Publicly funded elections

The idea of publicly funded elections is a concept designed to reduce corruption by funding elections with government money as opposed to individual campaign contributions. It is meant to reduce what is seen as undue corporate influence on politicians.

Methods of publicly funded election legislation have been adopted in Maine, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Arizona, North Carolina, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Massachusetts. In addition, public funding of elections have been incorporated at the municipal level in several cities. Wisconsin's 33 year old program was defunded by the state legislature in 2011 by Gov. Scott Walker and the legislature's joint finance committee. California recently overturned its ban on publicly funded elections, but charter cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles were already exempt from the ban and already have some form of public financing.

Some of these laws have run into constitutional problems in the courts. When the Citizens United v. FEC decision defined money as a form of speech, the ability to limit campaign spending and publicly finance campaigns in cities and states came into question. Some portions (such as state supplemental funds for publicly financed candidates whose opponents outspend them) of the Vermont system were found newly unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Randall v. Sorrell., but the core program of full funding of governor and lieutenant governor candidates remains in place. Portions of Connecticut's statute were held unconstitutional in 2009, on the grounds that it unfairly discriminated against third party and independent candidates, but the core program of full funding of constitutional and legislative candidates remains in place. In July 2010 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld portions of the District court's order but allowed the core program to continue.

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