District 14 chosen for publicly funded election
Area was viewed as split district where either party can win
BY CHRIS GAETANO
Staff Writer

New Jersey's 14th Legislative District has been chosen to take part in a program that seeks to test the viability of public funding for political campaigns.

In this second run of the Fair and Clean Elections (FACE) Pilot Project, a bipartisan state committee chose a Republican stronghold, a Democratic stronghold and a tossup district for participation. District 14, which includes areas of Middlesex and Mercer counties, was chosen this week to serve as the test case for split districts where neither Republicans nor Democrats dominate. The heavily Republican District 24 (Sussex/Hunterdon/Morris) and Democratic District 37 (Bergen) had previously been chosen to participate.

The choice of District 14 was seen by some as a disappointment. Candidates in District 12 (Monmouth/Mercer) were also vying to take part in FACE, having previously attempted to do so during the 2005 test program. Republicans Declan O'Scanlon, Caroline Casagrande and Jennifer Beck, along with Democrats Michael Panter and Amy Mallet, said that their district was ideally suited for the pilot program.

"If you look at voter registration in the district, there is a difference of 75 between Republican and Democrat voters out of over 140,000. If that isn't the very definition of split, I don't know what is. … This is clearly the most competitive district in the state," Beck said in a released statement.

O'Scanlon said that he felt politics had influenced the committee's choice of districts.

"It was obvious the decision was made before anyone set foot in the room, which is pretty distressing. … We had the facts on our side, but the politics were on the other side, and that is the unfortunate state of the state of New Jersey," O'Scanlon said.

Participating in FACE means that politicians in District 14 will have the option of running a publicly funded, or "clean," election. Campaigners who go down this road will have a substantially different fundraising experience than ones who forgo it.

To qualify for the program, a candidate must first collect at least 400 donations of $10 each, which gives the candidate access to $50,000. Each donation beyond that increases the amount of public money they would receive, to a maximum of $100,000 for 800 donors. Meanwhile, politicians can seek up to $10,000 worth of "seed money" in the form of donations not exceeding $500 each to help finance their quest for $10 donations. This has a dual effect of acting as a spending limit in campaigns as well.

All donations are subject to the same disclosure requirements for campaign financing that are currently in place. Assembly candidates on the same party ticket must either both run on public money or not at all. The measure itself is part of the state's ongoing efforts to blunt the influence of special interests in state government.

"The real purpose is to take special interest money out of politics and have elections be publicly funded, instead of special interests," said Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, a Democratic incumbent in District 14. "The public will have less of a perception that special interest money is controlling Trenton. They'll feel they're [the ones] controlling Trenton."

Greenstein and her Republican counterpart in the district, Bill Baroni, were sponsors of the legislation. District 14 contains Hamilton and West Windsor in Mercer County, and Cranbury, Jamesburg, Monroe, Plainsboro and South Brunswick in Middlesex County.

According to Derek Roseman, a spokesperson for the Assembly Democrats, District 14 will actually run on a different funding formula than the other two taking part in the program. Roseman said that the candidates could receive as much as $535,000, a figure reached by taking the average costs of

campaigns over the past three election cycles, though it was noted that Greenstein and Baroni are willing to talk together and "come up with a number much lower."

Third parties short-changed?

Public funding for political campaigns is available to anyone in District 14 who wants to run for the Legislature this year and can meet the aforementioned donation requirements. However, if a candidate is not running with either of the two major parties, they can access only about half the public funds the Democrats or Republicans can. This means that if an independent candidate and a major party candidate both got 800 donations, the independent would get $50,000 and the major party candidate would get $100,000.

This news was not received well by some third party officials, who felt that the legislation squeezed them out.

"It's one more instance of those in power seeking power," said Jane Hunter, chair of the communications committee with the New Jersey Green Party. "It's business as usual."

Hunter also said that the number of donations required is far too high to allow viable third party representation in the program. She said other states that publicly fund elections, such as Maine, do not have contribution standards nearly as high as this pilot.

Greenstein said that reduced funding for third party or petition candidates was decided upon after lengthy bipartisan talks. She said that it was her hope that reduced access to public funding would discourage people who weren't "serious candidates" from throwing off what is, essentially, a political experiment.

"We wanted to make it such to give new people the chance to participate, but you always have to balance that against candidates who were not serious candidates, and that's where the delicate balance lies. There was support for them getting money, but the debate was [whether] they get half. It was decided for the experimental purposes of this election to give them half and then maybe go further with full funding. Right now we're trying to control some variables. It's still an experiment," said Greenstein.

This does not satisfy Libertarian Party Chairman Lou Jasikoff. He expressed skepticism of the major parties' ability to differentiate between candidates who are and are not serious, asking rhetorically whether they just mean who has the most money. He said that the law is essentially unfair to third party candidates.

"It seems the purpose is to open the door to qualified candidates and yet it provides only 50 percent of the financing to minority and independent candidates as it provides to the Republican and Democratic candidates. They want us to get onboard the bus with them, as long as we sit in the back," said Jasikoff.

Trial and error

The program will only run in the general elections, meaning that the primaries will still be privately funded. Roseman said that this had not escaped the Legislature's attention, but she repeated that this pilot is still highly experimental.

"To use the well-beaten analogy, you have to crawl before you can walk. We want to make sure clean elections can work before we expand it to all elections," said Roseman.

According to Roseman, the bill has a provision that says if half of the candidates eligible to apply for a clean election qualify to do so, primary elections will automatically be included when the program is tested again in 2009.

The first pilot, which was held in Districts 6 (Camden County) and 13 (Monmouth/Middlesex) in 2005, was met with widespread criticism as only two out of the 10 eligible candidates managed to qualify for it. Under the 2005 system, candidates could gain public funding by getting 1,000 $5 contributions and 500 $30 contributions. Campaigners expressed a great deal of difficulty with getting those amounts.

A big part of this, to politicians, was that all donations had to be made out by check. Roseman said that these difficulties were addressed by lowering and standardizing the number and type of required contributions as well as allowing donations by cash and credit.

"It became a very bureaucratic, top-heavy process," Roseman said. "[The reforms] really smooth out and streamline the whole process, so it's not a burden for people who want to participate."

It is Greenstein's belief that clean elections will not only encourage participation in the political process from those ordinarily underrepresented, such as women and minorities, but will also reduce overall campaign costs over time.

"I think it will bring down the amounts eventually, so Fair and Clean Elections will have the dual purpose of changing where money comes from and also, I think, bringing the moneys down eventually so people begin to think in terms of spending less," said Greenstein.