This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 2nd, 2004. I'm Caleb Brown.

In the fights over school choice at the state level there's a recent phenomenon of local

districts using state resources to fight against that choice. It's a clear cut

example of taxpayer supported electioneering. Jacob Hubert of the Liberty

Justice Center details two recent cases in Kentucky and Texas.

I'm wondering how common this is because in my home state we had a struggle right now over school choice.

Kentucky is one of the few states that lacks any substantial form of school choice.

It's public to public, is essentially the range of options available to most parents.

And so in this struggle there's an amendment on the ballot to change the state

constitution and the opponents of the amendment have to the extent that they are

school districts or people who are employed in school districts have

made use of public resources, public web pages, public facing Facebook pages that are

run by the school district, sometimes signage outside of the school board office

urging people to oppose this

constitutional amendment. People have First Amendment rights and but there seems to be a real profound misunderstanding of the degree to which

government resources can be leveraged for the purpose of advocating how people vote in an election.

Right, and the law and that might vary by state, but Kentucky's law in this is very clear.

It says that tax dollars at the local, state, and federal level will not be used for politics

in the state of Kentucky. It's not at all ambiguous, and of course those tax dollars

include the tax dollars that school districts use

when they maintain social media pages and websites and billboards and all of that.

And yet we had this Pulaski County School District in Kentucky that put Vote No

...