Local-Level Suits Keep Campaign Reform Alive

Even though Congress has killed campaign finance reform at the federal level for this year, a drive to revamp election financing laws city by city and state by state is advancing in courthouses from California to Maine.

And although the wheels of justice may grind slowly, lawsuits at the state and local levels could lead to reforms well before the gridlocked political system in Washington effects change nationally.

Emblematic of the courthouse campaign is a suit in Georgia by John White, a 22-year veteran of the state House of Representatives who ran for the state Senate last year and was drubbed by an opponent who outspent him, $270,000 to $16,000.

The freshly out-of-work politician went to federal court with a novel argument: that the current system is so awash in private money that it undermines the constitutional right of nonwealthy citizens to seek public office and voters’ right to a choice of a full range of candidates.

“If you can’t raise $200,000, you can’t be a senator,” said White, now a public relations consultant in Albany, Ga.

White’s lawsuit against the state of Georgia is part of a three-pronged legal attack designed to persuade the courts to replace the current system with a publicly financed one.

Assisted by lawyers at the Boston-based National Voting Rights Institute, reform advocates are also defending campaign reform legislation and ballot initiatives enacted in states and municipalities across the country.

Ultimately, they hope to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse its own 1976 ruling--in the case of Buckley vs. Valeo--that struck down mandatory campaign spending limits as a violation of the 1st Amendment right to free speech.

“Thirty years ago, we won the fight to bring down the poll tax,” said Walter C. Butler, Georgia president of the NAACP. “The campaign finance system in Georgia today is the newest voting-rights barrier, preventing ordinary citizens from equal participation in the election process.”

So far, no court has bought the reformers’ argument. Just last year, judges in New York turned aside such a case involving the election of then-Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.), who outspent her opponent four years ago by $524,000 to $267,000.

“New legal theories are very hard to prove in court,” said Herbert E. Alexander, political science professor at USC and a campaign finance expert. “They usually have a very hard time getting accepted, and I suspect this will be the case as well.”

Reformers vow to persevere. They are using “the same kind of strategy employed by the civil rights groups--you keep hitting at the courts and finally get a breakthrough,” said Ellen Miller, head of Public Campaign, a reform advocacy group.

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White’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Atlanta, argues that the current system violates the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment by effectively eliminating many qualified but insufficiently well-heeled candidates.

“Such an exclusionary process operates as a ‘wealth primary,’ ” said John C. Bonifaz, counsel to the voting-rights institute. His phrase is intended to evoke memories of the exclusionary “white primaries” that proliferated early this century before they were struck down by the courts.

“Like that white primary, the wealth primary system today is part of the machinery for getting elected,” Bonifaz argued. “This system gives affluent contributors the power to effectively place names on the ballot, whether or not the potential candidate has widespread popular support.”

He has no illusions about his immediate prospects.

“This is a long-term struggle,” he said. He observed that it took the court 58 years to reverse course and outlaw school segregation in 1954, and 30 years elapsed before it banned the poll tax.

Bonifaz helped White file his lawsuit after a study by the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a nonprofit independent research group in Helena, Mont., found that the better-financed candidates in Georgia state Senate races won 83% of the time in the last three elections. Incumbents who outspent their challengers won 95% of the time.

Last year, White, 56, raised and spent $16,060 while Mark Taylor, his opponent in the Democratic primary, raised $310,874 and spent $269,821--a state Senate record.

“If it had not been for money, he would not have won the election,” White contended. He won 9,600 votes, or 38.5% of the vote.

In some places, the reformers are in court to defend gains already won. They are defending a 1996 voter-approved initiative in Maine providing for public financing of state elections. In Cincinnati, they are standing behind a 1995 ordinance that set mandatory spending limits for city council races. Also in Ohio, lawyers for the voting-rights institute are defending mandatory expenditure limits for judicial elections.

In California, they are backing Proposition 208, which voters adopted last November to cap campaign contributions and set other limits, against a lawsuit in federal court in Sacramento. Arguments in the case were heard last week.

Elsewhere in California, it is the reformers who are on the attack. They are representing the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in a 1994 federal court lawsuit challenging the private financing of judicial elections. The suit focuses on a Los Angeles County requirement that candidates pay to have their campaign statements published in voter guides.

The overarching goal of reform advocates is to persuade the Supreme Court to reverse its Buckley vs. Valeo ruling. They got a boost in January when 24 state attorneys general, describing the Buckley decision as “a barrier to American democracy,” promised to support cases around the country that seek to challenge the ruling.

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The attorneys general also noted that since that 1976 case, contributions in federal elections have increased eightfold to more than $2 billion in 1996. Less than 1% of the population gave 80% of such donations, according to Bonifaz, while 96% of the population gave nothing at all.

The far-flung legal skirmishes, Miller said, constitute “a very important battleground that has to go hand-in-hand with the public education work that has to be done” to lay the groundwork for reform. “Everybody has to be educated to think differently about the problems and the remedies.”

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* QUESTIONING COFFEE TALK

Congressman says he may ask lip-readers to view videos. A13