ACLJ Asks Supreme Court to Stop States From Silencing Nonprofit Advocacy

At the ACLJ, we have spent decades in the trenches defending the right of Americans – individually and through the organizations they build – to speak freely about the issues that matter most to them.

This week, we took that fight to the United States Supreme Court, filing an amicus brief in Alaska Policy Forum v. Alaska Public Offices Commission, urging the Court to grant certiorari and reverse a dangerous decision out of the Alaska Supreme Court that threatens the free-speech rights of every nonprofit, religious, and public-interest organization in America – not just in Alaska.

The ACLJ filed this brief on behalf of both us and all our supporters, all of those affected by this ruling, and the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a public-policy nonprofit dedicated to advancing transparency, free markets, and limited constitutional government. The ACLJ and FGA both know firsthand what it means to speak out on policy issues, and we both understood immediately what was at stake when we saw what Alaska’s Supreme Court did to the Alaska Policy Forum.

The Alaska Policy Forum ("APF") is a nonprofit public-policy organization. Like other think tanks and advocacy groups across the country, it researches, writes, and speaks on public policy issues. Among the issues APF has long addressed is ranked-choice voting – a subject of serious, ongoing public debate in Alaska and nationwide.

Here's the problem. When ranked-choice voting became the subject of a statewide ballot measure, Alaska's courts ceased viewing APF as a think tank and instead treated the organization’s efforts as “campaign advocacy” – which is regulated – simply because an issue APF had been discussing for years landed on a ballot. That relabeling triggered onerous registration, reporting, and donor-disclosure obligations that the government could never impose on ordinary public debate.

Think about what that means. An organization can be speaking about an issue perfectly lawfully one day, and then – with its message completely unchanged – become a regulated campaign entity the next because a legislature or a ballot initiative committee later decided to put that same issue before voters. The principle the Alaska Supreme Court endorsed does not stay confined to ranked-choice voting, and it does not stay confined to Alaska.

Think about the organizations that speak on the issues Americans care about most:

• Churches and religious ministries that preach about the sanctity of life – right as an abortion-related measure appears on a state ballot.
• Parental-rights organizations that discuss curriculum transparency and school choice – right as an education initiative qualifies for a vote.
• Public-interest groups that have spent years warning about the dangers of ranked-choice voting, ballot harvesting, or tax hikes – right as those very issues reach the ballot box.

This is not an abstract concern for the pro-life movement – it is an existential one.

Pregnancy resource centers, pro-life ministries, and organizations like ours have spent decades speaking out on pro-life issues. Under the Alaska Supreme Court's logic, a pro-life organization that has been making the same case for the sanctity of life for years could wake up one morning to find that its ordinary advocacy has been quietly reclassified as regulated "campaign speech" – complete with government-mandated donor disclosure – the moment a state legislature or ballot committee decides to put a life-related question before voters.

That is precisely the kind of exposure that has already been used to target pro-life pregnancy centers and speakers in other contexts, and it would hand hostile state officials a ready-made tool to unmask and chill the very donors and volunteers who make pro-life ministry possible.

As our brief explains, the First Amendment protects the discussion of public issues before, during, and after election season – and that protection cannot evaporate the moment a legislature or ballot committee decides to ask voters directly about a question the public has been debating for years.

Our brief lays out three core arguments for why the Court needs to take this case.

First, ideological nonprofits like APF are not business corporations chasing capital – they exist to disseminate ideas and persuade citizens. The Supreme Court has long recognized that speech about ballot measures deserves the fullest First Amendment protection, precisely because there is no candidate to corrupt. Piling registration and forced donor-disclosure requirements on top of that speech chills exactly the kind of associational freedom the First Amendment was designed to protect.

Second, the Alaska Supreme Court obliterated the constitutional line the U.S. Supreme Court has carefully drawn between issue advocacy and campaign advocacy. Speakers must know, before they speak, whether they're engaging in protected-issue discussion or regulated campaign activity. A standard that lets the government decide after the fact – based on timing, context, and assumptions about what voters must have been thinking – leaves every advocacy organization in America guessing – and guessing means self-censoring.

Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, constitutional rights cannot be defined out of existence through regulatory labels. As the Supreme Court put it just this year in Chiles v. Salazar, protected rights "cannot be renamed away" and "the First Amendment is no word game." A state cannot turn protected issue speech into regulated campaign speech simply by calling it that – any more than, as Shakespeare reminds us, calling a rose by another name changes its substance.

The ACLJ was founded to defend the constitutional liberties that make it possible for people of faith and conviction to speak, organize, and advocate without fear of government retaliation. This case sits squarely at the intersection of association, speech, and the ability of everyday Americans – through the organizations they support – to be heard on the questions that shape their communities, their schools, their churches, and their country.

If the Alaska Supreme Court's decision is allowed to stand, it hands every state a blueprint for silencing advocacy groups. It is a rule that, left unchecked, will reach every nonprofit, every ministry, and every public-interest organization willing to speak up about the issues Americans are voting on this year and every year after.

That's why we're asking the Supreme Court to grant certiorari.