Hawaii has become the first state in the nation to enact legislation curbing corporate political spending using a legal framework modeled in part on Montana’s approach, as the Aloha State’s governor signed the measure into law last month. The development comes as Montana voters prepare to weigh in on a related ballot initiative this November.
Hawaii’s New Law
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green signed Senate Bill 2471 into law after it cleared the legislature on bipartisan votes at every stage of consideration. Only a single lawmaker voted against the bill in the final tally — a remarkable level of consensus in any legislative body on campaign finance legislation.
The law prohibits corporate contributions to elections, candidates, and political parties. Its legal strategy hinges on regulating powers that states themselves grant to corporations, defining “artificial persons” broadly to include nonprofits, trusts, partnerships, trade associations, and unincorporated associations. The law is scheduled to take effect in the summer of 2027.
Even GOP Rep. Garner Shimizu, who initially opposed the bill, came around to support it before the final vote. “Hawaii and this 2026 legislature has the chance to make history, to reset a new precedent, to eliminate unlimited money sources that totally affect our elections,” Shimizu said.
The measure did not pass without controversy. The Hawaii Chamber of Commerce and several industry groups opposed the bill, and a memo from the state attorney general warned that the law “raises serious constitutional concerns.” Those concerns are likely to produce legal challenges before the 2027 effective date.
Montana’s Role as a Model
Montana’s history on corporate campaign spending is unusually long. State voters banned corporate electoral spending back in 1912, a prohibition that stood for nearly a century until the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision swept it away along with similar laws in other states.
That history has made Montana a touchstone for advocates seeking state-level strategies to restrict corporate political spending. The legal architecture behind Hawaii’s new law draws on the same state-authority argument — that states, as the entities that charter and empower corporations, retain the right to limit how those corporations participate in elections.
Michael Beckel of Issue One, a nonpartisan money-in-politics reform group, described Hawaii’s action as a meaningful breakthrough. “With this legislation, Democratic and Republican legislators in Hawaii have blazed a new trail to curb the undue influence of big money in politics and end secret spending in campaigns,” Beckel said.
The Montana Ballot Initiative
Montana voters will have a direct say on a related question at the November 2026 general election. A ballot initiative seeking to restore limits on corporate election spending has already cleared the signature-gathering threshold set by state law.
The initiative required supporters to collect at least 30,121 valid signatures statewide, with at least five percent of the governor’s vote total in each of 34 different state House districts. The campaign submitted more than 50,000 signatures total, and the Montana Secretary of State verified nearly 35,000 of them — well above the minimum needed to qualify the measure for the ballot.
Whether such a measure could survive federal constitutional scrutiny remains an open question. Citizens United established broad First Amendment protections for corporate political spending, and courts have struck down similar attempts to reinstate state-level restrictions. Hawaii’s attorney general flagged the same tension in the memo questioning SB 2471. Supporters of both the Hawaii law and the Montana initiative are banking on a legal theory that has not yet been tested at the Supreme Court level in the post-Citizens United era.
What’s Next
In Hawaii, legal challenges are widely expected before the law takes effect in summer 2027. In Montana, the November ballot initiative will put the question directly to voters, though any measure that passes would almost certainly face immediate court challenges given the existing constitutional landscape.
The parallel tracks — one a legislative act, one a voter initiative — reflect a broader effort by campaign finance reformers to use state-level action to test the boundaries of Citizens United. Montana, with its long history on the issue, sits at the center of that debate heading into the fall election cycle.
