By Jeremy Duda | Arizona Mirror
A proposal to reinvigorate Arizona’s system for publicly funding political campaigns could inject tens of millions of dollars into the state’s elections.
The Fair Elections Act, a wide-ranging citizen initiative that would overhaul Arizona’s voting and election systems, would allow every voter to contribute “democracy dollars” to candidates who run for office using Clean Elections, which provides public funding to candidates who reject traditional fundraising from private donors.
Democracy dollars would work like this: Every registered voter in Arizona gets a set number of certificates worth a certain amount of money, which they could contribute to Clean Elections candidates. Voters could give all of their certificates to one candidate, or divvy them up and give each voucher to a different person.
On paper, voters could have more than a half billion dollars in public funding to contribute to political campaigns. In reality, only a fraction of that money would likely be used.
The amount of revenue that the initiative’s new funding sources could average at least $20 million per election cycle, based on rough estimates by the Arizona Mirror. Campaign spokesman Joel Edman said the Arizonans for Fair Elections believes the revenue the initiative generates would be sufficient to cover the democracy dollars program, as well as other costs.
There are a lot of variables for the Clean Elections Commission to decide in terms of how much money and how many certificates voters would get or each election cycle.
