Is Montana Holding the Key to Undoing Citizens United?: 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.
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.
Mangan forwarded the email to his chief of staff. “This is why we are doing this lol,” he wrote.
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.
Billionaires’ spending on elections increased 160-fold between 2010 and 2024.
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 Citizens United that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend unlimited money in elections, as long as they didn’t coordinate with official campaigns.
The decision sent a flood of cash… https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/montana-plan-citizens-united-dark-money/ #MontanaPlan #CitizensUnited