Montini: Plotting a dirt nap for Clean Elections

The Citizens Clean Elections Commission must be the most effective and efficient government oversight operation in Arizona.

Otherwise, why would so many politicians be trying to get rid of it?

The commission has been under assault by elected officials from the moment the Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998.

This year it’s gotten really ugly, with everything from a proposal to wipe out the agency completely to a bill that would effective gut it.

Why?

The reason is right there in the name.

Silly us. We want our elections to be clean. The people who control the Legislature do not.

The Clean Elections law allows a candidate to collect a set number of $5 donations in order to qualify for campaign funding through the commission. The money doesn't come from the state's general fund but mostly from court fines.

The act also gives the commission the ability to enforce the campaign finance laws for privately-funded candidates and Clean Elections candidates. In the worst cases a politician can be kicked out of office.

Politicians hate all that. Even a politician who was elected to keep an eye on other politicians hates it.

Secretary of State Michelle Reagan seems to believe that Clean Elections is the enemy, and is supporting Senate Bill 1516, a proposal that could make it even easier for dark money interests to buy Arizona elections.

“It’s different this year,” said Tom Collins, executive director of the Clean Elections Commission, “in that the Secretary of State has engaged in a scorched earth series of political, legal and now legislative attacks on an independent commission that wants to enforce campaign finance laws in the manner the citizens voted for.”

Secretary Reagan previously noted the commission’s “noble intentions” but found it troubling the commission wants to “rein in groups if they corrupt our election system.”

Regular voters like us, on the other hand, might find it troubling if the commission did not try to keep the system uncorrupted.

This legislature, like many in the recent past, has lawmakers going after the commission’s funding and its authority on several different fronts. Republican  Michelle Ugenti-Rita suggested asking voters to abolish the commission altogether.

(This is the same lawmaker who would make it a Class 6 felony for someone to deliver another person’s signed and sealed ballot to a polling place.)

Meantime, there is SB 1516, about which Collins said, “There are so many things in SB1516 that make it more difficult to know about a candidate’s financing and that conflict with Clean Elections. The commission gets between politicians and their money, and between donors and politicians. Some legislators are not happy about it. But that is what the citizens did when they passed the law. They wanted to put voters before politicians and donors.”

You and I have had to deal with a Legislature that slashed education funding, tossed over 200,000 people off the health-care rolls, handed out big fat tax breaks to big businesses, passed enormous costs onto county and local governments and comes close every year to seceding from the union. And that’s with a Clean Elections commission.

Imagine the state without it.