Prop 15 opens the door to public campaign financing by setting up an experiment with the Secretary of State’s office in the next two statewide elections.
That’s intriguing, but not the place where public finance might be most useful. (There haven’t been a lot of secretaries of state buying the office). No, where California needs public finance most is in ballot measure elections.
Prop 16, which is wonderful because it serves as a good example for so many things that plague California, is instructive here as well. Its sole corporate backer is spending $40 million – plus to support the measure. The no campaign will spend peanuts. That’s not a fair fight.
Now, here is the point in any discussion of initiatives and money in which someone argues well: money doesn’t guarantee victory. Money is much more effective at killing an initiative than getting one passed. (Just asked Boone Pickens, who outspent his opponents 20-1 on a 2008 ballot initiative only to see it go down).
But according to every study, money buys you a much greater chance at victory. That’s not good enough. A public finance system should give opponents of a measure at least a shot to get a message on the air. How you do this should be left to the constitutional lawyers. But the goal ought to be providing a significant fraction of the amount of donations to the yes side to the no side.
Paradoxically, such a system might be good for rich interests using the ballot. Now, one effective argument against something like Prop 16 is that its sponsor, PG&E’s parent company, is using its money to buy a verdict with full knowledge that opponents won’t have the cash to compete. Giving the other side a chance through public finance might take that argument away-and focus campaigns on the merits and problems of the program the initiative is proposing.