The New York State Board of Elections has approved and adopted rules concerning independent expenditures, but many feel the rules won’t do a thing to slow down the campaign money train. According to the rules, people making independent expenditures will have to register and report as if they were a political committee.

Independent expenditures are defined by the state as expenditures that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate that the candidate did not authorize in any way. Expressly advocated is defined as containing express words calling for the election or defeat of a candidate. Therefore, committees can run advertisements that avoid using certain words and can escape registration and reporting requirements.

Bill Mahoney, a research coordinator for a New York good government group said the new rules “will make it even easier for independent expenditure committees, Super PACs, to hide who’s paying for them, and because of that it will lead to language that is much more harsh than what we’ve heard before.”