In Central Maine Power Company (CMP), et al. v. Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices, et al., the United States District Court for the District of Maine granted motions to allow CMP to continue donating to political candidates by declaring two portions of Maine’s new campaign finance law unconstitutional, but denied motions regarding the remainder of the statute, allowing the rest of the law to survive through legal severance.
The first element the court objected to in the law is the 5% corporate foreign ownership rule, arguing that this was too small of a share, and that only a controlling shareholder should be significant enough to exclude a corporation’s influence over elections. The second point was over if a foreign government “directly or indirectly participates in the decision-making process” over elections spending. The court interpreted the latter as possibly merely meaning a foreign government had consulted a corporation, even if this corporation was fully owned by American shareholders.
According to OpenSecrets, CMP and its parent company Avangrid have largely spent money on ballot referendums. By donating over $35 million to the Maine Affordable Energy PAC, they defeated a referendum that would have forced a consumer buyout of the utility grid. And they spent tens of millions to defend their referendum for a hydropower transmission line through western Maine.
Maine passed a ballon initiative restricting Foreign Government-Influenced Entities (FGIE) back in 2023. The Act could apply a $5,000 civil penalty or double the amount donated. They could no longer spend on elections, and their public communications had to carry mandatory disclosures of foreign-influence. It also applied a new burden onto media companies to check if block ads that failed to meet these disclosure rules. Because of this lawsuit, this law was blocked on the eve it was going to go into effect. This stillborn law had passed by a historic 86% margin. The law had been led by the nonpartisan Protect Maine Elections, and democracy reform groups such as American Promise and Maine Clean Elections. And Free Speech for People and Campaign Legal Center have filed amicus briefs arguing the 5% limit is a globally recognized threshold. Though most democracies, such as France, Canada, Japan and South Korea, completely ban corporate political contributions: foreign and domestic. Thus, there limit is 0%. After the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling that allowed unlimited spending on elections by American corporations, U.S. states and cities have begun applying the 5% threshold to at least limit foreign spending.
Aside from Maine, there was also a failed attempt to implement foreign spending limits in Minnesota. The only state where a spending limit is currently being enforced is in Washington, which uses the controlling-share limit, as opposed to the 5% cutoff. The only places in the U.S. that have a 5% limit being enforced are the cities of Seatle (2020-) and San Jose (2024-).
Leading up to and after Citizens United, there has been systematic campaign to corrupt U.S. elections by arguing that corporations have a First Amendment right to “speak” with unlimited campaign contributions. Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump had been judged by oversight agencies to have been interfered in by foreign actors—especially Russia—this wave of attempts to counteract America’s slide into unbridled corruption could have given some hope, if it had not been repeatedly quashed by moneyed interests. Corporate donations had been banned in the U.S. by the 1907 Tillman Act. Because corporations reacted by attempting to donate indirectly, a few acts—between 1947 and 2002—followed that further limited activities, such as requiring that corporate employees could only donate indirectly into Political Action Committees (PACs). Citizens United reversed this march towards democratic representation. If CMP had not been able to block the Pine Tree Power buyout, Maine taxpayers would have taken on $13.5 billion in debt to buy the utility, but could have been rewarded with improved reliability and a lower electricity cost. And while the NECEC corridor added tons of energy to the grid, it clear-cut pristine northern Maine woods (undercutting tourism and wildlife) to bring power to Massachusetts. The point of democratic referendums is to invite voters to decide which among such choices they care most about. When 86% of Maine’s voters voted against foreign interference, and a corporation with these foreign influences could buy their way into winning a lawsuit to reverse the voters’ decision, this is an extreme case of anti-democratic voting-system suppression.
