Prop 212 has been described as a grassroots response by Arizona parents. Secretary of State filings show 98 percent union funding, most of it national, and 90 percent of spending on paid signature gatherers.
This argument is usually made badly, so here is the careful version.
Unions are entitled to spend money on politics, the same as everyone else, and a teachers union backing a school measure is ordinary democratic behavior.
The issue is narrower. Prop 212 has been described throughout as a grassroots response by Arizona parents. The campaign finance filings describe something else.
The filings
- National Education Association, Washington DC — $6,565,438, or 87 percent of all contributions.
- AEA Fund for Public Education, Arizona — $810,000, or 10.7 percent.
- Everything else combined — $168,228, or 2.2 percent.
- Paid to Fieldworks LLC for signature gathering — $6,531,162, about 90 percent of all spending.
Union money accounts for roughly 98 percent of the $7.54 million raised. About nine of every ten dollars spent went to paid signature collection, and over 75 percent of the signatures came from paid circulators rather than volunteers.
The disclosure question
There is an unresolved complaint about how this was described to the public. The campaign's own website stated that 9 percent of its funding came from out of state.
The committee's position is that Arizona law requires disclosing the share of out-of-state contributors by headcount rather than by dollars. That may well be correct as a matter of law — we are not going to pretend to referee it.
But it is not what a person reading that website would have understood. If 87 percent of your money comes from an organization headquartered in Washington DC, and your website says 9 percent is out of state, the number is doing something other than informing the reader.
Why this matters for how you vote
A ballot measure asks you to write something into law directly. There is no committee hearing afterward, no amendment process, no governor's signature to negotiate. Whatever is in the text is what you get.
So the honesty of the campaign telling you what is in the text is not a side issue. It is most of what you have to go on.