Dark money groups now fighting Arizona's new disclosure law. Shocker.

The forces of darkness really, really, reeeeally want to ensure that never will you ever, ever – not EVER – get to know who is pulling the strings in Arizona’s elections.

I know this because they’ve now filed not one but two lawsuits hoping to kill Arizona’s new dark money disclosure law – the one that 72% of the voters ushered into law in November.

First came the Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s December lawsuit, challenging the law in Maricopa County Superior Court.

The Free Enterprise Club is best known as the dark money front that allowed Arizona Public Service to secretly spend millions on electoral campaigns to pack the Arizona Corporation Commission with friendly faces, ultimately resulting in a nice rate increase for the utility in 2017.

Now comes Americans for Prosperity, a national dark money group that on Friday filed a federal lawsuit asking that the new law be declared unconstitutional. Americans for Prosperity is one of the original dark money groups with ties to the conservative Koch Network, one that has funneled money into a web of other dark money operations that in turn have worked to kill earlier voter initiatives, including one to change the way we elect our leaders in this state.

1.7 million Arizonans say they want disclosure

And, of course, to kill earlier initiatives to require dark money disclosure.

So, you can imagine its operatives aren’t at all happy that voters finally slipped one by on them in 2022.

More than 300,000 Arizona voters signed petitions to put the Voters’ Right to Know Act on the November ballot. More than 1.7 million voters turned it into a state law.

Under that new law, any nonprofit or political party spending $50,000 or more on any combination of statewide races must disclose all donors who contributed $5,000 or more to a campaign, regardless of whether the money was passed through intermediary groups. For local races, the threshold is $25,000.

It’s a long-awaited burst of sunshine in a state that has long been breeding ground for shadowy operations.

The laughable argument that it squashes speech rights

Or, as the dark money guys see it, it’s an outrageous assault on the First Amendment right of their deep-pocketed donors to spend whatever it takes to get their candidates elected without anybody knowing about it.

A law specifying that voters have a right to know who is behind the campaign ads that influence our vote? That, they say, will have a “chilling effect” on their donors' right to free speech.

“Arizona’s recently enacted statute … trammels that right by subjecting countless Americans nationwide to governmental doxxing for doing nothing more than supporting their chosen nonprofit organizations and charities," according to the lawsuit, which lays out 68 pages worth of arguments for the many ways in which their donors are victimized by the new law.

Meanwhile, everyday Americans have long been identified when they kick in $100 to a candidate’s campaign. Somehow, they've survived all that “governmental doxing.”

Voters have finally have had enough of dark money

Former Attorney General Terry Goddard scoffed at the notion that anybody’s free speech rights are damaged by the Voters' Right to Know Law.

“Without proof, they argue that having to disclose means they won’t contribute at all, that disclosure equals silence,” said Goddard, who has led the yearslong effort to get a dark money disclosure law. “It hasn’t been a bar to participation for decades of political contribution disclosure for regular folks, but that’s what they argue.”

Having to actually own your words, it seems, is just too much to ask from the well heeled who in previous elections could spout whatever nonsense they wanted without being held accountable for what they say in the attack ads that seem to be a specialty of dark money campaigns.

For well over a decade, Arizona’s leaders have stood by as dark money has run like a river in this state. Now voters have demanded to know who is trying to buy our elections.

The nerve of them. All 1,736,496 million of them.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Two money groups now fighting Arizona's new disclosure law. Shocker.