Apologies are in order if this is a duplicate posting.

Tom Mathews
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Clean Elections - Making a Difference
by Micah Sifry

YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, Fall 2003
http://www.futurenet.org/27government/sifry.htm


In Maine and Arizona, a broad coalition united to
do something no one thought possible: free
elected officials to enact health care reform,
pollution reduction, and other laws that benefit
ordinary people


EARLIER THIS YEAR, the number-two Republican in
the Maine Senate, Chandler Woodcock, was
attending a political gathering when an industry
lobbyist came up to him and asked if he was a
“Clean Election” candidate. That is, had he run
for office under Maine’s pathbreaking system that
gives candidates full public funding if they
agree to raise no private money and abide by
spending limits? Senator Woodcock said he had,
indeed, run “clean.” “Have a wonderful evening,”
the lobbyist said as he spun on his heels and
walked away.

To Woodcock, this experience shows one critical
benefit of Maine’s clean election system: it
insulates the public’s representatives from
private special interests. “I will not run unless
I am a Clean Election candidate,” he said
recently.

Woodcock is not alone. The Maine Citizen
Leadership Fund did a survey of the 230
candidates who ran clean in the state’s 2002
elections and found that at least one quarter of
them would probably not have run for office if
they had had to raise private money the
old-fashioned way. More than half said the system
changed how they campaigned, allowing them to
spend more time on issues. “Before, fund raising
consumed 50 to 60 percent of my campaign time,”
one survey respondent commented. “Now I am able
to visit more homes and hold more coffee
[meetings] throughout the district. The focus is
on the voters and the issues important to them.”

How did the citizens of Maine achieve such a
fundamental change in their political process?
The answer is it took time and a wide-ranging
coalition of activists.

Nine years ago, in March 1994, leaders from a
diverse array of citizen groups met in Brunswick,
Maine, to talk about their common interest in
changing how money affected politics in their
state. The leaders came from the Dirigo Alliance,
a progressive coalition that focused on
recruiting and electing like-minded candidates to
the state legislature, and included
representatives from Common Cause, the League of
Women Voters, and the American Association of
Retired People. Church leaders, feminist and
peace groups, environmental and labor
organizations, gay and civil rights activists,
and Ross Perot followers from the fledgling
Reform Party rounded out the faces around the
table. Some early planning meetings even involved
representatives of local affiliates of the
Christian Coalition.

Some of the leaders knew each other from years of
working together on an array of issues. Others
sat across from groups that were usually their
political adversaries. They all shared a
commitment to addressing the problem of how
candidates’ dependence on private money was
distorting the democratic process.

A populist movement

The group, which soon took the name Maine Voters
for Clean Elections (MVCE), worked hard to appeal
to a wide array of constituencies and not just to
self-consciously progressive voters. “The issue
was mainstream, so we wanted to present a
centrist, populist, and commonsensical campaign
to Maine voters,” says David Donnelly, who was
just 26 years old when he was hired to run the
initiative campaign. MVCE built an advisory board
of respected state figures and former elected
officials, and put two retired businessmen—one
the former CEO of the largest private employer in
the state (the Bath Iron Works) and the other the
former president of the Maine Chamber of
Commerce—out in front as spokespeople.

This consensus-building approach explained the
outreach to unconventional potential partners
like the Christian Coalition, whose adherents
include many Main Street small-business owners
who are not necessarily happy that Fortune 500
companies buy special favors through campaign
contributions. Even though the right-wing group
never formally joined MVCE, the early efforts at
dialogue convinced Christian Coalition leaders to
sit on the fence when the coalition went public
with its campaign.

MVCE burst on the Maine political scene in 1995,
when 1,100 coalition volunteers managed to
collect 65,000 petition signatures in just one
day and succeeded in putting the group’s demand
for full public financing of elections on the
November 1996 ballot. The measure passed by a
margin of 56 to 44 percent. For the first time
anywhere in the United States, candidates would
be able to receive a competitive amount of
financing for their campaigns without having to
kneel before the wealthy interests and
individuals who dominate the electoral process.

Similar coalitions soon formed in other states,
assisted by regional organizing networks like
Northeast Action, which had fostered the early
work in Maine; the Midwest State Center; the
Western States Center; and Democracy South.
Public Campaign, the national organization
dedicated to winning full public financing for
all state and federal elections, was also born
out of Maine’s success.

Using tactics similar to MVCE, Massachusetts
Voters for Clean Elections built a volunteer base
of more than 4,000 committed activists and passed
a similar initiative in 1998 by a 2 to 1 margin.
Arizonans for Clean Elections, working in a much
more conservative state, eked out a 51 to 49
percent win that same year. And kindred groups
began winning similar but more limited
legislative victories in states like Vermont
(1998), North Carolina (2002), and New Mexico
(2003).

The clean election movement has not been without
setbacks, such as initiative defeats in Missouri
and Oregon in 2000, where business lobbies and
conservative ideologues moved to stem the
grassroots challenge, often using entrenched
incumbents to do their bidding. Clean elections
advocates have also had to fight at every step to
ensure that their experiments were defended in
the courts and properly implemented in the field.
In Massachusetts, a recalcitrant house speaker
succeeded in overturning the new law. In
Connecticut, a clean election measure passed,
only to be vetoed by the governor.

Only connect

“We’re making steady progress, nonetheless,
because as campaigns get more expensive and big
money donors more dominant, more and more people
are realizing that we have to make fundamental
changes so the public and its interests can get
fair representation,” says Deb Ross, Public
Campaign’s national field director. “The old
notion of ‘only connect’ comes alive for people
as they realize that, say, they’re not winning
their battle against an incinerator or developer
because of the campaign cash those interests can
throw at legislators.” To take a vivid example,
on Earth Day 2000, leaders of the Sierra Club and
other environmental groups gathered on the steps
of Connecticut’s state capitol to hail that
state’s then-pending clean elections bill as the
most important piece of environmental legislation
on the docket.

Perhaps the best evidence of the value of
coalition efforts for election reform is in the
legislative results that are beginning to appear
in Arizona and Maine. In both states, legislators
are discovering what it is like to no longer be
dependent on private contributors for their
campaigns. Arizona’s newly elected Governor Janet
Napolitano boasts that on the very first day of
her administration this January, she signed an
executive order creating a discount prescription
drug program. “If I had not run clean, I would
surely have been paid visits by numerous campaign
contributors representing pharmaceutical
interests and the like, urging me either to
shelve that idea or to create it in their image,”
she said in a speech this spring. “All the while,
they would be wielding the implied threat to yank
their support and shop for an opponent in four
years.”

Maine has also made great strides in the health
care arena, in large part because three-fourths
of its Senate and half of its House ran clean.
This spring, they passed legislation forcing the
disclosure of secret deals between drug companies
and middlemen, and pressuring those companies to
be more open in their pricing policies. The state
has also enacted a form of universal health
coverage that will offer uninsured Mainers
subsidized premiums based on their ability to
pay. Funding for that program will come, in part,
from a tax on insurance companies.
Environmentalists also hailed the passage of a
bill that makes Maine the first state to commit
itself to clear goals to reduce its contribution
to global warming, and another that aims to
reduce mercury and lead pollution. All of these
measures faced much tougher going in the days
before clean elections.


Micah L. Sifry is Public Campaign’s senior
analyst. To learn more about the battle for Clean
Elections in your state and in Washington, DC, go
to http://www.publicampaign.org.

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