Public confidence in the state Supreme Court has never been lower, for obvious reasons.
The new state budget won't help matters any.
The most significant campaign finance reform in over 30 years in Wisconsin was effectively gutted by the budget passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Governor Scott Walker. It eliminates all funding for public financing of state elections – including state Supreme Court races – and diverts the money to help cover the cost of implementing the new law requiring voters to have a state-issued photo ID in order to cast a ballot.
Also buried deep in the two-year budget is a tenfold increase in the limit on campaign contributions to Supreme Court candidates – from $1,000 to $10,000. Now there's a confidence booster!
Along with writing into existence substantially bigger donations to high court hopefuls, budget writers handed state elections entirely over to private interests by raiding the money from the 34-year-old Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund and the year-old Democracy Trust Fund that is the key funding source for the Impartial Justice Act to pay for a scheme to make it more difficult to vote.
There have been no documented instances of voter impersonation in Wisconsin, yet the state will be spending millions of dollars on a new state program that will disenfranchise some voters and unnecessarily burden many others. And state officials are paying for this waste of taxpayer money by killing public financing programs aimed at maintaining fair and clean elections. Doing this requires a profound act of disrespect toward Wisconsin taxpayers who checked the box on their income tax form designating some of their taxes to the clean campaign funds. Against their will, these taxpayers will have their money used instead for what amounts to a policy of poll taxation.
3 comments:
I read this with a deep sense of sadness. Wisconsin, a clean government state, is sinking into the morass of "paid for" elections. The reward for Walker et. al. must be substantial because they are willing to sell us out for that reward. We can now bury clean elections, campaign finance reform, and the facade of voter rights.
I'm not the most moral of men and see politics as no way fair, but to blatantly push Wisconsin into the same area as other states is guaranteed to create unfair campaigns.
Voter impersonation is extremely rare in the first place, as far as the US is concerned at least. I see no reason to invest dollars in security against it.
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