Democrats and Republicans Attempt Twitter End-Run Around Campaign Finance Laws

[Commentary] The Republican and Democratic Parties used Twitter feeds to secretly communicate ad buy and polling information to outside groups prohibited from coordinating their spending with parties. The information tweeted by both parties seemingly required a decoder key to use it. The Democrats included the decoder on their Twitter bio, while the Republicans did not post the decoder key, which suggests that outside groups may have obtained the crucial information from a nonpublic source. Lawyers will now argue over whether these tweets violated campaign finance laws, but it’s critical not to ignore the larger and more important point. Federal “coordination” rules are broken in many respects and need to be fixed.

[Ryan is Senior Counsel at The Campaign Legal Center]