It’s attack ad season. This official thinks Idahoans can ‘disagree better’

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) — It’s election season, so Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane is in the thick of it.

His office — which oversees elections and campaign finance — reliably gets a flurry of calls around this time from angry candidates and voters, he said. Perhaps they’ve seen a billboard they don’t agree with, or a campaign sign they think is dishonest.

They’ll say, “ ‘You’ve got to stop this,’ and it’s like, ‘Well, they followed the rules. It says ‘paid for,’ ” McGrane said. “We are content-neutral. We don’t care about what they’re saying. We’re tracking the money, not the message.”

The public’s misunderstanding of and frustration with the state’s election and campaign finance rules was, in part, what prompted McGrane on Tuesday to lead the state’s inaugural Free Speech Summit, he told the Idaho Statesman.

The event was high-profile: Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who has spearheaded a national “Disagree Better” initiative, gave the keynote address, and state lawmakers and officials led panels exploring how to balance government transparency and donor privacy, and whether Americans have simply forgotten how to disagree.

Idaho state Rep. Ilana Rubel, the House Minority Leader, argued during the event that people are only supporters of free speech if they fight to defend the speech of those with whom they disagree.

She relayed a story of the American Civil Liberties Union’s fight in the 1970s to defend the free speech of neo-Nazis who wanted to march through a Chicago suburb that was home to many Holocaust survivors. Even though the organization has strong ties to the Jewish community, Rubel said — the organization itself is not religiously affiliated — the ACLU went to court to fight for the neo-Nazis’ right to march.

“That is what it means to be pro-free speech,” she said. “That you are ready to go to the mat for the people that you disagree with to the very core of your being, because you believe in free speech more.”

The original model for the kind of adversarial speech the First Amendment aims to protect, McGrane said, was the speech American colonists used against the British.

“Our founding fathers fought really hard to say bad things about King George,” McGrane told the Statesman.

With attack ads against them still fresh in their minds, McGrane said, Idaho lawmakers have at times sought to use his office to tamp down free speech. Some have brought legislation that would have required the secretary of state to adjudicate the substance of campaign ads, and not just whether candidates followed spending rules.

But speech is “incredibly protected,” McGrane said. Idaho’s “Sunshine laws are a restriction on free speech, but they have to be very measured.”