This is the Kader Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 5th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown. What is dark money? How did it affect the 2016 election?

And the definition of the term may not be precisely clear, but Luke Walkup of the Center for Competitive Politics says the term itself is really a misnomer,

and to the extent dark money is a problem in elections, it may not be a problem worth solving and the

solutions would implicate your free speech rights. You've written that

dark money now accounts for or at least in the 2016 election accounted for less than 3% of

total spending in those elections. We can't call it campaign spending for reasons that we'll get into but first of all what is

uh... this scourge

uh... upon our democracy dark money uh... well that's a very good question to ask and I worry that too many times people don't really pause to think,

what is dark money really.

money is a pejorative label that has that people have come up with for spending by a certain

sect of non-profit group that is able to engage in a limited amount of speech

about campaigns and candidates without disclosing all of their donors to the

Federal Election Commission in the way that candidates and PACs have to.

And there are good reasons for this and many of the groups that are labeled dark money groups

are really well-known long-standing organizations like the National Rifle Association or Planned Parenthood,

the Sierra Club.

So I think a lot of the times it's misleading the label, but the idea is that groups that do not report

all of their donors over $200 to the Federal Election Commission, that these groups still have a very limited role, like you said, less than 3% of spending

in the 2016 election that these groups are responsible for.

But because they don't disclose their donors, they are sometimes tagged as dark money and the implication is given that this undermines democracy in some way because voters ought to know who is attempting to influence their vote.

But as we found in every election cycle that we've looked at since we've had these

disclosure laws which really started in the 1970s.

...