ADN warns against the anti-corruption initiative

Mary Hattie grew up "admiring an orange-tinted sky" in Anchorage, Alaska, and watching snow fall from clouds colored orange by the city's light. But city fathers now believe that switching to energy-efficient white lights will save money, and cut down on glare, and help folks see better. Under that white light, snow will appear white again, and Hattie recognizes "just how darn white snow can look at night."

Hattie's now a writer for the Anchorage Daily News. In April, while weighing the differences between orange and white municipal lights on Alaska's clouds and snow, she also weighed the difference between two ballot measures offered for consideration this year.

She wrote that one was the Clean Elections Initiative, which "would provide public financing for state-level political candidates. The goal is to take the corrupting and limiting influence of big money out of campaigns, open elective office to more people and allow elected state officials to spend less time dialing for dollars and more time doing their jobs."

But the other was the "Anti-Corruption Initiative," which "would prohibit government contractors from contributing to political campaigns and hiring legislators or their staffers -- or even former legislators and aides who have been out of office less than two years."

"No conflict there," she muses.

There's more to the story.

The rub is that the Anti-Corruption Initiative also prohibits spending any public money on any campaign, lobbying or partisan purpose. That means no public financing for political candidates, no matter how fair the system. That puts the Anti-Corruption Initiative squarely at odds with the Clean Elections Initiative, and that's a mistake.

"We just believe strongly that taxpayer dollars should not be spent ... for campaigning and lobbying," Bob Adney , executive director of the Committee to Stop the Corruption, says.

That suits the Libertarian, limited-government philosophy of many of the initiative's backers, including former state Rep. Dick Randolph. But it slams the door on a system that promises to pre-empt corruption by gutting special-interest influence over candidates, so they are beholden not to a few prime financial backers or industries but to all their constituents.
...
The Clean Elections Initiative gives us a fighting chance to improve the way we do electoral business in Alaska. The Anti-Corruption Initiative's ban on public financing works against that. Come August, let's vote for the anti-corruption force of Clean Elections.

"Dueling initiatives," Anchorage Daily News (AK) - April 4, 2008