EDITORIAL
Campaign reform bills must pass this year

It is doubtful that the intersection where money and politics meet will ever be totally free of problems and controversy.

But there's no doubt that the potentially corrupting influence of money on the political process can be tempered through smart legislation and through a change in the culture of money and politics in Hawai'i.

A fascinating pair of articles by staff writers Jim Dooley and Gordon Pang Sunday and Monday suggest that both processes — legal and cultural — are under way and are having an impact.

The legal side of the coin has to do with revising and rewriting existing laws covering campaign finance. The cultural side refers to political and public pressure to abandon longstanding accepted norms of fund raising and contributions.

The task now is to keep up the "cultural" pressure and to make sure that important and much-needed changes do not get lost in the shuffle at the Legislature.

Generous gifts

Culturally, it has long been an accepted, if rarely acknowledged, practice in Hawai'i that those who depend on government work (mostly non-bid) give generously to political candidates, mostly incumbents.

While there are longstanding limits on political contributions, those limits have been routinely ignored by contractors who give through friends, relatives, co-workers and shell organizations as well as directly under their own name.

A newly aggressive State Campaign Spending Commission has cracked down on this practice, meting out hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for contribution violations. Many of those cases have developed into criminal cases.

Tap turned off

The result is dramatic. The flow of contributions has dramatically dried up, Dooley and Pang report, with many of the regular "players" dropping out of the game altogether.

This comes as a relief both to contributors, who felt pressure to give, and to candidates, who uniformly say they detest the process of asking for contributions.

But that progress could just as easily slip away with the next shift in the cultural tide. That's one reason why legislation is needed.

The most sweeping "reform" plan comes through the Clean Elections movement, which would substitute public financing for private financing of elections.

Bills to experiment with the Clean Elections process are alive at the Legislature. But if lawmakers are reluctant to fully embrace that movement, they should at least authorize a Clean Elections process for a test election.

The system has worked in other jurisdictions and it could work equally well here.

Steps to take now

Short of pure public financing, however, there are any number of intermediate steps that should be taken this year.

Among them: Requiring candidates to file their campaign spending reports electronically. Currently, there is no requirement that reports by candidates or major contributors be filed electronically, which makes it difficult to access contribution information and to reasonably analyze patterns.

Both the House and the Senate have bills (SB 440 and HB 1747) that would require electronic filing. (Exceptions would be made for some candidates and groups who do not have access to computers or the Internet.)

The Senate bill, however, has additional reforms that would go a long way toward driving a stake in the nexus between political contributions and government work.

Flat-out ban

That bill simply prohibits contributions "directly or indirectly" from anyone who has a government contract for the life of that contract.

This requirement makes so much sense, it should have been imposed long ago. It is important that this ban be interpreted broadly, to include legislators as well as administrators.

Both House and Senate bills have additional changes and reforms that would both open up the contribution system to public inspection and lessen opportunities for mischief.

Some cynics will point out that for every reform law, there is a loophole waiting in the wings. That's no excuse for inaction.

As the results of a newly aggressive Spending Commission show, when there is political will, the way toward a clean and fair political system is easy to find.