今年1月初，透明选举倡议组织（Transparent Election Initiative，简称TEI）的创始人杰夫·曼根（Jeff Mangan）正准备发起一项投票倡议，旨在减少资金流入蒙大拿州政治，这时他的电子邮箱收到了一家拉票公司总监发来的信息。TEI的这项被称为“蒙大拿计划”的倡议，矛头直指那些向选举倾注数百万美元“黑金”、并使天平向其倾斜的富有参与者。因此，这份推销信的内容让曼根大为震惊。
In early January, Jeff Mangan, the founder of a small nonprofit called the Transparent Election Initiative was preparing to launch a ballot initiative to reduce the flow of money into Montana politics when his email inbox pinged with a message from the director of a canvassing firm. TEI’s measure, dubbed the Montana Plan, took aim at the rich players dumping millions of dollars of dark money into elections and tipping the scales in their favor. So the content of the pitch took Mangan aback.
该总监提出，可以帮助收集曼根团队让其倡议获得资格、登上蒙大拿州11月选票所需的数万份选民签名——每份签名收费21至23美元。如果TEI签约，仅上选票的成本就可能超过85万美元，是TEI 2025年总筹款额的两倍多。这个价格实际上意味着，这个非营利组织必须寻找一位富有捐赠人来资助他们的行动，而该行动的目标正是……遏制富有捐赠人的影响力。
The director offered to help collect the tens of thousands of voter signatures Mangan’s group needed to qualify its initiative for Montana November ballot—for $21 to $23 dollars per signature. If TEI signed on, the cost just to get on the ballot could reach over $850,000, more than double TEI’s total fundraising in 2025. That price tag virtually guaranteed the nonprofit would have to find a wealthy donor to bankroll their effort aimed at…curbing the influence of wealthy donors.
曼根将这封邮件转发给了他的幕僚长。“这就是我们要搞这项倡议的原因 lol（笑）”，他写道。
Mangan forwarded the email to his chief of staff. “This is why we are doing this lol,” he wrote.
TEI没有选择付费，而是花费数月时间招募并培训了711名志愿者，他们从全州选民手中收集了超过4.5万份有效签名。现在，他们的倡议将以“194号倡议”（I-194）的形式出现在周二的选票上。该倡议将禁止私营企业、非营利组织、工会和其他团体花钱支持蒙大拿州政治候选人当选或推动州级投票倡议通过。
Instead of paying, TEI spent months recruiting and training 711 volunteers who collected over 45,000 valid signatures from voters across the state. Now their initiative will appear on Tuesday’s ballot as I-194 It would stop private corporations, nonprofits, unions, and other groups from spending money to elect a Montana political candidate or pass a state ballot initiative.
亿万富翁在选举上的支出在2010年至2024年间增加了160倍。
Billionaires’ spending on elections increased 160-fold between 2010 and 2024.
曼根曾任蒙大拿州政治行为专员，这是一个负责监督选举诚信和透明度的委任职位。因此，他深知政治参与是有门槛的。他也清楚，自2010年最高法院裁定企业拥有第一修正案赋予的权利，可在选举中无限额花钱（只要不与官方竞选活动协调）以来，这个门槛已大幅抬高。
Mangan is Montana’s former commissioner of political practices, an appointed position overseeing election integrity and transparency. So he knows well that politics has a price of entry. He also knows that that price has risen sharply since 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend unlimited money in elections, as long as they didn’t coordinate with official campaigns.
这一决定向政治竞争注入了大量现金，并预示着所谓“暗钱”时代的来临——企业和富裕个人通过非营利组织转移资金以隐藏来源，然后再将其注入能够在选举广告上无限支出的超级政治行动委员会（Super PAC），这些广告包括电视广告、社交媒体视频以及来自名称晦涩的团体的邮寄传单。美国税收公平组织（Americans for Tax Fairness）的一份报告显示，2010年至2024年间，亿万富翁在选举上的支出增长了160倍。
The decision sent a flood of cash into political contests. And it heralded a new era of so-called “dark money,” as corporations and affluent individuals passed their dough through nonprofits to hide its origin, then funneled it to super PACs that could spend unlimited sums on election advertising, from TV ads to social media videos to mailbox flyers from groups with inscrutable names. Billionaires’ spending on elections increased 160-fold between 2010 and 2024, according to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness.
在上一次总统选举中，亿万富翁家族占政治支出总额的六分之一，约为26亿美元，主要用于支持共和党。
During the last presidential election, billionaire families accounted for 1 in every 6 dollars of political spending—a total of $2.6 billion, mostly in support of Republicans.
蒙大拿州和其他所有州一样，正面对这一后果。仅在刚过去的初选季，就有四个政治行动委员会向蒙大拿州三十多个立法竞选注入了400万美元——在那些“陌生人容易被注意到”的小城镇的低调竞选中投放攻击性广告，报道如此称道。TEI首席幕僚莉安娜·基辛（Liana Keesing）解释说：“既是因为资金充裕，也是因为这种极其丑陋的政治风格在许多小社区里感受不同。”
Montana, like every state, has been dealing with the ramifications. This past primary season alone, four PACs pumped $4 million dollars into three dozen legislative races in Montana—running attack ads in low-profile contests in the kind of small towns “where strangers get noticed,” the reported. “It’s both that there is a lot of money, but it’s also this very specific style of very ugly politics that is felt differently in a lot of these smaller communities,” TEI Chief-of-Staff Liana Keesing explains.
这种加速的政治支出新纪元极不受欢迎。2024年5月，跨党派的美国人中有72%认为政治中的金钱过多，这一比例多年来保持稳定。但改革者在挑战这一体系时，始终难以避开最高法院的判决——该判决臭名昭著地将金钱视为言论、将公司视为人。
This new era of turbocharged political spending is immensely unpopular. In a May , 72 percent of Americans across both parties agreed there was too much money in politics, a number that has stayed steady for years. But reformers have struggled to challenge the system without violating , the decision that infamously treated money as speech and corporations as people.
“蒙大拿计划”为他们提供了一条前进的道路。虽然该措施不会废除《联合公民诉联邦选举委员会案》判决，但它实质上会绕过该判决——至少在蒙大拿州范围内。它依赖的是各州长期确立的权力，即决定在该州注册成立的公司所享有的权力清单。一个多世纪以来，为了吸引企业，各州都没有限制这些权力，允许在该州注册的公司做任何合法的事情。但“蒙大拿计划”将从清单中移除一项权力：它们在选举中花钱的能力。
The Montana Plan offers them a way forward. While the measure wouldn’t undo , it would essentially sidestep it—at least in Montana. It relies on states’ long-established authority to decide the list of powers granted to corporations chartered in-state. For over a century, states trying to attract business have declined to limit these powers, allowing companies chartered there to do anything as long as it was legal. But the Montana Plan would remove one power from the list: their ability to spend money in elections.
它不会阻止个人——比如埃隆·马斯克或乔治·索罗斯——将数百万个人财富投入蒙大拿州的独立政治广告中。但它会迫使他们在自己的支出上署名。最先构想这一策略的美国进步中心左派资深研究员汤姆·摩尔认为，“蒙大拿计划”让《联合公民诉联邦选举委员会案》判决变得无关紧要，因为如果没有在政治中花钱的权力，公司是否拥有在政治中花钱的权利就不再重要。
It wouldn’t stop individuals—say, an Elon Musk or George Soros—from pouring millions of their personal wealth into independent political ads in Montana. But it would force them to put their names on their spending Tom Moore, the senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress who first conceived this strategy argues that the Montana Plan makes irrelevant, because without the to spend in politics, it doesn’t matter whether corporations have the to. The distinction is a bit academic, but Moore offers an analogy: “Neither you nor I have the power to flap our wings and fly,” he explains.
这种区别有点学术气，但摩尔打了个比方：“你我都没有扇动翅膀飞行的能力，”他解释道，“如果最高法院对我们说：‘嘿，恭喜你们，你们拥有了飞行的宪法权利，’这并不会改变我们不具备飞行能力这一基本现实。”“蒙大拿计划”将适用于“人造人”，这是一个统称，包括非营利组织和工会，以及营利性公司（该倡议为“真正的”新闻和评论出版商留出了豁免条款）。
“If the Supreme Court came to us and said, ‘Hey, congratulations, you’ve got a constitutional right to fly,’ it doesn’t change that underlying reality that we don’t have the capacity.”The Montana Plan would apply to “artificial persons,” an umbrella term that includes nonprofits and unions as well as for-profit companies (the initiative contains a carveout for publishers of “bona fide” news and commentary).
它不会阻止个人——比如埃隆·马斯克或乔治·索罗斯——将资金投入蒙大拿州的独立政治广告中。但它会迫使他们在自己的支出上署名，因为他们将无法再通过隐藏捐赠者身份的非营利组织来输送资金。
It wouldn’t stop individuals—say, an Elon Musk or George Soros—from pouring into independent political ads in Montana. But it would force them to put their names on their spending, since they could no longer funnel the money through donor-obscuring nonprofits.
法院会接受这种规避吗？夏威夷州已经提供了一个测试案例。今年5月，州长乔什·格林签署了一项类似于“蒙大拿计划”的法案，引发了轰动，右倾的夏威夷草根研究所和亲商业的美国商会提起诉讼，辩称新法律违反了第一修正案。
Will the courts accept this circumventing of ? Hawaii has already offered a test case. In May, Gov. Josh Green made a splash when he signed a bill similar to the Montana Plan drawing lawsuits from the right-leaning Grassroot Institute of Hawaii and the pro-business US Chamber of Commerce who argued the new law violated the First Amendment.
蒙大拿州共和党正式反对“蒙大拿计划”。与科赫家族结盟的政治倡导组织“繁荣美国”以及多个当地商会和行业协会也持反对态度。另一方面，前蒙大拿州州长史蒂夫·布洛克（民主党人）和马克·拉西奥特（共和党人）支持该倡议。纽约州民主党籍众议员亚历山德拉·奥卡西奥-科尔特斯和拜登政府时期的交通部长皮特·布蒂吉格也已背书该行动。
The Montana Republican Party formally opposes the Montana Plan. So does the Koch-aligned political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity and several local chambers of commerce and industry associations. On the other side, former Montana governors Steve Bullock (a Democrat) and Mark Racicot (a Republican) support the initiative. New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Biden-era Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have also endorsed the effort.
“‘蒙大拿计划’提供了一个切实可行、合法的解决方案，以解决我们关心的一切问题背后最大的问题之一：重夺民主控制权，将权力交还给普通民众，而非特殊利益集团，”布蒂吉格4月在X平台上发文称。
“The Montana Plan offers a practical, lawful solution to tackle one of the biggest issues underlying everything else we care about: reclaiming democratic control and putting power back in the hands of regular people, not special interests,” Buttigieg posted on X in April.
无论穆尔的想法在蒙大拿州、夏威夷州还是其他州能否成功，他的最终目标是将他的理论呈现在最高法院面前，挑战大法官们作出不利于各州界定并限制企业权力的裁决。“我们认为最高法院不会喜欢它，但会更不喜欢推翻它的后果，”他说。“他们将不得不拆解存在了200年的公司法基石。”如果最高法院有一天作出推翻“蒙大拿计划”的裁决，尽管民众反对大额资金介入政治？“人们说，如果最高法院推翻这个，那可能就是美国需要的一记重击，从而推动通过一项反企业宪法修正案，”穆尔说。
Whether Moore’s idea succeeds in Montana or Hawaii or another state, his ultimate goal is to get his theory in front of the Supreme Court and challenge the justices to rule against state authority to define—and limit—corporate powers. “We think there are good reasons why the Supreme Court will not love it, but will love the consequences of overturning it even less,” he says. “They would have to dismantle foundational corporation law that’s been around for 200 years.”And if the Supreme Court one day issues a ruling overturning the Montana Plan, despite popular opposition to big money in politics? “People have said, if the Supreme Court overturns this, that might be the kick in the pants that America needs to get an anti- constitutional amendment,” Moore says.
至于曼根？他希望利用这项投票倡议建立一个跨党派的竞选资金改革运动——回归到一种更早期、更“草根、邻里互助”式的政治，他说。“公民知道这正是当今所缺失的，而我们之所以成功，正是因为我们能够让他们重新对这件事感到兴奋。”
As for Mangan? He hopes to use the ballot initiative to build a bipartisan movement for campaign finance reform—one that returns to an earlier, more “grassroots, helping-your-neighbor” type of politics, he says. “Citizens know that’s what’s missing today, and that’s the reason that we’ve been successful is because we’ve been able to get them excited about it again.”