Stay out of Camden, stay out of Camden County, stay out of New Jersey.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “One of the suspects has a tie to Philadelphia, … We just want to send a clear message to the thugs, and criminals, and gun-bearing freaks over in Philadelphia who live in a society of lawlessness: we don’t want you here. So anyway, I’m really shocked that New Jersey lawmakers didn’t name the Elections Transparency Act the Elections Opacity Act. I checked with election lawyers and a prominent campaign treasurer to make sure I was reading the law correctly, and they agreed with my interpretation. But we’ll see if that holds up in court). (The law does take another stab at requiring dark money groups to disclose their donors, so there is a transparency-increasing element to it. To my reading of this law, that means if a super PAC spends millions in the final days of an election, there’s nothing to require disclosure of that spending until well after the election.

But while a similar requirement remains for the other types of committees, independent expenditure committees are now exempted. Murphy quietly signed this bill in April, independent expenditure committees - like candidates, political parties and traditional PACs known in New Jersey technical parlance as “Continuing Political Committees” - had to file 48-hour reports of large donations and expenditures made in between the 11-day pre-election reports and the 20-day post-election reports the groups filed. So you could imagine my shock when I got tipped to a largely-unnoticed part of the new law that could actually make elections less transparent. When I was first confronted with this massive bill that completely changes New Jersey’s campaign finance system, I trusted that New Jersey’s leaders wouldn’t call it a “transparency act” if it didn’t make elections more transparent. Take the “Elections Transparency Act,” for instance. I’m starting to lose my faith that the names of New Jersey laws are always a straightforward, honest description of what those laws do. Presented by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey

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