The history of campaign finance reform for San Diego has been a long and tortuous one. The initial interest in the use of public funding of San Diego elections was initiated in 2000 when a local activist, Francoise Farron called a group together to work on Clean Elections for San Diego. Clean Elections is full public funding for elections and it has been in effect in Arizona and Maine since 2000.
Under Francoise’s leadership, the Alliance for Clean Elections was formed and the Alliance attempted to get a Clean Elections initiative on the ballot in 2002 and 2003. Neither campaign was successful.
In 2005, a new group called Neighborhoods for Clean Elections initiated a long term effort to build awareness and support for clean elections. In 2016, they attempted to get a clean elections initiative on the ballot through the petition process. But even with many group and neighborhood endorsements, this attempt to get a clean elections measure on the ballot was unsuccessful. After much introspection, the campaign came to the realization that no provision for mobilizing the widespread support for clean elections had been created.
In April 2017, the goal of clean elections or the public funding of elections for the City of San Diego was deemed too important to put aside and the campaign was restarted with a goal to build a Phone Team as a way to mobilize supporters and to do more educational outreach about clean elections and need for clean elections.
Our current goal is to use the remainder of 2017 and 2018 to build a campaign structure capable of qualifying a clean elections ballot measure in 2019 and then to successfully win a 2020 general election clean elections campaign for the City of San Diego.
