The idea behind the Maine Code of Election Ethics is to have Maine politicians agree to a standard of behavior for campaigning and let the public decide whether they have met that standard. When this works, candidates run higher-minded campaigns and voters become more involved in the election. But because the code has no penalties for violating the standards and no one officially deciding even if the code has been violated, what more often happens is that the public is frustrated by a lack of an avenue for complaints and the candidates (or their surrogates) who protest opponents’ ads quickly begin to sound like whiners.

The code itself is clear and sensible. It is based on values that “are fundamental to our society and are widely shared throughout Maine: honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion.” What that means practically is that the ads of both the campaign directly and third parties will be free of demeaning references and images; push polling will be rejected; and factual claims will be backed up. It calls for a candidate to act as any civilized person ought to, and the candidates’ political parties spend a lot of time figuring out how badly they can abuse these standards without harming the candidate.

The Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy and the Margaret Chase Smith Library, which oversee the ethics code, have an opportunity to make this good idea less frustrating and more meaningful. They might, for instance, encourage a bipartisan board to serve as a review panel for complaints about abuses of the code. Or, more simply, they might solicit periodic opinions from campaign observers about the fairness and accuracy of specific campaign advertising. Newspapers undertake ad-watch series traditionally, but the stature of the center and the library, even though they would not direct board decisions or write individual commentary, would add weight to those opinions.

Campaign staff, particularly third parties, create inaccurate or unfair advertisements because they are effective. They smear opponents quickly, do a bit of damage and then are gone before hardly anyone bothers to check to see whether they were right. The code would more effectively stop this strategy if respected Maine citizens were charged with examining specific ads and deciding whether they met the code’s standards. If they did not, an amendment to the code could require a public apology from the offending party to the smeared candidate.

Sure such extensive rules are tedious, but so too are many of the campaign ads.