Robert Fizzell of Beloit, Wisconsin wrote a very good letter to the editor in support of Clean Elections and a proposal for full public financing of Wisconsin's Supreme Court races. Read it here at the Beloit Daily News and below. Thursday December 20, 2007‘Clean Elections concept backed'Your Friday, Dec. 14, editorial addresses public-financed elections, often referred to as “Clean Elections.”You claim that the proposed system would favor incumbents. It is hard to imagine a system that could be more favorable than the current one, which leads to 90% re-election. In fact, experience in several states where Clean Elections has been implemented shows that public financing does not favor incumbents and opens up elections to more candidates. Furthermore, these new candidates are winning. With full knowledge that it doesn't favor incumbents, all of our Supreme Court justices support public funding of elections.You suggest that public funding of elections is a restriction of free speech. The courts have said that public funding is not a restriction. Persons who wish to donate more than the public funding limits and candidates who wish to accept such donations are free to do so.Again, experience has shown that Clean Elections open the forum to more people, more points of view. A study in New Jersey found that after implementing Clean Elections, “70 percent of likely voters in the Clean Elections districts said they knew something or quite a lot about their respective legislative races, a figure nearly twice as high as the rest of New Jersey. ...Four in 10 voters in those districts ... said their campaigns were issue-oriented, compared to 25 percent elsewhere” (Home News Tribune Online 12/6/07).Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano said that Clean Elections helped her implement prescription drug coverage for seniors and the disabled without threats from pharmaceutical companies.Our money is already being spent on campaigns when it flows through corporations to fund candidates and we have no control over how it is used. It would be far better for us to choose which candidates get our support.Robert FizzellBeloit