Builders and others who created multiple political action committees to funnel money to state Supreme Court candidates last fall may not have broken the law, but they certainly did tread on the integrity of judicial races.

The BIAW’s proclamation — and call for front-page coverage of its “vindication” — followed the Public Disclosure Commission’s dismissal of a complaint from Seattle lawyer Kyle Olive. Olive accused BIAW, as well as tort reform proponents and gay marriage opponents, of skirting campaign finance laws by moving money from one PAC to another.

Here’s how it worked: The BIAW gave $750,000 to Change-PAC, which gave $1.3 million to It’s Time for a Change, which then bought ads slamming Chief Justice Gerry Alexander and other candidates.

The strategy allowed It’s Time for a Change to list just one contributor — its only one — instead of offering the broader disclosure sought by state law.

Olive argued that the move was intended to conceal who was really paying for the attack ads. Builders and others claimed that it merely was a way to meet the state’s legal requirement that political ads carry the names of the top five contributors without bogging down the commercials with a list.

The tactic may be legal, but that doesn’t make it stink any less. Adding to the confusion are those clever PAC names — Citizens for Judicial Integrity, Citizens to Uphold the Constitution and the Committee for Judicial Restraint, to name a few. They sound good, but tell you nearly nothing about the true interests behind them.

If voters wanted to find out who was really behind the ads, they could trace the money trail through PDC records. That is basically why the PDC dismissed the complaint. But the reason the state law requires real-time disclosure for political ads is to save voters the trouble — and to reflect the reality that few viewers will probably bother to track down the information.

Judicial races are no longer the staid, insular affairs of the legal community — which is not in itself a bad thing. But with higher visibility comes a greater likelihood of special-interest money fueling the kind of political slugfests we saw in last year’s Supreme Court races.

Timely and complete disclosure is the best antidote to nasty campaigning, not to mention undue influence on the bench. Anything that circumvents or complicates that disclosure is an attempt to escape accountability.