A clean shot

Though it may seem like mere fine-tuning, a bill to change the name of Maine’s Clean Election Act, approved 8-5 by the Legislature’s Legal and Veterans Affairs last week, actually causes more problems than it solves. The Senate should respect voter wishes on this issue and reject this alteration.

To begin with, yes, the names “Clean Election Act,” “Clean Election Fund” and, informally, “clean candidate” — meaning one who volunteers to abide by the rules under the act and receives public financing in return — could have been better chosen, perhaps with a name that did not suggest that anyone who chose strictly private financing was automatically something less than clean. But that was to begin with — three years into getting the act under way, Maine is certainly not at the beginning.

Instead, it is approaching a culmination: Voters strongly supported the act at the polls in 1996 and they have voted with their dollars to support its financing through the check-off on their income taxes since then. The first Maine candidates will begin using the new system, which has served as a model in several other states, next year. Now is the time to see whether it will work; it is not the time to start changing it around so that voters will never know whether the reform they supported would have made a difference.

LD 872 would substitute the word “Public” for “Clean” in the statute, the income check-off box and in every other reference. It is understandable that lawmakers would want a connotation-free name for such an important part of Maine’s election laws. But their concern now is outweighed by the confusion the change would cause. Besides, the concern is hypothetical, and the act contains a built-in review by the state’s election ethics commission after the first election cycle, so that if the name does prove to be a signifcant problem it can be addressed then.

With so many states having recently passed or still considering reforming the way candidates fund their campaigns, Maine’s election in 2000 will be followed closely nationwide. Lawmakers owe it to the public to give the act a clean shot.