SOCIALIZED ELECTIONS: BAD IDEA FOR STATE

A coalition modestly calling itself Missouri Voters for Clean Elections is attempting to pass an initiative that would begin publicly financed election campaigns. They have in mind election campaigns for the General Assembly and all statewide offices. The coalition consists of 37 groups, including the League of Women Voters, the American Association of Retired Persons, labor unions and environmentalists. Organizers need 75,000 valid signatures of registered voters on petitions from at least six of the state's nine congressional districts. They say they will spend up to $1 million to campaign for passage of the issue.

The Missouri Alliance for Campaign Reform, another of the groups involved, has long pushed the General Assembly for passage of legislation that would fund taxpayer-financed election campaigns. This year, as in other years, lawmakers have balked at such a move. So here comes the initiative effort.

Taxpayer-funded campaigns, which can be understood as socialized election campaigns, are a bad idea whose time hasn't come. This kind of reform proceeds out of the notion that we have too much money in campaigns. Of the folks who say this, we ask, how do they know? Money in political campaigns is -- as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held -- the exercise of protected speech, pure and simple. We need more speech, not less, in our campaigns. Those who seek so to limit speech represent the most serious threat ever to the First Amendment.

We have long held that the answer to money in politics isn't to limit spending, still less to socialize election campaigns, but rather to de-regulate them. Stated simply, the answer to money in politics is to remove all spending caps and strengthen strict, full disclosure of the sources of all campaign funds. Technology now exists to do this on the Internet. Campaigns could be required to disclose any and all contributions within, say, 48 hours of receipt, and anyone, anywhere in the world, could access the information and make up his or her own mind. That simple reform would do far more than this latest proposal from our do-gooding friends who want to push it all off on the taxpayers.