Committee kills Democrats’ election reform bills

BOISE – Two Democrat-backed election reform bills have died in a Senate committee.

They sought to require lawmakers to disclose personal financial information, and to create voluntary public financing of election campaigns, similar to Arizona and Maine.

The State Affairs Committee killed them on 7-2 votes Friday, split along Republican and Democrat lines.

The disclosure bill would have required candidates and elected officials to make public some personal financial information, including details of their income, landholdings, creditors and valuable gifts. Spouses of lawmakers would have also come under scrutiny.

Republican lawmakers said the notion they would be more accountable to their constituents if their neighbors knew how much they were worth was misguided.

“If you open up my freezer, there is not $90,000 in cash,” said Sen. Robert Geddes, R-Soda Springs. He was referring to the federal bribery investigation into U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-Louisiana, who had thousands of dollars inside frozen food containers, the FBI has said. “There’s maybe a little bit of meat with freezer burn.”

Forty-seven states require some disclosure for their state lawmakers, according to the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism organization in Washington, D.C. Federal laws require reporting by members of Congress.

Idaho’s ethics laws allow legislators and other public officials to vote on issues in which they may have conflicts of interest, though they must first disclose them.

Democrats say allowing voters to scrutinize elected officials’ financial disclosures on an Internet database would increase confidence in the Democratic process.

“It provides more education for the public,” said Sen. Kate Kelly, D-Boise. “It would hold us as elected officials or as candidates accountable, to think how our personal interests weigh on what we are doing.”

Republicans also killed the bill for voluntary public campaign financing.

The bill was championed by United Vision for Idaho. It is led by Jim Hansen, a former Democratic state lawmaker who lost his November bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho. During his campaign, Hansen limited donations to $100.

Hansen told lawmakers Friday that voters have lost faith in the current system, which allows large donors to give thousands of dollars to statewide elections. Many believe lawmakers are beholden to their biggest donors, Hansen said.

“It saddens me, when I hear more and more people say, ‘Forget it. It doesn’t matter,’ ” he said.

Had it passed, the measure would have created a system in which legislative candidates would collect at least 150 contributions of at least $5 in so-called “seed money” in order to qualify for a pool of money to finance their campaigns. Statewide candidates would have been required to collect 1,500 contributions to qualify.

The money for elections, in part, would have come from a 10 percent surcharge on civil court fines, according to the legislation.

Republicans said they took offense at the bill’s wording. It contended the traditional, privately financed campaign system violates one-person, one-vote principles; diminishes the meaning of the right to vote by allowing large contributions that negatively influence the political process; and “fuels the public perception of corruption.”

Sen. Joe Stegner, R-Lewiston, called such assertions “quite frankly, a personal insult.”

“I think you’ve overreached,” Stegner told Hansen. “And in doing so, I think you’ve hurt your cause.”