Maine Legislative Committee Prepares a Bill to Abolish Public Funding

Although Maine’s legislature is not in session, some of its committees are meeting. According to this story, recently the Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee wrote a bill to abolish Maine’s public funding program for candidates for state office. In Maine, legislative committees are Joint committees, composed of members of each of the two houses.


Comments

Maine Legislative Committee Prepares a Bill to Abolish Public Funding — 4 Comments

  1. Hello my understanding is the proposal is just to repeal the matching funds portion of the law. Leaving the initial allocation intact. However many people consider the initial funding levels too low, having been cut by 5% at least twice by the legislature rather then growing in reaction to actual spending as the law originally intended.

    the amounts would be as follows

    2012 Initial Distributions
    Candidate Primary General
    State Representative, Contested $1,429 $3,937
    State Representative, Uncontested $486 $1,299

    State Senate, Contested $7,359 $18,124
    State Senate, Uncontested $1,831 $5,981

    Governor $400,000 $600,000

    This is considered barly adequate for the house, assuming not too much outside money and an active candidate willing to knock on doors and meet voters, but inadequate for the State Senate, and completely unrealistic for the Governorship.

    Of course others have different opinions, especially some of the Republicans

    Truth in advertising
    Im a Democrat and i serve as Parliamentarian of the Maine Democratic State Committee

  2. Carl Pease is right. It won’t abolish public funding, but it will effectively stop candidates in competitive races from seeking public funds, regardless of their stance on the use of public/private funds for elections.

  3. I understand what #1 and #2 are saying, but the first paragraph of the story says the bill would strike all references to public funding from the law. That seems to me to mean that there would be no more public funding.

  4. Just the matching funds portion, and perhaps the Governor part, but not the Legislative initial allocation

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