This year’s appalling rise in political violence shows why the General Assembly was right to overturn Gov. Josh Stein’s veto of The Personal Privacy Protection Act. Doxing, threats, and violence have become serious national problems. Enhanced privacy protections for North Carolinians can be part of the solution.
Nobody should face harassment, intimidation, or worse for supporting causes they believe in. Yet in today’s increasingly polarized world, government actions that expose nonprofit donation records have this effect.
When California tried to force nonprofits to turn over their confidential donor lists — a demand issued by then-state Attorney General Kamala Harris — bipartisan concerns about donor harassment went all the way to the US Supreme Court. In 2021’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the court struck down California’s mandate as unconstitutional. Its decision reaffirmed the court’s longstanding protection of privacy rights when Americans join or support voluntary associations like nonprofits.
The most famous case on this issue dates from the civil rights movement. In 1958’s NAACP v. Alabama, the court unanimously protected supporters of the NAACP from being exposed to Jim Crow officials in the Alabama state government.
“It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as [other unconstitutional] forms of governmental action,” the court observed.
These cases stand as a stark reminder that First Amendment rights are easily undermined when state officials track our donations and, in effect, our beliefs. Governments also have a very poor track record of preventing leaks and hacks targeting personal data, making it dangerous to warehouse this information in the first place.
To address these problems, the Personal Privacy Protection Act prohibits state officials from making unlawful demands or disclosures of personal information collected from a nonprofit’s members, volunteers, and donors. It includes penalties to ensure officials take seriously their obligations under the law. These simple measures keep North Carolinians’ names, donation histories, and home addresses out of the hands of bad actors.
Nevertheless, Stein vetoed the bill over concerns that it “creates more opportunity for dark money in our politics, especially relating to candidates’ legal funds.” But the disclosures prohibited by the act align far more with the core privacy protections upheld in NAACP v. Alabama and AFPF v. Bonta than any notion of “dark money” in politics.
In fact, the law contains an exemption ensuring the state’s campaign finance laws are unaffected by its passage. And nothing in the law prevents the General Assembly from regulating candidates’ legal defense funds if they so choose.
21 other states already have privacy protections like those found in the act. The law has received strong bipartisan support and, in some cases, passed unanimously. That’s because everyone — left, right, or center — has a cause near to their hearts that could be at risk. In some states, pro-life and pro-choice organizations have even sat side-by-side to support the law’s privacy protections.
Indeed, the North Carolina law was supported by a diverse nonprofit coalition, including the ACLU, Americans for Prosperity, John Locke Foundation, North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence, North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault, North Carolina Family Policy Council, and Planned Parenthood.
It’s unfortunate that misinformation from privacy opponents about the Personal Privacy Protection Act’s bipartisan protections led to a veto. Thankfully, a bipartisan contingent in the General Assembly was undeterred. Now, North Carolinians can rest easy that despite an increasingly heated political atmosphere, their donations — and their constitutional right to support the causes they believe in — are protected.
