As a candidate for public office, I am forthright about the fact that I do not have deep pockets or easy mass media connections. I recognize the perception in the minds of some that this makes a candidate less viable for public office.
Against that backdrop, it is worth examining how it became so expensive to run for office in the first place. In the olden days, voters were more politically engaged and less prone to manipulation through mass media and partisan brainwashing efforts. This meant voters had to do more leg work to to get to know the candidates for themselves. Their environment also naturally afforded them with many more such opportunities than we have today.
Honestly, how expensive is it to book some time at the town hall or at the village tavern to have a lively discussion or debate about one’s platform and policies and to take questions from an invested and sincere audience? In many instances, the primary cost was the travel and the time to get there, which for local offices was minimal. Modern elections are based much more heavily on television and social media ads, mailers and other mass marketing as candidates try to reach their tens or hundreds of thousands of constituents.
All of these are excellent reasons to attend your local caucus meeting next Tuesday, March 17th, by the way. Your presence there costs you little but has an impact that can overturn the effect of hundreds of dollars of campaign spending by an adversary, perhaps more.
So imagine my chagrin when faced with the prospect of filing to run in the US House of Representatives race in Utah’s new 4th congressional district, and seeing that the filing fee costs nearly half of $1,000! Add to that the embarrassment that the only way out of paying said filing fee is to file a signed affidavit that oneself cannot pay the filing fee due to poverty. In part because this seemed like a deliberate humiliation tactic (the filing paperwork is made public), and in part because the exact criteria for what constitutes poverty is nowhere defined in statute, lending to uncertainty and apprehensions about arbitrary enforcement, this exception despite being nominally available exerts a non-trivial extortion effect on would-be candidates. How poor is too poor? If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, should you take out a loan to pay the filing fee? If you have a $1,000 emergency reserve for health or vehicular disasters or in the hopes of affording your children with better educational opportunities–someday–or to fix that washer and dryer that stopped functioning a year and a half ago, or if your spouse is saving up to put you through school, are you “too poor” to pay the filing fee? The question is diabolical that any that any government would even ask. It is not pursuant to any enumerated constitutional authority. Filing fees, though they can seem necessary to those who are trained to accept whatever the government does, our wasteful and unfair.
Further, candidates are not naive about the fact that it costs something in toil and effort to compete. Does our legislature intend to convey that a grassroots candidate must sacrifice a tithe of his or her hard-earned campaign fund just to show the government and the public that they are “serious” about the race? Let’s look at the actual impact on campaign flexibility of such a fee. It can cost to the tune of $50 or $60 to book the largest meeting rooms available in a public library for non-resident who needs to travel outside of his own town or County to campaign to an electorate. Many private venues with extended hours of availability that overlap better with voter schedules can cost significantly more, into the multiple hundreds of dollars for a single booking. This just to afford a venue in which to meet with voters. Add to that the gas costs of traveling around a quarter of the state, and you will find that the shoe string booking and travel costs of an entire caucus convention cycle to meet with the grassroots delegates is entirely consumed by the filing fee for that office alone! If that isn’t an undue burden on those who wish to file for public office, I don’t know what is!
Let’s examine three popular defenses for candidate filing fees:
- That they signal that a candidate is serious about the office.
- That they covered needed elections administration expenses.
- They improve ballot, management and grooming.
Let’s address each one.
1. A candidate signals that he is a serious contender for an office by making himself available to voters. In modern times, this factually requires no small effort to raise awareness of his candidacy, but even more important is connecting with and engaging with individual voters. This shows that the candidate is accessible. The candidate will publish his views on various subjects that he believes will be of interest to the electorate. He will take questions from the public, and he will answer them. All of this takes effort and in modern times, it often takes some money as well. The filing fee requirement directly competes with that necessity. Erasing filing fees would have the effect of making candidates more accessible to the public. The founding fathers understood this, and stated it expressly: a certain amount of income or paying a filing fee or filing a declaration of impecuniosity were never advanced as prerequisites to running for national office anywhere in the text of the Constitution.
2. The notion that elections need to be centrally administered is very new. The vast majority of election processes were administered locally, even for federal races where there was a local vote tally, until only just the past few decades. Voter credentialing was handled in local precincts until the National Voter Registration Act in 1993 and the subsequent Help America Vote Act in 2002 change that landscape significantly. These bills have not helped America vote; they have centralized the government’s veto power over your identity and concentrated the ability of partisan regimes and bureaucrats to gatekeep your right to vote! This is a serious impediment. I have called out on other occasions around the Proposition 4 redistricting issue.One
2. The matter of whether the filing fee covers the cost of governmental administration of elections is distantly secondary to the question of whether whether a centralized government should be trusted to administer elections in the first place. To that important question, I will cite the reader to the evidences that elections used to be administered in a decentralized fashion, which did not require the printing of ballots at all. One can argue that the filing fee defrays the cost of printer toner required to put names on millions of ballots. Question: when did we begin to believe it was necessary for the government to send us printed ballots in the first place? This is related to the next question.
3. The ballot management and grooming question goes like this: if we allow large numbers of candidates to get out to the ballot, won’t we have to print multiple pages of ballots, driving up expenses and the complexity of administering elections, and leading to voter fatigue?
I see the appeal of this question, but it ignores several important realities. First, government printed ballots were not used for elections in a wide variety of venues and for a considerable amount of time in American history. Somehow, we managed! Perhaps it is best left as an exercise to the reader to investigate and learn how. Let your imagination run wild for a minute about how you would do it before checking the Internet as to the particulars.
Second, there is no constitutional authority to limit the number of candidates on the ballot or impose a “financial fitness test” as a viability check gatekeeping your ability to run for office!
If you have many candidates that file for the same office, that is meant to be a blessing, not a curse! Each one can contribute meaningful positions and healthy discussion. Uncontested elections are typically the worst case because they rob the electorate of their choice! Too many races are left uncontested due to steep hurdles. Having more candidates increases the likelihood that one of them will be a solid choice — especially if you eliminate financial worthiness checks.
In the end, the myth that the government needed to take it upon itself to narrow the field of candidates and manage a tidy, curated list of options for us, is a large part of what entrenched the mythos by which we unwittingly delegated ballot gatekeeping authority over to our governments–authority never properly granted them in written constitutions, and only exploited because of our ignorance.
Also, this is Not Legal Advice, but I am not aware of a single instance of a candidate being charged for filing a false affidavit of impecuniosity. The law is written as the appearance of being a paper tiger to intimidate candidates and to pay voluntary filing fee. I am confident that any reasonable jury would find a defendant not guilty for prudently, having financial reserves to defray costs of living and reserving ample funds for a campaign, while attesting to being “too poor” to pay such a ridiculously expensive filing fee. Almost everyone is poor nowadays, thanks to inflation and ever-increasing costs of living. Our time is running out to figure this out and come up with good solutions to it. Paying voluntary fees over extortion of selective enforcement and arbitrary determinations about conditions not defined in statute isn’t at the top of my list for good things to do to make the world a better place. If the Utah legislature does decide to come up with a concrete definition, there is no constitutional tribunal worth its salt that would find it passes muster as a serious infringement against equal suffrage and the right to representation in government, including equal protection and the constitutional guarantee of the right to represent ourselves by running for office.
Anyway, when I went to file for the office, the card reader at the Lt. Governor’s Office failed–two times. I ended up writing a check. When I got home, I noticed that two charges were already pending with my bank. I am working to get these duplicative charges refunded. You would think they would have noticed they had overcharged.
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