(CN) — A federal judge in South Dakota Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit from an anti-abortion group, which claimed that a state law that requires nonprofits to disclose their top donors when disseminating political messages violates the First Amendment.
Students for Life Action filed the suit in 2023 against South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley. The group claimed that they intend to send political messages in 2024, when voters may be asked to overturn South Dakota’s near-total abortion ban. But the law, which requires groups like Students for Life Action to list its donors, chills their free speech rights, is overbroad and violates the rights of any nonprofit that seeks to spread its views, the group argued.
The defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that Students for Life Action failed to allege an injury in fact and lacked standing, and also asserted the law is constitutional.
Chief U.S. District Judge Roberto Lange, a Barack Obama appointee, ruled that Students for Life Action did have standing but still sided with the defendants in a 44-page opinion.
Lange wrote that identifying donors of an organization who make independent communication expenditures informs voters of the source of the communication and helps them to gauge any bias, motives and validity of a given message. Thus, the judge ruled, South Dakota has a “sufficiently important government interest” to justify the statute. Because the law is narrowly tailored to South Dakota’s informational interest, the complaint must be dismissed, Lange wrote.
Students for Life Action specifically asserted that the statute is not narrowly tailored because of it lacks temporal limitations, low spending thresholds, disclosure statement requirements and provisions regarding public office holders and issue advocacy. The group claimed that the statute applies to election related speech “at all times,” not just near election time.
Lange disagreed.
“The candidate-or-ballot-question prerequisite to the statute’s application explicitly ties the disclaimer and disclosure statement requirements to election-related communications, as opposed to general political speech. Therefore, the statute’s application to communications ‘concerning a candidate or a ballot question’ is sufficiently narrowly tailored to survive a facial overbreadth challenge,” the judge wrote.
“SFLA’s argument overstates the breadth of the statute. The challenged statute only applies to communications that ‘concern a candidate or a ballot question,’” he added.
Students for Life Action emphasized that the window of time in which speech is subject to South Dakota’s disclosure regime is longer than those in other states.
“SFLA in part of Count I challenges the statute’s temporal scope as not narrowly tailored because it supposedly applies to election-related speech ‘at all times’ and not ‘close in time to an election,’” Lange wrote. “SFLA’s argument overstates the breadth of the statute. The challenged statute only applies to communications that ‘concern a candidate or a ballot question.’”
The judge said the statute is narrowly tailored to the “state’s significant interest in an informed electorate.”
Neither attorneys for Students for Life Action nor attorneys representing the state immediately responded to requests for comment Tuesday evening.