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Clean Election Essentials
How Do Full Publicly Funded (Clean) Elections Work?
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- Candidates of any party qualify for full public funding of their campaigns by gathering a predetermined number of signatures and small ($5-10) donations from registered voters in their districts. This insures the candidate has a genuine basis of popular support. This qualification bar has successfully avoided an unwieldy number of candidates seeking clean elections funding from being on the ballots in Maine and Arizona.
- These qualified candidates must then agree to refuse any further private contributions and remain publicly funded through both the primary and general election, agreeing to the campaign spending limits established. (The amount of public funding depends on size of the district and is typically determined by averaging the cost of such campaigns over the previous two to three election years.)
- They must also agree not to self-fund their campaign.
- Clean Elections is a voluntary system and no candidate can be forced to run a clean publicly funded campaign. It must be voluntary in order to withstand constitutional challenge, which is one of the ways special interests sabotage campaign finance reform. In spite of the voluntary nature.
- If the non-clean privately funded candidates significantly start outspending the publicly funded candidate and/or independent expenditure or issue ads are used to target the publicly funded candidate, additional public funding is given to the clean candidate to help offset this and discourage such tactics.
- Funding for clean elections on the state level has been provided either from the general fund (the Maine model) or primarily from surtaxes. The Maine model costs each taxpayer $3-4each. Most of the funding for Arizona’s system comes from a ten percent surtax on all civil and criminal penalties. Another more creative surtax that has been suggested is a tax on campaign TV media buys themselves. The cost under both the Maine and Arizona models is about 1/tenth of one percent of the state budget. For much more populous states, like California, the cost would still be trivial, about the cost of a movie, $8, which would arguably a hundredth of what the average tax-payer would save in excess utility bills and other costs due to special interest control of the government.
Just6dollars.org has calculated that if every American paid only $6 extra taxes each year, the revenue generated would cover full public funding of all Congressional and Presidential elections.
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