Who's behind 'toxic' super PAC ads? We may never know.

Federal campaign laws require that super PACs disclose who is funding them. But, in the absence of FEC rules, some groups are finding ways to disclose without revealing the names of individual donors.

For example, super PACs can list the name of a nonprofit that is legally allowed to keep its donors secret. Or they can donate through front corporations, whose names convey no information to voters.

Restore our Future, a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, attributed three $1 million contributions to such front corporations. One of them, Spann LLC had no apparent business activity. It was constituted soon before a $1 million contribution to the super PAC and dissolved soon after. Edward Conard, a former colleague of Mr. Romney’s at Bain Capital in Boston, later came forward as the owner.

“The letter of the law is clear: Groups are to disclose who is funding them,” says Michael Beckel, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington. “But there are a lot of ways in which the high promise of disclosure may not be met, and voters will be in the dark more than the majority of Supreme Court justices imagined when they wrote the transparency and disclosure portions of Citizen's United.”

Moreover, the timing of the deadline is not ideal, he adds. “Voters will have gone to the polls in Florida, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa by midnight on Tuesday,” he adds. “The GOP race could be over by the time people who know who is bankrolling it.”

The identity of donors matters, especially in an era of unlimited contributions, he says. In the 2008 campaign cycle, then-Sen. Barack Obama pledged to release the names of this top fundraisers, or bundlers, who had collected at least $50,000 for his presidential campaign or for the Democratic National Committee. Together, some 357 bundlers raised more than $55.9 million for Democrats. Two dozen of the bundlers were appointed by to serve as ambassadors in Mr. Obama’s first year in office. 

House Republicans are investigating whether a $528 million federal energy loan for now-failed Solyndra Inc. was a quid pro quo for another big Obama bundler. Republicans did not agree to disclose bundlers in the 2008 campaign cycle, so a comparable analysis of rewards for big donors is not possible.

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