The General Accounting Office last week provided one of the first studies of states with public financing for campaigns. The GAO, which examined the systems in Maine and Arizona, generally concludes that it is too early to know the effects on their political systems, but offers some useful observations – warnings, really – about the way these systems operate. The report is important because full public financing for campaigns is in effect for six states, with partial public funding in 20 more, and organizations are pushing for it in all remaining states.

As predicted, public financing is popular among candidates. In 2000, 33 percent of candidates used Maine’s Clean Elections financing; in 2002, 62 percent did. Similar increases were seen in Arizona. The percent using the system in Maine, according to the GAO, reflected the percentage elected, suggesting the publicly financed candidates were as serious and elected as often as privately funded candidates.

However, the benefit of all this participation is, at least so far, hard to discern. For instance, the presence of public funds to relieve candidates of the chore of having to collect money themselves did not mean that significantly more candidates ran for office. The GAO speculates that term limits producing open seats could be as much an influence as public financing in prompting people to run. Further, the races in which a candidate was publicly financed were not more competitive in either state as a result of the financing and while the amount of money spent directly by campaigns dropped in Maine, it rose in Arizona.

Worse, and as already noted in Maine, increasing public financing coincided in both states with increases in private expenditures – the money spent by political action committees in support of or opposed to a candidate. Legislative leaders of both major parties in Maine have run Clean for their personal re-election campaigns, yet have solicited huge sums of private money for their political action committees to dole out to other candidates, thus buying votes for their re-election to leadership positions. Both parties have shoved private independent expenditures into their campaigns, forcing absurd levels of public matching funds into the other side’s Clean campaign.

In 2002, a privately funded incumbent pre-paid campaign expenses before the primary to deny the Clean opponent a level playing field. And just to make certain the Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices did not take this watchdog thing too seriously, the Legislature in 2001 changed the law so that party leaders now get to choose who watches them.

The GAO was careful to point out that with only two elections to examine under public financing, it did not have much data from which to draw conclusions. But Maine is already aware of some of the new problems created under its Clean Election Act and some of the old ones the act failed to solve. The lesson for states without this form of financing is that candidates who are determined to get around the law usually will, and public financing cannot stop them. One more reason to watch how well candidates behave, and not just whether they conform to the letter of the law, very carefully.