Clean Elections Slowly Spread From Maine
WASHINGTON, April 28—When Maine voters approved the Clean Election Act in 1996 they started a trend. Clean election laws based in part on Maine’s are now on the books in Arizona, Connecticut, North Carolina and other states and a number of cities throughout the country.
And there are proposals in California, Maryland and the U.S. Congress that are based in part on Maine’s voluntary campaign finance system. Candidates who choose to receive public funds in Maine must collect a certain number of $5 qualifying contributions, depending on the office being sought. They then receive a set amount of funds from the Clean Election Fund.
Supporters say that clean elections eliminate the taint of special interest from politics and allow more people to run for office. Opponents say the laws impinge on freedom of speech and force taxpayers to support the campaigns of people they disagree with. Public concerns about money and politics have been heightened recently with the political scandals involving convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Public financing of campaigns are “the most effective way for the voices of ordinary people to be heard in the political process,” said Nick Nyhart, the executive director of Public Campaign, a public financing lobbying group.
Nyhart’s organzation and Common Cause, another reform-oriented lobbying group, are pushing to pass a bill that Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) has introduced. The measure, called the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act, would bring to the House a system similar to Maine’s. In the Senate, Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) plan to introduce a comparable bill, Nyhart said.
Tierney’s bill would set up a voluntary system under which House candidates whose political parties garnered at least 25 percent of the vote in the previous election would be allowed to gather 1,500 “seed contributions” of $5. If they meet that target, they would become eligible for public funds in the general election and would have to forgo any private donations.
If a candidate decides not to accept public financing and to raise his or her own campaign funds, an opponent who accepts public financing and is being outspent by the other candidate would receive additional public money.
Nyhart said it would allow politicians to spend less time raising money and more time with voters.
Tierney’s bill does not challenge Supreme Court rulings in Buckley v Valeo and McConnell v Federal Election Commission, which limit campaign finance reform to voluntary systems. But Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) has sponsored a bill that would require all House candidates to receive public financing. Because it would not be voluntary, Obey’s legislation would probably require a constitutional amendment.
Under Obey’s Let the People Decide Clean Campaign Act, all candidates for Congress would be required to get their money from a fund fed by contributions from voters. The Federal Election Commission would divide the fund among Republicans, Democrats and occasionally third-party candidates based on the percentage of the vote each party’s candidate won in the previous election.
Maine Rep. Tom Allen (D) has not decided which bill he will support but said, “In my 10 years in Congress, I’ve become increasingly interested in public financing.”
Rep. Michael Michaud (D) said he is concerned about the cost, under the present system of financing congressional campaigns, which can run into the millions.
“I think the public deserves to have confidence that there’s no abuse or no corruption in the whole electoral process,” Michaud said. “We’ve got to make sure that we do something to build confidence in the system.”
Michaud said that public financing would widen the field of candidates for office. Now you have to be independently wealthy or spend 80 to 90 percent of your time raising funds, he said.
He said he has ruled out supporting Obey’s bill because it is in conflict with Supreme Court decisions. Before backing Tierney’s bill, Michaud said, he would wait to see what the final legislation looks like.
The financing for candidates in Obey’s bill would be based on median household income in the congressional district. Michaud’s second district is generally poorer than Allen’s first district, which would mean candidates in the second district would get less money than candidates in the first district. But because the second district straddles the Portland and Bangor television markets, Michaud would need TV time on both, while Allen needs air time only in Portland. Television advertising is the most expensive and one of the most important tools in a modern campaign.
Michaud is the only member of Maine’s congressional delegation who had a chance to run under Maine’s Clean Election Act. In his last campaign for the state legislature in 2000, he decided to raise his own funds because, he said, the new system still had some kinks to be ironed out.
Maine’s two Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, say that public funding is unnecessary at the federal level.
“While our current system is far from perfect, I would be reluctant to put taxpayers in the position of being forced to pay for politicians’ campaigns,” Snowe said in a statement. “I believe we should give the Bipartisan Campaign Reform legislation I and my colleagues fought so hard to pass a chance to work, realizing that it has only been in place for one round of federal elections so far.”
Collins said that instead of devoting money to finance political campaigns, Congress should devote more funds to health care, education, defense and homeland security.
“I believe that taxpayer money is better spent meeting the needs of our young, our elderly and our most vulnerable, and protecting our nation against threats from nature and from those who want to do us harm,” Collins said in a statement.
The chance of success for either of the House bills is slim. Allen said that a Republican-led Congress was unlikely to pass such reforms; in general, Republicans at the national level oppose public financing of campaigns.
“The only entity that is capable of imposing public financing on congressional campaigns is Congress itself,” said John Samples, the director of the Center for Representative Government at the libertarian Cato Institute.
“They have in the last 30 to 40 years not chosen public financing of congressional campaigns,” Samples said. “They passed it once, but it wasn’t a serious bill and it was vetoed.”
Samples said any bill Congress might pass would be written to ensure as little change as possible in the high reelection rate of incumbents. Since public financing would increase funds for challengers, he said, it is unlikely that Congress will act.
Libertarians oppose government regulation, Samples said, and others oppose public financing because, they say, it would limit freedom of speech and force taxpayers to donate to campaigns they otherwise would not support.
Samples pointed to the federal law that finances presidential campaigns as an example of how such a statute might not work.
Members of reform groups like Nyhart say taxpayers already pay politicians’ salaries that they do not agree with. Voters have been paying $400,000 a year for the last six years, plus numerous perks, to President Bush, although about half of them did not support him in either election.
Samples also disagreed with reform groups’ argument that public financing would eliminate the advantage of access. He said the evidence that donations buy access to members of Congress is hazy at best.
“To this date the Supreme Court has not recognized equality of influence as a good reason for limiting freedom of speech,” Samples said.
Samples said liberalizing campaign finance limits and taking redistricting out of partisan hands would help increase competition in local and House races.
Brian Darling, the director of Senate relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, agreed with Samples on many points. He said conservatives in general believe that publicly financed campaigns are a bad idea.
Some of the proposed public financing systems favor major parties, forcing other parties to get more signatures or seed money for the same amount of funds. Darling called this unfair, saying public financing should be for everyone or no one. Darling also said that public financing could lead to more visibility for fringe candidates like Nazis or Islamic extremists.
In California, the state with the largest population, the state Assembly recently approved a public financing bill. It still has to go through the Senate, be signed by the governor, who said he would consider it, and go to the voters as for final approval in a public referendum.
Aaron Cervantes, the Latino outreach coordinator for the California Clean Money Campaign, said that the bill passed the assembly, which is controlled by the Democrats, along party lines. He said his group was “cautiously optimistic” that it would pass the Democratic Senate this year.
Cervantes said his group hopes that if California adopts the system, it will spread even further.
Maine’s system has sparked much of the current debate on the subject. Recently it has prompted a nettlesome debate in the Maine Republican primary campaign.
Peter Mills and Chandler Woodcock, who are running for the Republican nomination for governor, have both accepted public funds. They say that the people of Maine supported the system, noting that it was adopted by ballot initiative.
Mills said that despite some reservations, notably that it forces taxpayers to finance the campaigns of candidates whom they do not support, he enjoys the time that being a clean election candidate gives him to spend with voters.
Woodcock said that without public financing he would not be able to run. He thinks the system, only four election cycles old, still has some fine points that need to be tuned, including how to assure to solvency of the clean elections fund.
Noting that he was not a statewide figure before entering the primary, he said that the increased time with voters has proved invaluable,.
Republican David Emery is running his gubernatorial campaign traditionally. Though he hates fundraising, he said, he is doing it to show that he is serious about cutting government spending at a time when Maine is $5 billion in debt.
“It’s always easier when someone else pays your bills for you,” Emery said. “If I didn’t have to work to pay the bills at my house I could play golf all day, but that’s not life.”
Emery said he support public financing for the state legislature because that is a part-time job that requires a lot of sacrifices of its members. But making candidates for the governorship do their own fundraising, he said, helps to weed out those with little chance of winning.
Gov. John Baldacci (D) is running his campaign traditionally. Jeff Connolly, his campaign manager, said that while the governor supported clean elections in principle, he decided not to run on clean election money because Maine is in debt. Connolly said Baldacci believes the money for the governor’s race, which is the most expensive one in the state, could be better used.
Other states still have kinks to iron out in their systems as well. Connecticut recently enacted a law that bars all contributions from lobbyists and state contractors and their families. Opponents say it is unconstitutional and will be challenged.
Phil Sherwood, the spokesman for the Clean Up Connecticut Campaign, said that his group and other reform organizations did not want that prohibition in the bill, but it was put in at the insistence of Republican Gov. Jodi Rell. Sherwood said he hoped any legal problems would be ironed out eventually.
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