THE MONTH of February can tend to be slow at the University. The madness of rush is long over; the honeymoon of new and different classes has faded and the dreary gray days offer little incentive to spend time outside. This is, of course, until the explosion of the rainbow of colored chalk and fliers inundates the University during student government elections. After the unusually exciting election experience surrounding the race for Student Council president last year, a diligent team of students, staff and administrators have cobbled together the new independent University Board of Elections (UBE), officially sanctioned by this past fall's referenda.
Yet in the quest for streamlining the elections process and in an attempt to ensure a level of irreproachable legal standards, the former system of campaign spending limits has been abolished. Constitutional interpretations aside, the UBE should reinstate reasonable constraints on the flow of money into student government campaigns.
In November of 1975, the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments in Buckley v. Valeo regarding the constitutionality of the new Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). Passed in the wake of Watergate, FECA limited individual contributions to campaigns. Those contribution restrictions were upheld by the Court on the grounds that the government had a "compelling" interest in eliminating corruption or even the appearance of corruption from the electoral process.
While the Court upheld the contribution restrictions, it also held that a cap on candidate spending violated the First Amendment rights to free speech and association. Thus candidates in federal elections are free to spend as much as they wish so long as they do not accept public financing. Public financing is available to major-party candidates in primary and general elections from taxpayer revenues. In short, the government will match the money in your campaign if you agree to raise money within the limits set forth in FECA.
This would be the logical source for apprehension on behalf of the UBE when they decided to eliminate candidate expenditure limits. However, several criteria exist which offer persuasive evidence that the UBE should reverse this decision.
All questions of equality and egalitarian principles aside, the interest in eliminating corruption offers compelling grounds for the UBE to limit the effect of increased campaign spending on student elections. Because the Court has decided that concerns over the exponential rise in campaign spending in federal elections does not offer a compelling rationale for limiting candidate spending, the absence of any University system of public finance severely limits the ability of the UBE to regulate student campaigns.
A happy solution would be to create a system of public finance using limited Student Activity Fee revenue. By offering the carrot of "free" matching funds with which to campaign, the UBE would encourage students to abide by spending restrictions. Admittedly, this solution is dramatically complicated by the current Board of Visitors requirement that SAF monies not support student political activities. However, the Court found in Regents of Univ. of Wisconsin v. Southworth that the marketplace of ideas was sufficiently consistent with the educational mission of the institution that SAF monies could fund political discourse, so long as viewpoint neutrality is maintained. If every candidate is equally eligible for funding, then neutrality is preserved.
So, by creating a funding mechanism, the University could offer limited public finance for candidates who acquired a sufficient number of petition signatures. This would allow the UBE to cap the spending of candidates in elections, preventing elections from escalating into a hemorrhage of private finance as candidates attempt to outspend their opponents.
Additionally, in 2001, the Court decided Federal Election Commission v. Colorado (a.k.a. Colorado II), upholding the limits on party-coordinated spending, saying that coordinated spending was tantamount to election activity by the candidate. The FECA restrictions on coordinated expenditure limits did not unduly threaten First Amendment free speech and associational guarantees. This would mean that clubs and other student organizations would not be able to spend outside the restrictions imposed by the UBE on student campaigns.
Knowing the extent of the brilliant and creative minds of student leaders at the University, there is little doubt that an absence of campaign restrictions will likely result in a dramatic growth of spending not only throughself-financing, but through fundraising parties and other such events that would lead campaigning toward a race to outspend one's opponent. While the UBE cannot mandate spending restrictions, offering a system for students to voluntarily opt into would ensure that campaign spending not spiral out of control. The limited subsidy of student elections would be relatively inexpensive when compared to the limitless amounts of money pushed into the system now that the restrictions have been removed. The benefits of such an investment are certainly worth the cost of setting it up.
(Preston Lloyd's column usually appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at plloyd@cavalierdaily.com.)
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