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Ethics board sets primary as cutoff for official social-media posts about filed "millionaire’s tax" initiative; broader change rejected
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Summary
The state ethics advisory board debated whether old newsletter guidance lets officials post about a bill now filed as a ballot measure and voted to adopt the primary date as a bright-line cutoff for official posts about such measures, while rejecting a proposal to lift restrictions for members not up for reelection.
The Ethics Advisory Board on Wednesday wrestled with whether decades-old newsletter guidance should apply to single-topic social-media posts now that a major income-tax bill—repeatedly referred to in the meeting as the "millionaire's tax"—has been filed as a ballot initiative. After extended debate the board voted to use the date of the primary as a bright-line cutoff for official social-media outreach about measures on the ballot and agreed to issue a fast ethics alert to advise offices.
Board members and staff reviewed an opinion dating back about 30 years that allows incidental remarks about legislation in multi-topic newsletters. Jeanne, an ethics adviser, told the board that the old rule could be adapted for social media but urged caution: "You could post about it but what it needs to be is you can use whatever news hook ... and straight back to what happened during session and don't talk about anything else," she said, urging factual context rather than advocacy.
That position met resistance from members who said using taxpayer-funded channels to amplify views on an imminent ballot question risks running afoul of the statute. Jamie said officials cannot use state resources to promote or oppose a ballot measure: "We cannot use taxpayer money to amplify an opinion about a ballot measure that is just flatly prohibited by the statute," she said.
Staff read a sample post (labeled in materials as Example 4) that used strongly worded framing about the measure; participants debated whether inflammatory language or persistent single-topic postings would amount to an "indirect appeal" to voters. One staff example declared, "every day more people are realizing the so-called millionaire's tax ... is really meant to be an income tax on everyone," which drew discussion about tone, sourcing and whether such wording crosses the line into advocacy.
The board considered a motion to reaffirm the prior advisory while extending its temporal reach to a full biennium and explicitly applying it to official social media; the motion was discussed at length. Separately, a more expansive motion to allow members who are not up for reelection to use state resources without restriction for past-biennium bills was put forward and failed.
Ultimately the board adopted a narrower, clearer rule: adopt the primary date as a date certain for monitoring and restricting official social-media communications about measures that become ballot initiatives. Members also asked staff to prepare a short ethics alert to distribute quickly, with a fuller opinion to follow. The board then adjourned the public portion and moved into executive session.
What happens next: staff will draft and distribute an ethics alert providing interim guidance on social-media posts about ballot measures; a fuller advisory opinion will follow. The board did not remove the advisers' role in doing case-by-case balancing before the primary, but it established the primary cutoff as the working bright line to reduce ambiguity.
(Reporting by the Ethics Advisory Board public meeting.)
