Interest Versus Express Advocacy?
The bright-line test doesn't cover forms of communication that are indirect or debatable. Consider this message to voters:
- If you like candidate X, you need to know he did Y.
In a communication like this, there is no mention about voting, however, the plain intention is to cast doubt on voters that supported candidate X.
Campaigning like this is typically called negative campaigning, making attack ads, or making thinly veiled promotional ads on the behalf of the candidate.
Read more about this topic: Issue Advocacy Ads
Famous quotes containing the words interest and/or express:
“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if the town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)