Assemblyman Jay Webber, Chairman of the Taxpayer Protection Caucus in the Assembly, today issued this statement on yesterday’s Alaskan election in which voters of that state resoundingly defeated Ballot Measure 3, which proposed the “Alaska Clean Elections Act” and would have created a program of taxpayer-funding for Alaska election campaigns similar to New Jersey’s “Clean Elections” pilot project. Unofficial results of the Alaska Election are that 64% of voters voted “NO” on Ballot Measure 3.

Assemblyman Webber stated, “The Alaska election results show that citizens reject taxpayer-funded campaign programs. And if New Jersey’s citizens were given the same opportunity to vote on this State’s own ‘Clean Elections’ experiment, they too would defeat it. The reason is obvious: citizens understand that forcing taxpayers to finance the campaigns of politicians does nothing to produce clean government.”

“Especially remarkable about Alaskans’ rejection of taxpayer-funded campaigns is that one of their sitting U.S. Senators is under indictment. If any set of voters is attuned to public corruption problems, it’s Alaskans — but they still rejected the ballot measure because they know that sending more public dollars to politicians cannot cure corruption driven by the attraction of public money in the first place. The results in Alaska mirror the experience in Massachusetts, where they repealed the publicly funded campaign program in 2003 because it wasted taxpayer money and failed to achieve its purposes,” Assemblyman Webber commented.

“New Jersey Legislators working to make citizens pay for political campaigns should take note of the lessons of Alaska and Massachusetts and should stop attempting to salvage this State’s unconstitutional and twice-failed experiment in taxpayer-funded campaigns. I urge my colleagues to focus instead on policies that actually will make New Jersey more affordable and its government more accountable. We should cut spending, taxes, and debt, rather than scramble to find ways to send taxpayer dollars to politicians and their consultants. And we should focus on reforms that will make elections more competitive and government more transparent, rather than resurrecting a twice-failed experiment that undermines those goals,” concluded Assemblyman Webber.