Montana Has an Ambitious Plan to End Dark Money in Elections [View all]

Fifteen years after a landmark Supreme Court case turbocharged corporate spending in the political process, a group hopes it may have a way to finally rein in some of the outsized influence of the ultrawealthy. The 2010 ruling on Citizens United v. FEC opened the floodgates of political spending in elections. Every year since then, untraceable financial political contributions, largely from corporations and wealthy individuals, have increased dramatically. Now, the state of Montana is on the verge of being the first in the nation to counter the impact of Citizens United via a 2026 ballot measure using an innovative legal maneuver that other states could adopt.

The idea is the brainchild of Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Moore, who laid out his reasoning in a white paper on September 15, 2025, is arguing that states have the legal authority to define corporate charters and therefore can redefine them at any time. When I interviewed Moore for my weekly radio show, he explained: “The states’ authority is absolute in terms of how they define their corporations and which powers they decide to give their corporations.” This is considered “basic foundational corporation law,” and all states have essentially given corporations the same, extremely broad charters.

Until 2023, Moore worked as chief of staff for Commissioner Ellen Weintraub at the Federal Election Commission (FEC). During that time, he met and collaborated with Montana Commissioner of Political Practices Jeff Mangan. Moore remained friends with Mangan even after he left the FEC. “I sent [Mangan] a draft of the [white] paper,” said Moore, “and he called back that night and said, ‘We are doing this in Montana.’”

That was in fall 2024. Almost immediately the wheels began turning, and in April 2025, Mangan launched the Transparent Election Initiative to put Moore’s theory into practice. In June, the “The Montana Plan,” based on a draft of Moore’s paper, was born. That plan is the basis of the Transparent Election Initiative’s constitutional amendment as a ballot measure to be put before Montana voters in 2026. The measure asks voters whether or not their state should redefine corporate charters to disallow spending in elections.




https://truthout.org/articles/montana-has-an-ambitious-plan-to-end-dark-money-in-elections/