New decisions by state officials will allow candidates for public office in Arizona and Oklahoma to use campaign donations to pay for child care, rulings that supporters say will allow more women to seek office.
In a legal opinion issued Monday, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) found that state law allowed the use of privately raised campaign money for dependent care, so long as that care was provided so that a candidate could actively campaign.
Mayes’s opinion found that child care expenses cannot be covered by official funds. The state’s officeholder funding law, Mayes wrote, does not permit the use of official funds for dependent care.
Oklahoma’s Ethics Commission ruled Friday that candidates who are primary caregivers may use campaign funds to pay for the care of children, people with disabilities or elderly relatives. Dependent care falls under what Oklahoma law considers an “ordinary and necessary expense,” the commission ruled.
The new rulings now mean that candidates in 35 states and Washington, D.C., may use campaign funds to pay for child care, according to a database maintained by the Vote Mama Foundation, a group that backs covering child care as a way to spur more caregivers to seek office.
Read more: Using campaign funds for child care now allowed in two-thirds of states
Minnesota became the first state to allow campaign funds to cover child care expenses in 1993, followed by Nebraska in 1994. The push got new momentum in May 2018, when the Federal Election Commission ruled that a congressional candidate in New York — Liuba Grechen Shirley, who later founded Vote Mama — could spend campaign funds to cover campaign-related expenses.
That year, another five states expanded their rules to explicitly allow for child care spending, and seven more states followed up in 2019.
The new rules have allowed more parents of young children to cover the cost of care while they run for office.
In a report issued in January, the Vote Mama Foundation found 68 candidates for federal office and at least 87 candidates in state and local office had used campaign funds to cover care expenses. Most of those candidates were women, and almost half were candidates of color.