Traditional
campaign-finance reform involves contribution limits, but nobody
thinks they've made a dent in the role of money in politics.
Candidates who must comply with contribution limits don't seem any
less beholden to special interests than other politicians.
But a new type of election reform is gaining popularity around the country, and it's likely to make some headway in Iowa during this year's legislative session. While "clean elections" - publicly financed political campaigns - probably won't pass the state legislature this year, there's a good chance they'll make it farther than ever.
"Never before has this been discussed so much," said Mary Boyle, press secretary for Washington, D.C.-based Common Cause.
Ethics reform and contribution limits have been tried, Boyle said, but "you're not going to get at the heart of the corruption" without the public financing of political campaigns.
"Clean elections" have been instituted in Portland, Oregon, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and some states on a limited basis. But the largest-scale experiences have been in Arizona and Maine, both of which offer clean elections for all state offices.
Voters in both states passed ballot initiatives creating the new systems. Only one state - Connecticut - has passed statewide clean elections through its legislature; that program will go into effect in 2008.
The Wild Wild West
The phrase "clean elections" is a bit of spin used to describe a system in which candidates voluntarily choose to fund their campaigns with public money. Participants agree to not take money from special-interest groups or even citizens, except for a small amount of "seed money" that's eventually put into a state pool.
In return, they get a set amount of money with which to run their campaigns. Candidates can also choose to fund their campaigns privately.
In Iowa, the movement is called VOICE, or Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections. (For more information, visit http://www.voterownediowa.org.) On Monday, activists rallied in Des Moines for clean elections. And on Tuesday, Iowa State Representative Pam Jochum of Dubuque was scheduled to introduce a public-financing bill in the House.
Jochum has sponsored the legislation for several years. She noted that elections are "the only thing that's public that relies on private financing. It's caused a lot of problems."
Jochum's new position as chair of the House's State Government committee ensures that the legislation will have a better shot than in past years. "I think it's going to make it out of committee," she said.
That's the modest goal for activists this year, said Adam Mason, a community organizer for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. "With this legislation the last six years, it gets sent to committee and just gets buried," he said. Bills that aren't priorities for a chamber's or committee's leadership often die in committee.
In Illinois, legislation is being proposed to publicly fund judicial elections, but there's no equivalent bill for the General Assembly or statewide nonjudicial offices.
Lynda DeLaforgue is co-director of Illinois Citizen Action, which is pushing for public financing for judicial campaigns. She said that initiative is a baby step. Publicly financed elections are "a tough sell in the Illinois state legislature," she said. "We've always been called the Wild Wild West of campaign finance, and that hasn't changed."
The Illinois Senate has twice passed public financing for judicial elections, DeLaforgue said, but the bill hasn't gotten any traction in the House. Speaker Michael Madigan, she added, hasn't been antagonistic to the legislation, but "it hasn't been a priority."
She noted that Illinois Citizen Action supports public financing of all state campaigns but wants to start small. (For more information on the public financing of judicial elections, visit http://www.citizenaction-il.org/issues/campaign_finance/campaign_finance.html.)
Barriers to public financing are legion, Common Cause's Boyle said. For legislators, "it's not the system that brought them."
Another issue with lawmakers is ignorance. Two local legislators who responded to a Reader inquiry on Tuesday - Representative Linda Miller and Representative Steve Olson - said they were not familiar with VOICE. A third, Senator Frank Wood, was familiar with the legislation.
Lobbyists and special interests worry that they won't be heard any longer and therefore fight the reforms. "There's a reluctance by the whole political establishment," Boyle said.
And some voters see it as "welfare for politicians," Boyle said.
But there seems a be a growing movement, and even some support at the federal level. In a speech in the Senate earlier this month, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois - formerly an opponent of public financing - said he will be introducing clean-elections legislation on the federal level: "I hope ... that we can move, even in this session of Congress, to meaningful hearings and the passage of public financing of campaigns that will truly reform the way we elect men and women to office at the federal level ... ."
How They Work
Public financing is hardly a new idea. Presidential candidates for the past 30 years have had the option of getting some of their financing from the federal government. Every eligible candidate has gone this route in the general election - until now.
In announcing her presidential bid, Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated that she would bypass matching public financing for both the primary and the general election. This suggests that Clinton thinks she can raise more money than she would by signing up for public financing, and she wouldn't be constrained by that system's spending limits.
The presidential matching-funds program is considered outdated by many advocates of publicly financed elections. First, it's only partial public financing. More critically, because it caps participating candidates' spending, it puts puts them at a disadvantage compared to candidates who don't opt for public financing. And the fundraising prowess of many candidates makes public financing almost foolish.
In 2004, for example, George W. Bush opted out of public financing for the primary and raised nearly $200 million. If he had taken public money for the primary, his spending would have been capped at $45 million.
State systems have learned from that disparity, and although they have spending limits, they also have matching funds available for candidates who are outspent. This ensures that candidates are competitive in terms of the amount of money they have available, and it reduces the incentive for a candidate to choose to finance a campaign privately.
The Iowa proposal is modeled closely on Maine's, Jochum said. The amount of money each candidate gets is based on spending in the last two election cycles, she said. Today, House candidates would each get $30,000; Senate candidates $40,000; secondary statewide candidates (such as those for attorney general and secretary of state) $200,000; and gubernatorial candidates $3 million.
And candidates who are outspent by privately funded opponents would receive matching funds of up to twice the amount initially allocated to each candidate. So if a gubernatorial race had one candidate who opted for public financing and one who didn't, the publicly financed candidate's funds would start at $3 million. If the privately financed candidate spent more than that, the publicly funded opponent would receive a one-for-one match, up to an additional $6 million.
Those funds ensure a level playing field, Mason said, but they actually might provide an advantage to publicly financed candidates, who can claim that their opponents are in the pockets of special interests. "That might go even further than the extra money," he said.
Jochum estimates that if all candidates participated and all had primary opponents, public financing of elections in Iowa would cost roughly $19 million. For that price she said, "you can buy your government back from the special interests."
In Maine, administrative and campaign costs for public financing have totaled $15 million over four election cycles, said Adam Smith, a communications associate with the not-for-profit Public Campaign organization. In Arizona, the cost has been $28 million over four cycles. The cost estimate for Iowa is so high because it assumes full participation.
To become eligible for public financing under the Iowa proposal, legislative candidates would need to collect 500 signatures within their district and 500 $5 contributions. Statewide candidates would need to collect 500 signatures from each congressional district (a total of 2,500 signatures) and 500 $5 contributions from each congressional district. Candidates are also allowed to create exploratory committees that can raise up to $10,000, with no contribution of more than $100.
Once candidates opt in to the public-financing system, the money they've raised is put into a statewide clean-elections fund.
One attractive feature of the Iowa proposal is that it's expected to be self-financed. In addition to the pool of "seed money" contributed by candidates, funding would come from a state income-tax check-off, a tax exemption for contributions to the system, and a 1-percent sales tax on political advertising.
Other states have used a variety of funding mechanisms. Arizona, for example, uses civil and criminal fees, while Connecticut plans to use the proceeds from sales of abandoned property.
Do They Work?
There are multiple ways to evaluate whether existing clean-elections laws have been working: whether candidates opt into the program, for example, and whether they're able to run competitive races.
Following the 2006 general election in Maine (which has had clean campaigns since 2000), nearly 84 percent of the legislature will be made up of people who used public financing for their campaigns, according to Public Campaign (http://www.publicampaign.org). In the general election, 81 percent of all candidates used public financing.
In Arizona (which has also had clean elections since 2000), 42 percent of the new legislature used public funding, and nine of 11 statewide officers participated in the program.
The federal General Accounting Office studied Maine and Arizona and confirmed that by those measures public financing has been successful. But in its 2003 report, it also noted that it was unclear whether clean elections reduce the advantages of incumbency or increase the overall competitiveness of elections: "Various measures - contested races (more than one candidate per race), incumbent reelection rates, and incumbent victory margins - reflect mixed results. ... In sum, with only two elections from which to observe legislative races and only one election from which to observe most statewide races, it is too early to draw causal linkages to changes, if any, that resulted from the public financing programs in the two states." (The General Accounting Office report can be downloaded from http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03453.pdf.)
And there are other criteria by which it's too early to tell. "The measure of success is bringing new and diverse candidates into the political process," Common Cause's Boyle said.
And it's critical to keep in mind that the most meaningful - if hard to quantify - standard is whether clean elections result in better public policy, or at least public policy less rooted in the agendas of lobbyists and special interests.
It's just one piece of evidence, but in 2003 the Maine legislature passed the country's first statewide universal health-care program. In a legislative area bogged down by the interests of hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies, a state with clean elections did what nobody else had been able to accomplish before.
"The public really wins out," Boyle said. "The agenda is in the public's best interest."
