Publicly funded elections in California to replace present corrupt system of funding by big money special interests.

To the Editor:

Now that we have a veritable cornucopia of candidates for the October 7th recall election for Governor in California, perhaps it is time to think about to eliminate the ongoing corruption of political campaigns and elections by big money special interests. We need to replace the present system of privately-funded candidates with a system of publicly-funded candidates.

This reform has already been accomplished in most of the western democracies: Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the European nations. There they have short campaigns, with several televised candidate debates and printed campaign statements published in newspapers and on internet web pages, with little, if any privately paid TV advertising followed in short order by the election.

Under this reformed election system, there would be no private funding for campaign advertising. To be eligible for public funding of television debates, newspaper statements and other advertising, candidates say for Governor, would have to gather one thousand signatures of registered voters and themselves pay a $100 registration fee. We need to set a high enough bar to discourage mere publicity seekers and completely frivolous candidates, but low enough to allow motivated idealistic citizens to join the electoral fray.

Yours truly,

James K. Sayre

11 August 2003