Brady Wiseman: The Montana Plan for transparent elections is here, and just in time

The Montana Plan is here, and just in time. Also known as the Transparent Election Initiative, it’s a ballot measure called I-194 that will ban corporate money, dark money, and money-laundered billionaire bucks from our election campaigns.

When someone with a clipboard asks you to sign, please do. It’s how we get back to talking to each other, helping each other, and becoming a community again.

Campaign season has arrived, so the billionaires are back with their dark money tricks, subverting our primary elections for our Legislature and Congress. The nasty ads, the vicious mailers, all meant to divide and conquer us by yanking our chains left and right and never, ever talking about up and down.

So most of us remain down, not being able to afford to live. Come this fall, it will all get worse. The result will be the same, a government that fails us.

We all need the same things. Homes we can afford, gas, groceries, health care, child care, and education for our kids. It’s all been bid up out of sight by forces we don’t understand, who win by getting us to fight each other so we never see who is doing this to us. It’s time to start looking upwards.

We believe the root cause is the hundreds of millions of dollars getting dumped into our Montana elections. We’ve all seen the rivers of cash that have appeared in the past 15 years since the Supreme Court legalized corruption with the Citizens United decision.

The money power bullies, bribes and extorts our elected officials. The money wins, and we lose. The ultra-rich get richer while the rest of us struggle to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table, and the bills paid.

The all-volunteer Montana Plan campaign is how we the people fight back. It changes the rules so Citizens United no longer matters. It brings us back to the law we had for 100 years in Montana, which said corporations can’t give money to election campaigns.

We got that law in 1912 the same way we are getting the Montana Plan, one citizen to another, working together to put a new anticorruption measure on the ballot ourselves, without needing a bunch of compromised politicians who cannot and will not do it for us.

For the first time anywhere, Montana’s new law will finally define in writing that corporations are not persons, they are artificial entities created by law. And they do not have the rights of people, they have privileges granted and limited by law.

This new law made by and for the people says that corporations — all corporations, no exceptions, including those from out of state — do not have the privilege of giving money to election campaigns in Montana.

Corporations can’t fund campaigns, end of conversation. Billionaires can no longer launder their money into anonymous lies.

We Montanans have been fighting the forces of greed for over a century. It took a citizen’s initiative back in 1912 to pass the Corrupt Practices Act. That corralled the Anaconda Company which had completely crushed our freedom to govern ourselves by literally throwing bags of money over rooming house transoms in Helena.

Another citizen’s campaign got us a new Constitution in 1972, the best in the country. And here we are after another 50 years, needing to rise up together once again.

The Montana Plan does not take away a single right. Individuals will still be able to write checks to campaigns, but they are going to have to follow our laws and tell us who they are and where they live.

You will no doubt soon be meeting a friend or neighbor carrying a clipboard and asking if you’ve heard about The Montana Plan. We encourage you to help put the Transparent Election Initiative on the ballot by signing the petition. Then come November, we can finally set things right.

Let’s get this fixed in ’26.