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Opinion of the Court
"Contracts to disburse
"For purposes of this subsection, a person shall be treated as having made a disbursement if the person has executed a contract to make the disbursement." 2 U. S. C. § 434(f)(5) (Supp. II).
In our view, this provision serves an important purpose the District Court did not advance. BCRA's amendments to FECA § 304 mandate disclosure only if and when a person makes disbursements totaling more than $10,000 in any calendar year to pay for electioneering communications. Plaintiffs do not take issue with the use of a dollar amount, rather than the number or dates of the ads, to identify the time when a person paying for electioneering communications must make disclosures to the FEC. Nor do they question the need to make the contents of parties' disclosure statements available to curious voters in advance of elections. Given the relatively short timeframes in which electioneering communications are made, the interest in assuring that disclosures are made promptly and in time to provide relevant information to voters is unquestionably significant. Yet fixing the deadline for filing disclosure statements based on the date when aggregate disbursements exceed $10,000 would open a significant loophole if advertisers were not required to disclose executory contracts. In the absence of that requirement, political supporters could avoid preelection disclosures concerning ads slated to run during the final week of a campaign simply by making a preelection down-payment of less than $10,000, with the balance payable after the election. Indeed, if the advertiser waited to pay that balance until the next calendar year then, as long as the balance did not itself exceed $10,000, the advertiser might avoid the disclosure requirements completely.
The record contains little evidence identifying any harm that might flow from the enforcement of § 304(f)(5)'s "advance" disclosure requirement. The District Court speculated that disclosing information about contracts "that have
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