From the AP:
A federal judge has dismissed part of a challenge of Connecticut’s new public financing law, but agreed to hear claims that the law is unfair to minor party and petitioning candidates.
U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill said the plaintiffs did not prove that a part of the law concerning matching funds was unconstitutional. The plaintiffs include the state’s Green and Libertarian parties and the Connecticut ACLU. (AP)
The part of the lawsuit that’s going ahead concerns the very, very high qualifying bars for minor parties. Right now if you were, say, a Green Party candidate running for office, you’d not only need to get the required amount of small contributions, but also have an awful lot of petitions signed (or your party has to have won a certain percentage of votes in the last election–but since you’re a Green Party candidate this probably didn’t happen) to get public financing.
This case will be very interesting to watch as it moves forward.
Source
“Federal judge dismisses part of campaign finance law challenge.” Associated Press 21 March, 2008.
18 responses so far ↓
Give it a few election cycles, but my guess is that ultimately the public financing will have little impact on getting non-major candidates elected.
You need money and organization to win an election. So while public financing addresses one part… people will still need to overcome the second part… and without town committees, they’ll be hard-pressed to pull off victories.
Personally, I wish they could win. I’m just skeptical that it’ll happen… at least in numbers large enough to change the composition of the majority.
Of course, if you have a candidate who is willing to dedicate six to eight months of weekends… knocking on doors… then s/he may be able to overcome the lack of organization. But those candidates are few and far between, IMO.
It seems to me like the law is fair enough as it is, in the respect they’re still disputing–those are the requirements for any minor party or petitioning candidate to get onto the ballot in the first place, and of course anyone applying for public financing should be on the ballot already.
until we as a country and state say we have had enough of the major political parties, they will rule
who would have thought that iraqi have a greater freedom on their ballot they the US
GC, what is the requirement for petition signatures for public financing? And is it similar to what you need to get on the ballot? I don’t see the particulars in the story linked above.
CtRoadrunner, would you rather have a ballot with hundreds of yahoos on it; or some kind of vetting process which eliminates the bozos, the nutjobs, and the non-electable? (no snide remarks about eliminating the Democratic line from the ballot allowed!)
Here are the regs (see here for complete overview):
Since the Greens, for instance, don’t qualify for the top three in most cases, they have to get a lot of signatures. In some districts, it’s more difficult than others.
Genghis Conn said:
Good. If you can’t get 10% of the people who vote to accept the basic premise of your candidacy, you should not be running for office to begin with.
If this requirement leads to minor parties cultivating bases of support among actual voters, then it will be a good thing for our democracy. And if it results in an end to the parade of misfits who think engaging with voters on a one-to-one basis is beneath them, then it will also be a good thing for our democracy.
If you want to represent your neighbors in government, run for office. If you want to “shape the debate,” you’d be better served writing a letter to the editor or, really, practically anything else.
The one change that I can think of that would make the system more fair — and this would only be to make the system work in a theoretical future where minor parties actually become relevant — is that the number of signatures required for a minor party candidate to receive full public financing should never exceed half of the plurality for that office in the last election, and it should never exceed half the voting population divided by the number of qualifying candidates. In a field with four or five legitimate candidates, it would actually be unfairly limiting to make a candidate get more signatures than the votes they’d need to win.
What if their was a population loss since the last election? Can the same citizen sign more than one petition? If there are five qualifying candidates and they get n/5 signatures, do those lose financing if one withdraws and they have less than n/4 signatures? Since turnouts tend to be lower in Presidential midterm years, should candidates be required fewer signatures for those years?
The law violates the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause.
As I heard State Rep. Michael Caron say in committee, these problems, which are not rectifiable, are a clear indication why this idea was fatally flawed from the onset.
There is no fair way to do this and the U.S. Supreme Court should order it void in total when and if it gets there.
John does make a good point, I think.
That all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal then others wasn’t written as part of an instruction manual.
If the bar to getting financing is some relatively decent number of signatures and a Democratic/Republican Town Committee can’t get them, they’ve got some bigger issues to worry about the Greens. Make the rule consistent for all parties, regardless of past performance.
John
Why does it violate due process? Is that substantive or procedural due process you’re talking about?
Thanks,
Ken K.
John
Sorry - I meant equal protection? I misread your 14th amendment claim. Why does it violate equal protection?
Thanks,
Ken K
The coming revolution:
1) Get the courts out of state party politics.
2) End primaries.
3) Bring back party bosses (women admitted, provided they smoke cigars) and bring back the smoke filled rooms.
>>provided they smoke cigars
Hear hear!
>>….would you rather have a ballot with hundreds of yahoos on it; or some kind of vetting process which eliminates the bozos, the nutjobs, and the non-electable?
Yeah!
How do we get that?
Open primaries couldn’t hurt.
ACR said:
A setup like that, and you link to Wiki??? Talk about missed opportunities — how about sexy, or sophisticated-artsy, or cultural?
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