614
ASSOCIATES, INC.
Opinion of the Court
whose high solicitation costs stemmed from the unpopularity of its cause. Id., at 967.
"[N]o doubt [there] are organizations that have high fund-raising costs not due to protected First Amendment activity," the Court recognized; it concluded, however, that Maryland's statute was incapable of "distinguish[ing] those organizations from charities that have high costs due to protected First Amendment activities." Id., at 966. The statute's fatal flaw, the Court said, was that it "operate[d] on [the] fundamentally mistaken premise that high solicitation costs are an accurate measure of fraud." Ibid. As in Schaumburg, the Court noted, fraud could be checked by "measures less intrusive than a direct prohibition on solicitation": Fraud could be punished directly and the State "could require disclosure of the finances of a charitable organization so that a member of the public could make an informed decision about whether to contribute." 467 U. S., at 961, and n. 9.
Third in the trilogy of cases on which the Illinois Supreme Court relied was our 1988 decision in Riley. The village ordinance in Schaumburg and the Maryland law in Munson regulated charities; the North Carolina charitable solicitation controls at issue in Riley directly regulated professional fundraisers. North Carolina's law prohibited professional fundraisers from retaining an "unreasonable" or "excessive" fee. 487 U. S., at 784 (internal quotation marks omitted). Fees up to 20 percent of the gross receipts collected were deemed reasonable; fees between 20 percent and 35 percent were deemed unreasonable if the State showed that the solicitation did not involve advocacy or dissemination of information. Id., at 784-785. Fees exceeding 35 percent were presumed unreasonable, but the fundraiser could rebut the presumption by showing either that the solicitation involved advocacy or information dissemination, or that, absent the higher fee, the charity's "ability to raise money or communicate would be significantly diminished." Id., at 785-786.
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