Troubling allegations amid 'clean election'

Her Web site says she's for "taking campaigns out of the hands of special interests and putting it back into the hands of voters." It says she "supports tougher pay-to-play laws that would ban special interest contributions to all campaign accounts and at all levels." But things aren't always as they Seema.

South Brunswick Democrat Seema Singh has started her run for state Senate in District 14 (Middlesex/Mercer) on a troubling foot with a campaign finance scandal and an ethics probe into her actions as New Jersey's former ratepayer advocate.

According to state Election Enforcement Commission (ELEC) records, the former ratepayer advocate has accepted contributions from some of the very power companies she was in charge of protecting us from. As ratepayer advocate, we'd like to think her relationship with these special interests would be somewhat adversarial, but the contributions give the appearance that the opposite was true. The situation looks even worse when you consider that she's a participant in the Fair and Clean Elections (FACE) Pilot Project.

In FACE, candidates can qualify for public campaign financing when they get 400 contributions of $10 from voters in their district. The point of FACE is to eliminate the influence of special interests and party bosses on campaigns, and force candidates to get back in touch with the grassroots of their parties and regular voters. However, candidates are entitled to accept larger donations during the primaries, as she did from the utility companies. What she did broke no rules, but it's the sort of "loophole-ism" that subverts the very purpose of the "clean elections" process.

It also recently came to light that the New Jersey State Ethics Commission was probing Singh's actions while she served as ratepayer advocate. According to a complaint filed with the Department of the Public Advocate, Singh rehired a retired chief of staff as a legal consultant for about double the salary she was making before. Singh declined to comment on the specifics of the probe, but agreed with her campaign chair's opinion that the timing of the complaint, filed in December, was suspicious.

To be sure, this sudden allegation of improper conduct dating back to 2003 has all the fingerprints of Republican opposition research, or as we call it, dirt-digging. However, just because it's negative campaigning doesn't mean it's not an important, valid point of criticism.

If Singh wants the voters to trust her judgment in deciding the state's budget, personnel and laws, she needs to earn it. A good start would be by returning the shady donations - utility companies are not proper investors to be cultivated for a ratepayer advocate's political campaign. It would also be nice to get some answers about this ethics probe. We realize it's difficult to comment on an ongoing investigation, but not addressing its allegations won't make it go away. It's early in the campaign, but if she doesn't start working to come out in front of these controversies, it could be a long summer.