A unanimous three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals has affirmed a trial-court ruling against former Democratic N.C. Sen. Joe Sam Queen in his lawsuit against current Republican Sen. Ralph Hise, the man who unseated Queen in 2010.

Queen had claimed that Hise and the North Carolina Republican Executive Committee broke the “Stand By Your Ad” campaign finance disclosure law through the procedure used to finance television campaign ads in the 2010 campaign. Judge Donna Stroud’s opinion notes that Hise and Queen both benefited from campaign ads supported by their respective parties.

Each political party paid for the production of video messages to be used in its candidate’s advertising. NCGOP transferred funds to American Media and Advocacy Group (“American Media”) for the specific purpose of media buys for the Hise campaign, and American Media held these funds in a separate account designated for Senator Hise until he authorized a media purchase with the funds. The North Carolina Democratic Party (“NCDP”), by contrast, donated money to the Queen campaign to be used to purchase air time through its media company, Envision, and Envision?s subcontractor, Buying Time, Inc. Each contribution by the NCDP to the Queen Committee was transferred to the committee’s account for a brief period of time, and held there normally no longer than several hours — once only eleven minutes — before being transferred to Buying Time. Both Senators Hise and Queen authorized all expenditures to purchase the air time.

Substantively, the only difference in the actions of the plaintiff and the defendants is that the Democratic Party ran the contributed funds briefly though the candidate’s campaign account before they were used for a media buy, while the Republican Party sent the funds directly to the media company to be held “in escrow” for the candidate to be disbursed for a media buy only at the candidate’s direction. Both candidates listed the candidate or campaign committee as the “sponsor” of the advertising in the required on-air disclosure statements and neither listed a political party as a “sponsor.” Neither candidate committee had sufficient funds, but for the contributions of the respective political parties, to pay for their television advertising campaigns.