By Hank Kalet, Managing Editor
The evidence is piling up that public financing of legislative elections is good for voters.
A study released Tuesday by two New Jersey polling groups shows that voters in districts in which legislative races were funded by public money knew more about the November races and believed their candidates focused more on issues than voters in districts not covered by the state’s clean elections pilot program.
The study reviewed the results of several Fairleigh Dickinson University Public Mind polls and Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics polls conducted before the election. It found that nearly twice as many likely voters in clean elections districts had heard of the program (44 percent to 22 percent), were aware of their legislative races (70 percent to 37 percent) and thought their candidates focused on issues (41 percent to 25 percent) as voters in all 40 legislative districts.
It also said that clean elections voters “reported having received more information than voters in the rest of the state,” with 82 percent of clean elections voters saying they received campaign ads in the mail and 74 percent saying they had received information from newspapers, compared with 49 percent and 56 percent, respectively, statewide.
”In general,” the report said, “likely voters in the Clean Elections districts were more knowledgeable than their counterparts elsewhere in the state late in the campaign.”
The poll numbers demonstrate a point that supporters have been making for years: that, properly administered, public financing of elections offers the best approach to bringing voters back into the electoral process.
”Clean elections can re-energize an electorate turned off by partisan attacks and hungry for issue-oriented campaigns,” Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, whose 14th District includes Cranbury, Jamesburg, Monroe and South Brunswick, said in a press release.
Ms. Greenstein, a Democrat, sponsored the original clean elections legislation in 2005 and was a co-sponsor along with Assemblyman Bill Baroni, a Republican, of the expanded 2007 pilot program. The 2007 program provided public funding to candidates in Districts 14, 24 and 37 who collected more than 400 $10 contributions from registered voters. In all 16 of the 20 candidates on the ballot in the three districts qualified for money, with 12 of them — the six major party candidates in the 14th, the three Republicans in the 24th and the three Democrats in the 37th — qualifying for the maximum amount of funding.
The program also called for up to $100,000 in rescue money, provided to candidates when an unaffiliated group is deemed to be trying to influence voters. Ms. Greenstein qualified for the money this year when Common Sense America, a nonprofit that lobbies against gay marriage, ran radio ads targeting Ms. Greenstein, distorting her record on taxes and spending in the process.
This year’s results offered a distinct contrast with the 2005 program, in which only two candidates qualified for money and candidates complained that requirements were onerous and that voters were unaware of the program.
The new law called for the state Election Law Enforcement Commission, which administered the program, to run nonpartisan ads in a variety of media explaining clean elections. In addition, candidates were given extra perks — a clean elections designation on the ballot and 250-word statement on the sample ballot mailed to every voter in the district — designed to encourage them to get the word out about the program.
Plus, the need to canvass voters for qualifying contributions meant that the public had to be brought into the process, Mr. Baroni said.
The success of this year’s program was doubly important, given the failure of the 2005 pilot. Had this year’s program failed, it is likely that the Legislature would have killed the program altogether, said Mr. Baroni, who defeated Democrat Seema Singh for the 14th District Senate seat.
”We knew it was our last chance to get it right, that there were things we had to fix,” he said. “This was the year that it was going to make it or not make it.”
The program is not perfect and needs some revision before it can be expanded statewide. It treats third party and independent candidates differently than major party candidates, does not include the primaries and calls for too much spending in so-called swing districts (those represented by legislators of both parties).
Both Mr. Baroni and Ms. Greenstein are hopeful that the necessary revisions can be made.
”I think candidates can spend what they’re given,” Mr. Baroni said. “We can lower the number (for funding), but also re-look at the rescue money issue and make it more lucrative to provide a disincentive to outside groups.”
In the end, legislators need to keep in mind an important point made in the polling report: Voters, regardless of their legislative district, do not trust legislators to do the right thing.
It is here, as Ms. Greenstein points out, that clean elections can help.
”Years of legislative campaigns focused more on raising money than creating ideas have taken their toll on New Jersey’s voters,” she said.
”We will not be able to turn around negative views of the political process overnight, but by renewing clean elections we can at least continue to ease some of the public cynicism.”
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected] and his blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.

