For its supporters, campaign finance disclosure is always an obvious good. No additional paperwork is ever too much, no financial threshold ever too low. And so, with each additional layer of regulation, citizen participation in government becomes a rote exercise in paper pushing.

Take recent legislation out of Massachusetts: H. 806/S. 506. It’s a seemingly straightforward proposal which forces compliance paperwork and attendant publicity on any individual or group who spends $1,000 “in the aggregate” on influencing that quintessential bit of New England localism: the town meeting. Both bills have already advanced out of committee with few dissenting votes.

Disclosure zealots characterize their cause as simply shining a spotlight on the evergreen enemy of “Big X” or “dark money.” “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” they often assert, quoting Louis Brandeis as he was snippeted in the Buckley v. Valeo opinion. The corollary implication that speech, association, and privacy inevitably harbor some kind of viral payload gives short shrift to the First Amendment. But at least that kind of language is aimed at large, sophisticated entities who can afford competent counsel to handle the government’s paperwork demands.

The problem is that such proposals lack a theory of how smaller citizen-led groups are supposed to navigate capacious or complicated rules. If you’ve never filled out a campaign finance or lobbying disclosure form before, it’s certainly not always obvious how to do so properly.

On this point, the Massachusetts bills are instructive. Once a spender has crossed the $1,000 threshold for spending “in the aggregate in order to influence or affect an article on a warrant or the vote on any article at a town meeting,” that entity incurs a recurring requirement to detail its contributions and expenditures, including “the full name and address” for any person an expenditure is made to, as well as “the full name and address from whom each gift, payment or contribution was received.”

At the outset, we should note that the “influence” language is precisely the same protean vocabulary that the Supreme Court found unconstitutional in Buckley because it “offers no security for free discussion.” Is simply noting the negative externalities of a new policy enough to cross the line? Or is more explicit advocacy required? Already, you can see how difficult compliance with this measure could be – and why it risks chilling exactly the type of local involvement that’s unique to the town meeting system.

For a normal person without a campaign finance background, it might not be clear that the statute may well apply to spending $1,000 on any advocacy whatsoever related to town meetings over time. And if you’re a non-normal person like me, you’re still not quite sure if it does – but it seems to. (Frankly, normal people probably won’t even think to check whether there’s a state law that affects their participation in town government in the first place, but bear with me.)

Anyway, if even experts aren’t quite sure what the law means, it’s impossible to expect local activists to navigate it smoothly. In particular, many may not realize that spending a few hundred dollars on leaflets three or four times might push them over the $1,000 aggregate threshold.

And once you’re in, it’s not clear how you ever get out. Instead, monthly filings with the town clerk seem to continue indefinitely, as well as regular filings before and after town meetings. The stick for noncompliance? Four-figure fines and a stint in the clink. Making civic engagement as big of a chore as doing your taxes doesn’t seem conducive to keeping citizens involved in local affairs, does it?

As the en banc Eighth Circuit put it in striking down a Missouri law that attempted to regulate unpaid volunteer activists like big-time lobbyists:

The burdens of the law are straightforward. Most obvious is the time and effort required to fill out paperwork . . . In exchange, [the activist] loses his freedom “to remain anonymous” and exposes himself to “retaliation” for his advocacy. McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n, 514 U.S. 334, 342, 357 (1995); cf. NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449, 460-62 (1958) (stressing the chilling effects of “compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy”). In short, compliance is not free. But neither is noncompliance, which exposes violators to fines and possible jail time.

Without easy ways to opt out of the system or de-aggregating the $1,000 threshold, fines and possible jail time are exactly what small-time, grassroots groups of friends and neighbors will face if they wish to pool resources and involve themselves in the governance of the communities where they live and work, even just occasionally.

The legislative sponsors of this effort claim to care deeply about town meetings. They’ve correctly observed that “Town meetings are essential to the fabric of our nation; the American Revolution was spurred in part by the king limiting the number of town meetings people in the colonies could hold.” Quite so.

But, if that is the case, why then write legislation that only sophisticated actors can comply with, while engaged citizens of good faith are left confused and ultimately deterred from civic participation?

And, of course, there’s another point in the sponsors’ history lesson: King George III and his minions certainly would have wanted to know who was spending money to influence those town meetings to whip up Patriot sentiment, now wouldn’t they?