Campaign Finance Reform as Duopolist Farce

This week a federal judge struck a blow for equality of political opportunity in a ruling which found Connecticut's public funding system for political campaigns unconstitutional because it discriminates against minor parties. Ballot Access News quotes the summary from the decision:

The CEP (Citizens Election Program) enhances the relative strength of major party candidates in ways that represent a severe burden on the political opportunity of minor party candidates for the following reasons: (1) it provides participating major party candidates public funding at windfall levels, well beyond what most major party candidates would typically be able to raise on their own from private fundraising sources; (2) it permits major party candidates who are as equally ‘hopeless’ as minor party candidates in many districts to become eligible for full funding without first requiring such hopeless major party candidates to make the same threshold showing of public support required of minor party candidates through the additional qualifying criteria; (3) the additional qualifying criteria for minor party candidates are nearly impossible to achieve, thus ensuring that minor party candidates will only very rarely qualify for the ‘enhancing’ benefits made available by CEP participation; and (4) in the event a minor party candidate does qualify for partial CEP funding, it handicaps that participating minor party candidate by automatically granting full funding to his or her participating major party opponent, and by prohibiting the partially-funded minor party candidate from raising private contributions, up to the full grant amount, in increments greater than $100.