EDITORIAL

Big-money elections repel voters.

   With the dust settled on the most expensive — and, not coincidentally, the nastiest — gubernatorial campaign in state history, it is an appropriate time to take stock of the way we pay for our campaigns.
   Campaign-finance rules enacted since Watergate have been effective at requiring disclosure of the sources and the amounts of campaign contributions. But, as this year’s race for governor shows, they have failed miserably at limiting the amount raised and spent.
   The push to reform New Jersey’s election laws came out of the Watergate era. Up until the early 1970s, candidates for public office and contributors to their campaigns didn’t have to tell anybody anything about how much money they were spending or where it was coming from.
   The Campaign Contributions and Expenditures Reporting Act of 1973 changed that, requiring candidates and campaign committees at the state, county and local levels to file reports listing contributors, contributions and expenditures. (The law was later amended to place limits on individual contributions, require political action committees to register, and compel contributors to list their occupations and employers.)
   Just as important, the law provided partial public financing for gubernatorial campaigns. Under the public-financing scheme, the state would match every dollar raised by gubernatorial candidates from private sources with two dollars of public funds, up to a maximum specified by law. Gubernatorial candidates who accepted public financing also agreed to a ceiling on campaign expenditures.
   This law worked very nicely from 1977 until 2001, with every candidate opting into the system.
   This year, however, both Jon Corzine nor Doug Forrester opted out, choosing instead to spend obscene amounts of their own money — most of it on mudslinging television commercials. They were permitted to spend as much as their bank accounts could bear because both eschewed public financing and the U.S. Supreme Court has held in the past that candidates have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of their own money on their own campaigns.
   Does this mean only millionaires will run for governor of New Jersey in the future? We hope not. We hope this particular campaign — which, we hasten to add, brought out a smaller percentage of registered voters than any gubernatorial race in history — proves to be an anomaly. We hope New Jerseyans still believe that public financing is one of the keys to fair, honest elections. And we hope the example set by the successful candidacies of Govs. Kean and Whitman will warn wealthy candidates who might be tempted to reject public financing — especially if their opponents accept it — that they do so at considerable political peril.
   That’s why we are asking that Gov.-elect Corzine — who, we assume, is interested in serving more than one term — commit himself now, even before he takes office, to accept public financing in 2009 if his opponent does the same. This sort of gesture won’t undo the damage he and Mr. Forrester did during their spending spree of the past few months, but it would go a long way toward restoring public confidence in New Jersey’s campaign-finance laws.