The spiraling cost of campaigns, high-profile scandals and voter distrust of Congress have fueled an effort for fundamental reform of the way we fund congressional campaigns. As a result, many federal decision-makers have been working on proposals to create a Clean Elections model for publicly financing congressional campaigns. This briefing paper looks at options to pay for a federal Clean Elections program.

We decided to examine if state governments have had any success in creating an important layer of independence between the investigators and those being investigated—the state legislators. We found that the states are far ahead of Congress in understanding the inherent conflict of interest of colleagues overseeing colleagues.