Mitt Romney's quiet contribution to Prop. 8 backers again exposes laxity of Alabama PAC rules

Mitt Romney's quiet contribution to Prop. 8 backers again exposes laxity of Alabama PAC rules:

Mitt Romney has made no secret of his opposition to marriage equality or his support in 2008 of California's Proposition 8 reversing a court decision constitutionalizing same-sex unions. A spokesman for him said at the time he would be contributing financially. But until now, it was unknown that he had contributed $10,000 to the anti-gay National Organization of Marriage through an Alabama political action committee. He effectively hid it. Sam Stein writes:

Records filed by Romney's Free and Strong America PAC with the Federal Election Commission did not include details of that $10,000 donation. Nor did NOM's public 990 form. In fact, record of the payment was only uncovered Friday when the pro-gay rights Human Rights Campaign was sent a private IRS filing from NOM via a whistleblower. [...]
Asked for comment, an aide to Romney said that the donation was made through the Alabama chapter of the Free and Strong America PAC. State records confirm this. However, the 990 NOM filed lists the donation as having come from PO Box 79226 in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Perfectly legal. And perfectly obscuring. Thanks to the lax laws governing PACs in Alabama, many politicians use it as a place to set theirs up. Unlike federal law, Alabama PACs have no $5000 limit on how much an individual donor can contribute. And some contribute a good deal more. Before a candidate, Romney, for example, actually declares that he is a candidate, he can set up a PAC in Alabama that pays all the bills in preparation for a run without running afoul of federal law.
That's exactly what Romney's team did, raising $456,750 last year from 41 individual donors. Altogether, starting in 2006 before he declared for the 2008 race and in 2010 before he declared for 2012 race, his Free and Strong PAC raised more than $1 million. As Mary Orndorff reported last year:

Records show that, of the $412,000 that Romney's Alabama PAC spent last year, $20,500 was in contributions to the campaigns of 15 Alabama Republicans running for state or legislative office. The rest went mostly to administrative expenses for people and vendors in Massachusetts, where Romney's presidential campaign was later based.

Said Dave Vance of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center: "It's a complete violation of the spirit of the law and it's a pathetic problem. Alabama is fertile ground because they can take the money in large chunks."
But why did Romney choose to support NOM through the Free and Strong PAC? He certainly didn't have to do that given that his support for Prop 8 was well known. But putting the money into NOM might have had more to do that organization's standard operating procedure of shielding the identities of its contributors. And well it might given this week's exposure of its memo detailing a multi-million-dollar campaign to drive a "wedge" between gays and African Americans over marriage equality.