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GREG BARON: The proposed Senate campaign financing legislation has a long way to go before any final action. At the moment, it's in the form of a bill called Senate file 1005. But before it gets out of committee, amendments will be proposed and provisions revised. As it stands right now, the bill would regulate all state campaign financial practices.

Among other things, it calls for spending limits for all candidates, disclosure of the source of all contributions over $10, and public financing through a voluntary dollar check off on all Minnesota individual tax returns. It was this question of public financing, which drew a good deal of attention by the chairman of both the Republican and DFL state parties. Hank Fischer the DFL chairman called the dollar check off an important step in the right direction and urged immediate passage out of committee.

HANK FISCHER: I think that the dollar check off proposal puts Minnesota in a great position to be in the forefront in this country in taking positive action to eliminate and reduce the problems of financing campaigns. While I'm planning on having additional suggestions at some time in the future on the role of public financing in campaigns, I think that this dollar check off is an important step.

It's been our feeling that the only way you're going to do away with the large contribution in a political campaign is to make it unnecessary. And the only way you're going to do that is to assure each candidate a minimum campaign budget for which he's beholden equally to all his constituents that is from tax-supported funds. I have a paragraph here from Philip Stern that appeared in the Washington Post that I'd like to read to you.

"Elections campaigns are, after all, very much the public's business. And one of the few examples of the public's business not financed by tax supported money. Every other aspect of elections, registration, printing, and counting of ballots, purchase of voting machines, and so on is paid for by the taxpayer.

In the interest of honest elections, private financing of these activities would be unthinkable, yet campaigns are an integral part of the election process. Why should they be entirely privately financed, especially in the face of the overwhelming evidence that the present system badly warps the entire Democratic process giving vastly more weight to the big giver than to the average voter?"

Finally, I think it's time for action on this bill. I think this bill can be loved to death with amendments that do nothing to improve it. If you and your distinguished colleagues are prepared to solve problems, you have an obligation to act now. This bill should receive top priority and should be prepared to be acted upon at the beginning of the January session.

GREG BARON: While accepting in principle the purpose of the legislation, Republican State Chairman Senator Robert Brown quarreled with a number of specific provisions and strongly opposed the check off system. On that point, he proposed instead a tax credit plan allowing citizens to contribute $25 to the party of their choice and have the state match the $12.5 refund allowed by the federal government.

ROBERT BROWN: We have been opposed to the check off. We continue to oppose the check off as creating a bureaucracy that's unnecessary, as providing discrimination really. When you have that kind of a fundraising, public fundraising system, you are saying one of two things, either we got to give money to all candidates, anybody who files, which means every lawyer who can't advertise any other way can plunk down $20 and file for the legislature and get some money to do his advertising.

And then he might even get elected, which probably would upset his practice more than anything. As they've been telling me around here, these guys cry all the time. Or-- OK, we'll both try to stay on the point, Mr. Chairman. Or, you go the other route, and you set some kind of threshold, which you have to reach in order to receive some of this public monies. And then you run a very serious question of saying-- of somebody arbitrarily, those of us in the legislature really, arbitrarily saying, who qualifies as a serious candidate or who qualifies as a serious political party.

I don't really think that this-- and I think our party consistently has held that this is not a responsibility that we should have as a legislature, but rather the approach that Senator Hanson suggested and that Mr. Fischer said was acceptable I think would be adequate. I have some statistics here that I'll pass out about the fundraising efforts of the Minnesota Republican Party during the decade of 1960 to 1970. This is out of a doctoral dissertation. And it shows the-- because contrary to what the governor said about the broadest fundraising effort or something like that, this has been cited by political scientists all over the country.

What the Minnesota Republican Party has done has been cited as the greatest broad-based political fundraising effort of either political party in any state in the country. And the DFL with its telethon this year, I think, doubled. Didn't they get the number of contributors? They got about 20,000 contributors. I think this is the direction to go to get people to voluntarily contribute to the party of their choice.

Now if you go to the tax credit route, we've seen tax credits work in this state for senior citizens, we've seen tax credit work in the state for parents of children in non-public schools, it does work. It takes some effort on the part of the people collecting the money, but that's the responsibility of the political parties. We in the Republican Party would accept that responsibility and that challenge.

It should be the responsibility of the candidates so that if somebody wants to run as an independent, he can never get any money from the check off system. But if he can go around and say to people, look, I'm a good candidate for office and here's why I'll be elected and so on. And if you contribute $25 to my campaign, you get half of it back from the feds and half of it back from the state and when you pay your income tax.

It's an even handed approach. And the whole determination as to who gets the large number of small contributions is based on who can do the best selling job with the small contributor. To me, this is a reasonable middle ground position between no government involvement in campaign financing or the check off system, which the DFL has advocated in the development of this bill.

GREG BARON: Public financing is only one of a number of detailed provisions, which will have to be worked out before the proposed legislation can continue on its way to the floor of the Senate. It's unclear how long the process may take, but it's hoped that a bill can be passed sometime early in the 1974 legislative session. This is Greg Baron.