South Dakota anti-choice campaign broke the law

Posted by Ann Friedman at 4:45 PM on November 7, 2006.

Campaign finance reports from South Dakota show that the abortion ban campaign has cost a total of around $4 million -- $2.2 million spent by the coathanger club, and $1.8 million spent by pro-choicers.

The abortion-banners have been chirping that most of the money they've used to produce lying ads has come from inside the state. Included in their filing is a report of $750,000 from an anonymous donor via a shell organization in South Dakota. That's right. More than a quarter of the anti-choice funds have come from a single undisclosed source, who made a donation to Promising Future, an organization recently set up by Republican legislator Roger Hunt.

Now Hunt is in some trouble over failing to disclose who funds the shell corporation. Failure to properly file a campaign finance report is a class 2 misdemeanor.

Local progressives are thinking the anonymous donor is Steve Kirby, a wealthy anti-choicer who ran a failed campaign for South Dakota governor. He gave huge amounts of money to the initial push to pass the abortion ban, but his name shows up nowhere on the VoteYesForLife campaign finance filing.

Ms. Magazine reminds us that the campaign has been in trouble over its funding before. Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint against lead abortion-banner Leslee Unruh's crisis-pregnancy center and the Abstinence Clearinghouse for using federal dollars to campaign for the abortion ban. The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families has also filed a complaint against Hunt and the recipients of his anti-choice charity for failure to reveal the donors.

In other South Dakota election day news, subscribers received today's Sioux Falls Argus Leader wrapped in VoteYesForLife campaign materials.

Tagged as: abortion, election06, south dakota, campaign finance

Ann Friedman is AlterNet's managing editor and an editor at Feministing.com.