Bob Lazaro is the inexplicably popular, always colorful mayor of Purcellville. He’s famous for suing the County over a high school. As a result, residents of Purcellville saw their taxes going to funding both sides of a local lawsuit. Now that is fiscally conservative!

Well, it appears that Mickey Mouse took a stand against the Mayor’s antics, and is being called out for it.

Purcellville Mayor Bob Lazaro this week made good on a statement he made to the Town Council May 11 by filing a formal complaint to the Virginia State Board of Elections “with respect to apparent violations of the State Code related to Campaign Finance Disclosure.”

The mayor was referring to signs placed outside the polling station advocating write-in votes for Mickey Mouse in the uncontested mayoral race May 4. Lazaro was unopposed on the ballot, however, an unidentified group or individual paid for automated phone calls to residents and distributed fliers advocating the defeat of incumbents on the Town Council. – Leesburg Today

It is odd to find myself grudgingly agreeing with Mayor Lazaro’s call for disclosure, even as I wonder what the consequences of that agreement may be.

Please click through and join me in my deliberation.I strongly support disclosure in election spending, especially in an era when corporations no longer have spending limits. The DISCLOSE Act, which would shed a lot more sunlight on corporate political spending, and help mitigate some of the evils of the Citizens United decision, is an important part of that.

In the independent campaign against Purcellville incumbents this year, the robocalls did not provide disclosure of who paid for them.

The automated phone calls received by area residents right before the election advocating the mayor’s defeat and proposing a fictitious character, also failed to contain the legally required disclosure, Lazaro said, adding the same comment for the signs. – Leesburg Today

That lack of disclosure in the robocalls, which are quite different from fliers that an individual voter can print up at home, is simply not okay. Like TV airtime, robocalls are a form of speech that is only available to some, not all, thanks to their cost. If you’re paying for robocalls, you need to say so on the calls (in my opinion).

In the case of TV airtime, disclosure is equally important. It’s all well and good to say we all have free speech, but when some peoples’ speech is “freer” than others by virtue of access to public airwaves by spending private money to get that access, the relative prevalence or value of a particular opinion can be misconstrued or artificially enhanced by spending. After all, airtime is a zero-sum speech game (unlike, say, the Internet). Company X buying ad time during the LOST finale closes off the possibility of Advocacy Group Y having access to that time. It is critical that there is disclosure of funding when it is funding that makes some kinds of speech even possible.

That being said, I worry about the impact disclosure requirements may have on small, local elections where anonymity of authorship may be invaluable as neighbors clash over local issues. Disclosure requirements, with their attendant compliance costs, shouldn’t be used as a bludgeon to minimize a minority’s ability to dissent. Disclosure requirements could be used to quell dissent in two ways.

First, the cost of complying with disclosure requirements could, themselves, provide a barrier to otherwise free political speech. The costs of printing up a flier and distributing it are negligible, but the costs of filling out required forms with the state for having printed up the fliers and the even greater costs (fines, lawsuits) of not filing because you didn’t know you were supposed to are far from negligible.

Second, the act of public disclosure of flier authorship could lead to blowback on an individual and their family. There’s a reason a lot of Revolutionary leaders published their opinions anonymously. Even today, I wonder what distributing a pro-migrant flier in Sterling might lead to if it were signed by someone in the neighborhood. Ostracization in some places for sure, vandalism possibly. Do we have the freedom from negative reactions to our political speech? Probably not. That seems to advocate for the importance of anonymous political speech, in flier form, even immediately before an election.

The flier Mayor Lazaro takes issue with did provide authorship disclosure, of a sort.

In his letter, Lazaro cited the “apparent violations” of the disclosure act. The flier, accusing the town of “debt, debt, & more debt,” said it was “time to fight back” and advocated the defeat of incumbent Town Council members. The flier, Lazaro wrote, violates the campaign finance disclosure provisions of the state code as it did not have the legally required disclaimer identifying the person and/or group paying for it. The flier contained a statement at the bottom saying it was “paid for privately, not sponsored by any candidate, campaign or PAC.” – Leesburg Today

So the question is whether that level of disclosure on the flier is sufficient. Is it enough to assert that a flier wasn’t paid for by a PAC without making a positive statement of who did pay for it? After all, our country was founded using anonymous fliers, as The Anonymous Liberal has observed.

The whole point of pseudonymous writing is that people don’t know who the writer is. They have to judge the writing on its merits, not on the credentials of the writer. That was precisely why Madison, Hamilton, and Jay chose to use a pseudonym. They wanted their ideas to be judged separately from any opinions people had about them personally. If they wanted to cash in on their reputations as “heroically successful revolutionaries,” they would have signed their own names to what they were writing.

Indeed, we who write Loudoun Progress have debated among ourselves and with others about the relative merits of blogging publicly or anonymously.

And so I am of two minds, and have to compliment Mayor Lazaro for making me think. I am sincerely interested in hearing what the readers of Progress think about anonymous political speech, as our experiment in Loudoun group blogging continues.

(Bonus points for those of you who noticed I linked to a concurring Supreme Court opinion by Justice Thomas above.)