By Hank Stephenson and Ben Giles | Arizona Capitol Times
As fewer candidates choose to run for office using Arizona’s Clean Elections system, lawmakers are sensing the system’s vulnerability and are preparing to deal a death blow.
Clean Elections has faced endless attacks in its tumultuous 15-year history in Arizona, but Executive Director Todd Lang said this time is different.
Threats stemming from the Legislature this year are multi-faceted and include an attempt to neuter the program with a ballot measure asking voters to shift funding from Clean Elections into the state’s education system.
A pair of bills that would dramatically increase campaign contribution limits for privately funded candidates have the potential to dwarf the fundraising power of publicly funded candidates and push Clean Elections further down the road to irrelevancy, the system’s advocates warn.
Raising contribution limits would weaken the value of the dollars Clean Elections provides to candidates who run with public money, Lang testified last month in the House Judiciary Committee. “Traditional candidates have a huge advantage under this system, and you have a huge Prop. 105 problem. It completely undermines the purpose of the act and it undermines the opportunity for people to participate in the system.”
The bills and resolutions making their way through the Capitol still pale in comparison to the biggest blow to Clean Elections — a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the system’s matching funds provision, which offered publicly funded candidates a way of keeping pace with well-funded traditional candidates funneling thousands of dollars into campaigns.
The court’s decision changed the landscape of Arizona elections, and Clean Elections supporters can no longer argue for it to be separate but equal, according to critics of the system.
“Once the Supreme Court struck down matching funds, they were never going to have an ability for them to have the same amount of money,” said Rep. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler. “It’s a violation of free speech. We can’t look at them as equal; we have to look at them as different alternatives.”
