{news} Clean elections trial Day 2(New Haven Advocate)

[Tim McKee]

Clean Elections On Trial: Day 2
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Notes from the federal trial challenging Connecticut's historic campaign
finance reform law.
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Thursday, December 11, 2008
By Andy Bromage Andy Bromage photoYale University Professor Donald Green.

A Yale University professor told a federal judge Wednesday that minor
party candidates get "a fantastically good deal" under the state's new
clean elections system.

The testimony, by political science professor Donald Green, was in stark
contrast to the portrait painted a day earlier by the Green Party of
Connecticut's lawyer, who spent seven hours describing the hurdles third
parties face trying to get funds through the Citizens Election Program.

Green was called as an expert witness for the state Elections Enforcement
Commission during day two of a bench trial in U.S. District Court in
Bridgeport. The Green Party, the ACLU and the lobbyists' association are
challenging the state's campaign finance reform law on the grounds it
imposes stricter rules on minor political parties than on Democrats and
Republicans.

In the calm and precise tone of a scholar, Green refuted the notion that
third parties somehow get the shaft because they must raise seed money
and gather signature petitions to qualify for taxpayer-funded election
grants. Actually, it's a great deal for minor parties, he said.

The Citizens Election Program benefits minor parties in three ways, Green
said: It gives them access to money they wouldn't otherwise have access
to (public election grants that range from $3 million for governor down
to $50,000 for state representative); it helps them build a presence in
neighborhoods by meeting voters during petition drives; and it gives
voters incentive to support third parties because voting for minor party
candidates helps them qualify for ballot access and public money the next
time.

THE 20 PERCENT DOCTRINE

The Green Party's argument is that the law is unconstitutional because it
makes it harder for third parties to secure public cash than for major
parties. Democrats and Republicans are guaranteed public election grants
so long as they raise a base amount of seed money ($15,000 for state
Senate, $250,000 for governor, and varying amounts for other offices) in
amounts of $100 or less.

Minor parties, by contrast, can only get the full grant if they raise the
benchmark amount of cash, and if they won 20 percent of the vote for that
seat the prior election, or collect valid signatures equal to 20 percent
of the voter turnout for the past election. Minor candidates can get
lesser grant amounts for lesser shares of the vote --- two-thirds of the
grant for 15 percent and one-third for 10 percent.

Raising that much money isn't nearly as hard as the Green Party makes it
out to be, the professor testified.

"When you look at the powerful financial incentives the Citizens Election
Program offers, even at 10 percent the threshold is very, very minimal,"
Green said. "A 20 percent petition is less than 10,000 signatures [for
certain races]. Twenty percent is a very low threshold in terms of an
outward expression of electibility."

Prof. Green said there's good reason to set the threshold for full
funding at 20 percent, instead of the 5 percent bar set by public
financing programs in Maine and Arizona. For one thing, it weeds out
"non-serious candidates who embarrass the system" and would erode support
for publicly-funded elections in the legislature. And two, it keeps out
so-called "stalking horse candidates," Democrats or Republicans who would
run a sham campaign as a "third party" candidate to divide the
opposition.

But U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhill saw an inherent flaw in
Green's logic: If collecting signatures from 20 percent of the voting
public is so easy (for minor parties), then how would it deter major
parties from running stalking horse candidates anyway? "You can't have it
both ways," the judge said.

MAJOR VS. MINOR

What makes someone a major political party? In Connecticut, the number 20
does.

Parties that have 20 percent of registered voters with them are
considered a major party. All others – the Greens, the Libertarians, the
Working Families Party, Connecticut For Lieberman – are considered minor.

The constitutional question that came into focus Wednesday, and that
could end up deciding the case, was this: At what level can the threshold
for qualifying for full public financing constitutionally be set? The
clean elections law sets it at 20 percent, same as the bar for major
party status.

Underhill questioned how realistic it is to expect a minor party
candidate to qualify for public financing in the 2010 governor's race.
Doing so would require getting around 100,000 valid signatures, roughly
20 percent of the vote total from 2006. Many times campaigns collect
twice as many petitions as actually needed to account for ones that don't
check out. For governor, that would mean 200,000 petitions, and at $2 per
signature (the going rate for professional canvassers) that would cost
$400,000, more than the amount allotted candidates during the qualifying
period.

As the day wore on, Underhill pressed a defense lawyer, Monica Youn of
the Brennan Center for Justice, which has teamed up with the state to
defend the law, about why a hopeless Republican running in a Democratic
stronghold like Bridgeport, for instance, should be treated any different
than a hopeless Green running anywhere else.

Underhill: "What evidence did the legislature consider when setting the
thresholds?"

Youn: "The legislature did not specifically look at statistics for
petitioning. What they did was look at the 10, 15 and 20 percent
benchmarks with regards to fundraising and petitioning."

Youn noted than in 2006, 22 out of 168 minor party and petitioning
candidates in state elections
(about 13 percent) received over 10 percent of the vote, meaning they
would qualify for some level of public financing in 2008.

Youn: "The evidence shows a viable minor party candidate would be able to
hit the threshold."

Then Youn took on what is often whispered about, if not expressly said.

"The suggestion that two major parties work together to keep out minor
party candidates just doesn't hold up as a matter of logic. The major
parties aren't worried about minor parties. They're worried about the
other major party. This idea that they're working together to protect a
duopoly is just fiction."

Underhill's questions eventually boiled down to this: Why should a major
party with a history of poor performance in a district (say, the
Republican Party in Bridgeport) be treated any differently than a minor
party? If Bridgeport was so solidly Democrat that Republicans didn't run
candidates there for years, why shouldn't they have to petition to
publicly finance a campaign there same as the Greens?

The answer given by Prof. Green and the defense was basically that the
Republicans, in this instance, have a greater level of "latent" support
around the state than minor parties have, as evidenced by broad support
for certain GOP candidates, like the popular Gov. Jodi Rell.

"Even in one-party dominant districts, the lesser majority party usually
gets 20 percent," Youn told the judge.

"If the legislature had wanted to discriminate, they couldn't have found
a better number than 20 percent," Underhill replied.

WHAT'S NEXT

This week's bench trial is a facial hearing, weighing the
constitutionality of the law on its face, or as written.

The parties will reconvene in Bridgeport on Thursday to summarize their
arguments, and come back in March with complete data from the 2008
election to argue the law "as applied," in other words, does the law have
a discriminatory effect in its application?

Stay tuned.


******************************************
Tim McKee, Manchester CT, main number cell-860-778-1304, 860-643-2282
 National Committee member of the Green Party of the United States and is a spokesperson for the Green Party of CT.
BLOG-http://thebiggreenpicture.blogspot.com

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