How They Voted On A Meaningless Bill

Legislators in the State House of Representatives this week overwhelmingly approved a bill that is guaranteed to be blocked by State Senate. Here is how the city's two representatives voted:

• Joe Serra (33rd district): YES
• Matt Lesser (100th district): NO

Matt Lesser said, "I support instating limits on organizational expenditures as well as Connecticut's existing prohibitions on state contractor contributions -- but not at the cost of slashing Connecticut's Citizens Election Program which is what the bill would do."

According to CT News Junkie, 

The bill reduces public grants to candidates by 25 percent, eliminates grants to unopposed candidates, caps the amount of money the state party can give to a publicly funded candidate, lowers the amount of money an individual can give to a state party from $10,000 to $5,000, and prohibits a state party from using money from its federal account to support a publicly financed candidate. The bill would also limit the amount of money a family member of a candidate could receive from a campaign to $1,000.

Each one of the provisions in the bill addresses a scenario that occurred in the 2014 election cycle.

The bill addresses the Democratic Party’s use of its federal account to send three mailers featuring Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, the more than $207,000 in Democratic Party money that went to help fund Sen. Ted Kennedy Jr.‘s state senate campaign, and a recent report by NBC Connecticut’s George Colli, who highlighted the money relatives of state lawmakers received from the Citizens Election Program for the campaign services they provided.

The State Senate is not expected to take up this bill, meaning that the bill will die without a vote. CT Mirror also covered the vote on the proposed campaign finance law, in an article entitled, House votes for doomed election reforms.