Lawmakers last year approved $3 million in funding for Maine’s Clean Election program as part of the state’s budget. A mistake in drafting the budget, however, has left the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices unable to distribute the funds to candidates and campaigns beginning on July 1.
Rather than fixing the drafting error, Republican lawmakers in the Maine House of Representatives are using the situation to attempt to rewrite Maine’s Clean Elections law, because they don’t like it.
This is unconscionable, especially because the public funding system has twice been approved by voters, in 1996 and 2015, and candidates who signed up to use it are campaigning for office ahead of November’s election.
It is reminiscent of a similar situation in 2015 when the word “and” had been inadvertently left out of an energy bill. Rather than simply agreeing to add in the missing “and,” House Republicans used it as an excuse to reopen debate over the bipartisan bill that had passed two years earlier.
Rather than simply restore the missing “and,” House Minority Leader Ken Fredette used it as an excuse to seek $300,000 for a new energy agency and funding it by taking the money from an energy efficiency fund.
This effort failed and lawmakers passed a bill to simply add the “and” late in the legislative session. The bill became law when legislators, including Fredette, voted to override a veto from Gov. Paul LePage.
Fredette and some other House Republicans are playing a similar game with Clean Election funding. His colleague Jeff Timberlake said he was aware of the drafting error last year but didn’t say anything because Republicans don’t support public funding of political campaigns and they wanted “another whack at it.”
This is a cynical rebuff of the hundreds of Maine citizens who voted for the funding system, to the thousands of Mainers who have donated $5 to candidates to help them qualify for Clean Election support and to the more than 100 candidates who are using the system to run for office this year.
Clean election funding wasn’t always a partisan issue. At peak GOP participation, in 2010, 74 percent of Republican candidates for the Maine Legislature used the public financing system; 88 percent of Democratic candidates ran using public funding that year.
In 2016, only 47 percent of Republican candidates used clean election funding while 80 percent of Democrats did.
The current financial situation is complicated by the fact that LePage has refused to sign off on financial orders allowing the Ethics Commission to disperse public campaign funding it already has on hand through the end of the current fiscal year, which ends on June 30. As a result, the commission on Wednesday told qualified candidates that they would get only 28 percent of the money they are owed.
In exchange for a set amount of public funding (initial amount are: $5,075 for state House candidates, $20,275 for Senate candidates and $600,000 for those running for governor), candidates pledge to forego private donations. Candidates must collect a minimum number of $5 contributions to qualify for the public financing. So far this year, 45,000 qualifying contributions have been collected, a record amount.
Clean Election candidates have pledged not to take private donations and planned their campaigns based on the amount of money they were entitled to receive. Withholding that money negates a promise the state made to qualified candidates, putting them at a big disadvantage in November’s election.
Several candidates joined a lawsuit, filed Thursday by Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, to compel LePage to sign the orders directing funding to qualified candidates.
As to the longer-term funding problem, lawmakers have an easy, straightforward remedy at hand — fix the drafting error so the public campaign funding law works as intended. Whether they like the law or not is irrelevant.
Follow BDN Editorial & Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions on the issues of the day in Maine.