Can Taxpayer-Funded Political Campaigns Even the Scale?

Instead of realizing her purported dream to hold public office, Boyles was ordered to pay back the money she'd been given, and ultimately left the state—she says she couldn't get a job because of the scandal. Boyles has paid back about $69,000 to date, according to the city auditor's office. She currently owes $112,919 including interest and penalties.

The 2006 incident was just the first hiccup in Portland's fledgling Voter Owned Elections system. And as it has done with all progressive ideas adopted by that perpetually superior city, Seattle has decided that it should now follow suit. Led by council member Sally Clark, with the support of the mayor and a majority of the council, the city plans to convene a task force in the coming months to consider implementing its own taxpayer-funded campaign system.

Candidates for a citywide council seat in Seattle need to raise around $250,000 to be viable. But given individual contribution limits of $700 per candidate for the primary and $700 for the general election, candidates often end up loaning themselves large sums of money. As a result, council seats are held by those who can afford it—or by local celebrities, like former journalist Jean Godden, who have name recognition going in.

Clark hopes public financing will get more people involved. "My interest is in broadening participation," she says. "Can we make the barriers fewer and shorter for candidates and broaden the pool of people contributing?"

Under the Portland rules, candidates for mayor who choose to go the "voter-owned" route can qualify for $200,000 in primary funds, and $250,000 for the general election, if they collect a signature, and $5, from 1,000 citizens. In return, candidates promise not to accept any direct contributions and to limit in-kind contributions to $12,000. The rules for commission seats are the same, but the amount of public funds given is lower.

But the program is not necessarily producing the intended effects. For example, earlier this year Portland's incumbent commissioner Erik Sten, the author of the public finance system, who was not scheduled for a re-election bid until 2010, announced he was stepping down immediately. Suddenly the city needed a special election that it didn't have rules to handle. At issue: whether the voter-owned candidate for Sten's seat should receive the full amount of public funding, given the race's truncated schedule.

In this case, the voter-owned candidate is Sten's chief of staff, a City Hall insider who some argue was uniquely positioned to get the requisite signatures in short order, and not the grassroots type Portlanders had envisioned the system would benefit. It's an ironic twist: The candidate running a privately financed campaign could have to scramble to match the publicly funded candidate's war chest, especially if the latter candidate gets the full amount.

"The best way I can describe it is that it just feels icky," says Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard. Leonard was the only commissioner to vote against the program when it was created in 2004. He says he still sees no difference between the voter-owned system and privately financed campaigns, except that taxpayers are footing the bill—with money that comes out of the general fund and is expected to total around $2 million this year.

"This system has demonstrated as many problems of producing candidates as the private system has," he says. "We have yet to have a grassroots person. People for months try to get the signatures and can't. I thought it was supposed to open up the system to outsiders."

Indeed, Sten, who ran as the incumbent in 2006, has been the only publicly financed candidate to win office. But Janice Thompson, executive director of Democracy Reform Oregon, a nonprofit dedicated to campaign finance reform, says that's not the only way to measure success.

"We are seeing reduced spending," Thompson says, adding that some privately financed candidates are even capping their donations to the same amount received by publicly funded candidates—a phenomenon she likes to call the "Portland Miracle."