On December 16, 2022, California Assembly Member Alex Lee introduced AB 83 which would enact the "Get Foreign Money Out of California Elections Act.  Six months later he requested that the bill be moved to the inactive file.  When the legislature reconvened on Wednesday for the second year of the current biennium, he gave notice of his intention to remove the bill from the inactive file.  Readers may recall from this post that the bill would extend to foreign-influenced business entities the state's current ban on any  contribution, expenditure, or independent expenditure in connection with the qualification or support of, or opposition to, a state or local ballot measure or an election for a state or local office by a foreign government or foreign principal.  

The bill would define a "foreign-influenced business entity" as a business entity (defined in Cal. Gov't Code § 82005) in which any of the following occur:

• A single foreign principal holds, owns, controls, or otherwise has direct or indirect beneficial  ownership of one percent or more of the total equity, outstanding voting shares, membership units, or other applicable ownership interests of the entity.
• Two or more foreign principals, in aggregate, hold, own, control, or otherwise have direct or indirect beneficial ownership of equity or voting shares in an amount that is equal to or greater than 5 percent of the total equity, outstanding voting shares, membership units, or other applicable ownership interests of the entity.
• One or more foreign principals participate in any way, directly or indirectly, in the business entity’s decisionmaking process with respect to contributions or expenditures of funds in connection with a ballot measure or election.

When I wrote about the bill last year, I noted that "the 1% ownership threshold seems to be extraordinarily low".  This concern was subsequently validated in an analysis prepared for the Assembly Committee on Elections:

An analysis prepared by the Center for American Progress (CAP)—one of the co-sponsors of this bill—suggests that this change would dramatically expand the scope of state law restricting campaign contributions and expenditures by foreign nationals. In particular, the CAP study suggests that almost all very large, publicly-traded corporations would be considered FIBEs under the provisions of this bill. Specifically, based on an analysis of 111 US-based publicly traded corporations in the S&P 500 stock index, the CAP study found that 74% of the studied corporations had a single foreign shareholder who owned 1% or more of the corporation’s total equity, and that 98% of the studied corporations had multiple foreign shareholders who collectively held at least 5% of the corporation’s total equity.