Buckeye Institute Fights Arizona’s Donor Disclosure Law

​When Arizona’s Proposition 211 forced the disclosure of nonprofit donors, it trampled on a bedrock principle of American liberty: the right to speak, associate, and advocate without government surveillance or coercion. The Buckeye Institute, an Ohio-based think tank focused on free-market policy and constitutional liberties, is now urging the Arizona Supreme Court in a powerful amicus brief to strike down this law as a threat to free association and free speech under both the U.S. and Arizona constitutions.
 
The Buckeye brief echoes concerns we’ve raised before: public disclosure of nonprofit donors invites harassment, threats, and even violence. Buckeye’s evidence isn’t abstract. It includes firebombings of offices, armed raids, and death threats, all targeting people for their beliefs or the organizations they support.
 
Technology only worsens the problem. With a few clicks, bad actors can compile and weaponize personal data against donors, publishing maps to their homes, attacking their families online, or pressuring employers into firing them. Witness the recent murder of a pro-choice state legislator and her husband in their Minnesota home. The Buckeye brief cites doxing sites targeting Tesla owners, threats against donors to Canadian truckers’ protests, and the public outing of supporters of one California proposition who lost jobs and faced violence.
 
Buckeye itself became a target after opposing Medicaid expansion in Ohio. The IRS, already embroiled in a scandal over political targeting, launched a field audit shortly after Buckeye’s advocacy succeeded. Donors, fearing retaliation, began giving anonymously or stopped donating altogether.
 
The Buckeye brief also includes historical notes, touching on “Publius, Cato, and Common Sense … just three of dozens of pseudonyms the Founding Fathers used to communicate and publish during the Revolutionary War.”
 
“The Founders’ ability to organize, associate, and speak anonymously was fundamental to the public acceptance and ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and likely remained at the forefront of their minds when drafting the First Amendment,” Buckeye declares. It quotes a constitutional scholar: “The bottom line is that it is highly probable that the United States would not exist without anonymous speech.”
 
Yet a lower court “suggests that organizations must all but endure a serious act of violence before availing themselves of judicial intervention.” Buckeye rightly argues that Proposition 211 is not only dangerous but unconstitutional at the state level. Arizona's Constitution provides even stronger protections for free speech and association than the First Amendment. And since Alabama v. NAACP, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that donor disclosure chills protected speech and deters lawful participation in civic life, especially when governments collect this information without a narrowly tailored need.
 
The Arizona Court of Appeals wrongly dismissed these dangers as speculative. But Buckeye’s brief to that state’s Supreme Court leaves no doubt – violence and harassment are real, widespread, and predictable. A government should not wait for a tragedy before upholding Americans’ constitutional rights.

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