New Jersey Assembly member Amy Handlin (R) urges her state to continue to expand and improve the Clean Elections pilot program for the next cycle of legislative races. Acknowledging a few bumps in the road in the last two cycles, Handlin argues that overall the system is a vast improvement over the status quo and worth improving in the coming years.

Use of the Clean Elections program improved dramatically in 2007 over 2005, thanks to new qualifying requirements and better public education and Handlin, who participated in the program in 2005 has some suggestions for further tweaks to adopt for 2009. Among her suggestions are expanding Clean Elections to include more races, and primary races and lowering the bar for entry for third party candidates.

No Clean Elections program is perfect out of the gate, but making fixes over the years to the program is vastly preferable to letting small flaws doom the whole idea:

But I know what it would mean to give up. By default, we would simply revert to politics as usual. Ordinary voters would be marginalized again, despite the $10 checks written by thousands of them, in good faith, to help reform the system. Some politicians would go back to trading favors and votes in the never-ending pursuit of campaign cash. Others would engage in the kind of backroom deals recently laid bare by the U.S. Attorney, with government contracts surreptitiously awarded to financial supporters.