FAIRMONT — The latest version of the state’s election law on disclosing who pays for campaign ads by independent or third-party groups near election time is under attack again, this time by a small, nonprofit, West Virginia-based group.

West Virginians for Life Inc. (WVFL) wants a federal district judge to throw out the disclosure and reporting requirements for “issue advocacy” groups like itself.

The anti-abortion group wants a preliminary injunction barring enforcement by the state Election Commission and the state’s 55 county prosecutors. It also wants a declaratory judgment that strikes down parts of the law, including amendments approved by state lawmakers in June, as unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston will hear the First Amendment “political speech” case at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday in Charleston.

It’s the latest test for campaign funding disclosure and reporting requirements that first passed in 2005. The Legislature acted after an independent group known as “And For the Sake of the Kids” spent millions in 2004 against former state Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw.

Shirley J. Stanton, a Fairmont lawyer, longtime opponent of Roe v. Wade and the WVFL’s president, said the group’s rights of free speech and association are being “chilled” by the state’s requirements.

“Under the amendments in the new law, we can’t even say we are ‘pro-life,’” she said Friday.

The group wants to tell voters about former Justice Margaret Workman’s role in a 1993 state Supreme Court ruling involving abortion.

Workman wrote the decision in Women’s Health Center of West Virginia v. Panepinto.

The WVFL prepared a radio ad, a mass mailing and a petition drive.

Each says, according to the group’s complaint, that “Workman’s 1993 opinion requires West Virginia to pay for abortions for any reason for women on Medicaid (and) states that West Virginia has spent more than $5 million on 12,000 abortions.”

“This is the way she voted,” Stanton said of the Panepinto decision. “The public has a right to know.”

When the WVFL learned about the new version of the state law, however, it withdrew the petition, which it had posted on its Web site, she said.

While the group does have a political action committee, the part of the WVFL in the lawsuit would be crippled by administrative costs alone that come with the reporting and disclosure requirements, she said.

Stanton is the local counsel in the suit, which was filed Sept. 30, one day before a preliminary injunction against the state’s election law was dissolved. The new law became effective the following day.

U.S. District Judge David A. Faber allowed his injunction against the old law to lapse after lawmakers changed sections of it on June 28. Faber did not rule on the constitutionality of the new law, saying only that his earlier decision cannot apply to the amendments, The Associated Press reported.

The new state law says, “When the relatively small size of the state’s legislative and other voting districts are combined with the economics and typical uses of various forms of electioneering communication, history shows that non-broadcast media is and will continue to be a widely used means of making campaign-related communications to target relevant audiences. Consequently, non-broadcast communications are prevalent during elections.”

The law also states that “identifying those funding mass mailing or telephone campaigns in the final days of a campaign may at least permit voters to evaluate the credibility of the message.”

And the law also states that “campaign expenditures by entities and persons who are not candidates have been increasing.”

“Public confidence is eroded when substantial amounts of such money, the source of which is hidden or disguised, is expended. This is particularly true during the final days of a campaign.”

The WVFL is being represented by Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom, a Terre Haute, Ind., firm that specializes in constitutional and campaign finance and election laws.

James Bopp Jr., the lead attorney, said Johnston will expedite his rulings since the Nov. 4 general election is only a month away.

In his filings, Bopp said the WVFL was not coordinating its campaign with any other candidate and is not a political committee.

The state’s test for whether a group like the WVFL is engaging in “express advocacy” (wording such as “vote for” or “vote against”) is too vague since it rests on a “context and totality of the circumstances approach.”

The state’s new definition of “express advocacy,” which is political speech that can be regulated in terms of reporting and disclosure goes beyond the constitutional limit set down in Buckley v. Valeo by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bopp said.

“While Buckley focuses solely on the substance of the communication to determine whether it is express advocacy, West Virginia law looks beyond the substance to context. This is unconstitutional,” he argues.

The definitions of a “political committee,” “political action committee” and a “unaffiliated political action committee” in the law are also too broad and vague.

“Each definition reaches substantially beyond whatever plainly legitimate sweep it may have,” he writes.

“It ensnares grass-roots organizations in West Virginia and elsewhere that communicate about issues, thereby engaging in speech at the core of the First Amendment,” Bopp argues.

Workman, one of three candidates for two seats on the high court, said Friday she was “troubled by the desire of this organization to distribute false statements about my record.” A Democrat, she served on the high court from 1989 to 2000. She was the first woman elected to a statewide office.

The 15-year-old Panepinto opinion “says very clearly that the state is not obligated to pay for any reproductive health services for anyone. The case says, in fact, the state is not obligated to pay for any reproductive health services for indigent people. Only if the state decides to pay for such services must they do so in a manner that meets constitutional standards of equal protection,” said Workman.

“It also holds that a woman’s freedom of choice does not carry with it a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail herself of that choice.”

The opinion also says: “ ... this case does not turn on the morality or immorality of abortion, and most decidedly does not concern the personal views of the individual justices as to the wisdom of the legislation itself or the ethical consideration involved” in a woman’s decision whether to bear a child, Workman said.

E-mail Bill Byrd at bbyrd@timeswv.com.