Prop. 306 is the wrong elections fix

Proposition 306 does two things. The first shouldn’t be done. The second shouldn’t be done this way.

Arizona has a system of publicly financing political campaigns for state offices and the Legislature, approved by voters in 1998.

In 2016, several publicly financed candidates made payments to the Democratic Party. Republicans and conservatives believe that this was, at least in part, a scheme. Money was pooled within the party and then diverted from safe districts to more competitive ones.

Prop. 306 would prohibit publicly financed candidates from making any payment to a political party for any purpose. Or to a politically active non-profit, such as a labor union.

This is excessive.

Political parties exist to elect their nominees. One of the ways they do so is to provide bulk services to candidates for such things as voter lists, voter registration, voter communication, voter ID, and get-out-the-vote activities. Through economies of scale, parties can do some of these things less expensively than each candidate doing it for themselves.

Candidates are often asked to pay for at least some of the costs of these activities. There’s no reason publicly financed candidates should be precluded from participating.

The Citizens Clean Elections Commission, which oversees the public financing system, adopted a rule to guard against the kind of diversion that Republicans and conservatives fear. Candidates must have an invoice for any specific services they receive from a political party or a non-profit.

The commission is empowered to review expenditures made by publicly financed candidates. If the invoices from a political party seem excessive for the services rendered to a particular candidate, the commission can require reimbursement.

This isn’t a failsafe barrier to the feared diversion. The commission unwisely allowed reimbursement for intangible “consulting” services, which will be difficult to place a fair value on. And the commission only has the express ability to fine the candidates. It probably doesn’t have the authority to require a political party or non-profit to disgorge any improper payments.

Nevertheless, seeing how effectively the commission regulates payments between candidates and their political party makes much more sense than flatly prohibiting them.

The second item is infinitely more complicated.

In addition to allowing candidates to run campaigns without raising money from interest groups, the Clean Elections initiative initially sought to level the playing field between publicly financed candidates and privately funded opponents.

It did so by providing additional matching funds if the privately funded opponent raised more than the initial public allotment or if an independent expenditure campaign weighed in on the side of the opponent.

To administer matching funds, the commission needed to know what privately funded candidates and independent expenditure campaigns were raising and spending. So, there were reporting requirements for them.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the matching funds feature unconstitutional. The commission nevertheless asserts the right to regulate and take enforcement action against privately funded candidates and independent expenditure campaigns. That assertion has, so far, not been successfully challenged in court.

State law also gives general enforcement authority over campaign-law violations to the secretary of state and the attorney general.

So, Arizona currently has a dual enforcement system. There can be conflicts over requirements and differing judgments about enforcement.

This is obviously unfair to those who participate in politics and needs to be corrected.

A case could be made to resolve the conflict either way. Republicans and conservatives, however, don’t trust the commission, and so want to resolve it by restricting the commission to regulating publicly financed candidates.

The clean way to do that would be to amend its jurisdiction to clarify that it includes only publicly financed candidates. Instead, Prop. 306 attempts to do so indirectly by stripping the commission of its exemption from the state’s Administrative Procedures Act. That makes its rules subject to the oversight of the Governor’s Regulatory Review Commission, which takes a dim view of the commission’s attempts to regulate privately funded candidates and independent expenditure campaigns.

That still leaves legal issues to be resolved.

The clean approach would have been more effective, and made for a more honest political debate.