CALDEN — The Fair Start Committee began with a simple idea: a small levy on very large campaign contributions, paid into the public financing pool that gives every qualified candidate the same starting allocation. Large money would underwrite small campaigns. The idea did not survive the first reading of §13.2.
Citizens can propose legislation directly to the Legislature, but the Constitution limits what an initiative can do. Under §13.2(3) it may not narrow a right under Article I, directly appropriate public funds, or impose or alter taxes, duties or tariffs. A levy is a tax. The drafters withdrew their first version before the Elections Panel ruled on it.
"We spent a month on the levy and about an hour discovering we couldn't have it," said Ansel Moray, a retired accountant for the Calden harbor board who chairs the committee. "The Constitution keeps taxes with the people we elect. I don't love that today. I suspect I'd love it the day somebody else wrote a petition."
What remains is narrower and, by the Panel's determination, eligible. The proposal would lower the individual contribution limit set by statute, require contributions received in the final thirty days before a federal election to be reported within two business days, and lower the threshold below which contributions are published only in aggregate. More names would appear on the public record.
That last change has critics among the people the committee wants to help. Small donors are often the least eager to be listed. Halsey Maddox, the crane operator running for the Assembly in Calden, told TNB earlier this month that his shift supervisor would rather her forty marks stayed out of a list. Moray said the committee had argued about it for weeks. "Disclosure is the price of influence," he said. "The question is where influence starts. We think it starts lower than the law now says."
The levy has not disappeared. Moray said the committee has asked several Assembly members to introduce it as an ordinary bill, where the Legislature can debate a tax as the Constitution intends.
Phase One is now open. The committee must gather signatures from the statutory share of eligible voters in at least a third of the Republic's States and Territories before moving to a national threshold of ten percent. If it succeeds, the Legislature has ninety days to enact the proposal, and if it does not, the question goes to voters, where it needs sixty percent. None of it will touch this spring's election. Moray expects the campaign to run well past it.
"Good," he said. "Nobody should change the rules in the middle of the game. We'd like them changed before the next one."