Philly’s Board of Ethics voted to close a loophole that super PACs use to get instructions from campaigns

The Philadelphia Board of Ethics on Wednesday approved changes to the city’s campaign finance rules aimed at closing a loophole that could have allowed candidates for city offices to give specific instructions to outside spending groups that are supposed to be prohibited by federal law from coordinating with them.

The five-member board voted unanimously to ban the strategy known as “redboxing,” in which candidates send indirect signals to independent expenditure campaigns like so-called super PACs, or political action committees that can raise unlimited amounts of money but are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns.

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Candidates can do that by publicly stating the strategic needs of their campaigns, and some in recent federal elections have put those instructions in red boxes on their campaign websites to guide super PACs buying advertisements on their behalf. The statements use lightly coded language to clue the PACs in on what the campaign wants, such as by stating that a certain message needs to reach voters “on the go” when the campaign needs mobile ads.

For instance, Karen Carter Peterson, a congressional candidate in Louisiana, published on her website a red box that said in part, “Young Black voters and White Women who are non-GOP voters need to read and see on the go that Karen Carter Peterson has been endorsed by Gary Chambers and Stacey Abrams.”

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The effort to shore up the board’s rules on super PAC coordination comes as candidates are throwing their hats in the ring for next year’s highly anticipated mayoral and Council races. The last open mayoral race in 2015 saw super PACs spend millions on the two leading candidates, Mayor Jim Kenney and State Sen. Tony Williams (D., Phila.).

Before the new rules were approved, the board’s staff amended them in response to feedback from local elections lawyers who said the initial version of the redboxing ban was too broad, potentially causing candidates to get in trouble for normal campaign communications not intended to instruct super PACs.

Adam Bonin, one of the lawyers who raised concerns, said that a candidate should be allowed to say, “Voters need to see our public safety plan.”

“But if they said, ‘Voters in the Northeast need to see [the plan] on their drive in to work,’ and then billboards magically appear on I-95, then I think it’s easier to presume that they saw” the red box, Bonin said.

The version of the new rules that the board approved Wednesday addressed that by being more specific about which types of campaign communications would create a violation, Bonin said.