Nathalie Paravicini for Secretary of State, Oregon 2024

After fighting campaign finance reform for 165 years and faced with the fact that organizers at the Honest Elections coalition were about to succeed in placing on the ballot Petition 9 to limit "payola elections", the "deep pockets" got scared and rushed to negotiate Oregon's first campaign finance law HB 4024.

In the recent short 2024 session, the Oregon Legislature enacted HB 4024, a law that:

• limits campaign contributions to candidates and political committees
• requires some disclosure of the original sources of funds to pay for political advertising
• requires some taglines on political ads of their original sources of funds

HB 4024 resulted from two weeks of continuous negotiations between the Honest Elections Oregon coalition on one side and the combined largest business and labor union lobbying organizations on the other. These businesses and unions are overwhelmingly the largest funders of candidates in Oregon.  They wanted a bill filled with loopholes that would make meaningless the contribution limits, disclosure requirements, and tagline requirements of a real campaign finance reform law.

The drama included posting of a final version (HB 4024-5) at 4:55 p.m. on Friday, March 1, for a public hearing scheduled for Monday, March 4, at 8 a.m.  Thus, the public hearing was called with 5 business minutes of notice to the public.

The Honest Elections Oregon negotiated over 2 dozen changes to close as many of those loopholes as possible, with the threat of moving forward with Petition 9.  Another reason we were taken seriously was the appearance of this highly informative op-ed in The Oregonian on March 3, 2024.

But this important new law is only a start of campaign finance reform in Oregon. 

HB 4024 contains concerning loopholes; implementation will be key.

The resulting bill passed the Oregon House of Representatives by a vote or 52-5 and the Oregon Senate by a vote of 22-6.

Here are the details of what ended up as HB 4024 (2024), including a very useful table of the final bill

Here is a useful table outlining the differences between Petition 9 and HB 4024 (version 3, later changed and renegotiated)