New York Citizens for Clean Elections is as grass roots as community organizing can be. This dedicated band of activists started meeting a few months ago. Focused specifically on getting the New York State legislators to pass the "Ortiz/Paterson Clean Election" bill, sponsored by 50 state legislators, they have a clean-cut strategy to achieve their goal.

The first Thursday each month at 7 p.m., about a dozen women and men meet in the Woodstock Community Center, a pretty white wooden building, that looks like it may have been a church way back when. They pull two long brown tables together, and sit in orange plastic chairs. There are no set officers, but Irene Miller, the person who knows just about everything there is to know about clean election, keeps the meeting moving along the well thought out agenda.

Irene Miller used to live in New York City. Until 1997, she was "apolitical," she said. Then she attended a meeting of the New York Women's Club, a group started in the 1920s with a long history of working for citizen participation in government. The chair at this meeting asked if anyone was interested in campaign finance reform, and Irene raised her hand. Another longstanding member said, "Thank God," Irene recalled, and that was how she became involved in an ongoing campaign for clean elections in New York City.

She was taught grass roots organizing from experts in the field, spear headed by Citizen Action. Their goal was to get enough signatures on a petition for a citywide ballot initiative. They needed 40,000, and got 90,000, through house parties, meetings, and educating people any way they could. Then Mayor Guiliani used his executive powers pulling the full public funding campaign finance reform measure off the ballot. Instead, New York City ended up with "partial funding" where candidates get private and public funds to finance their campaigns.

Irene calls this "good money after bad," because the aim of clean elections is to remove private money influence on candidates.

Due to this disappointing defeat of their effort, Citizen Action got out of the clean election business for awhile.

That is until Irene moved to Palenville, N.Y.

Maine, Arizona and Massachusetts all passed clean election reform, and Irene got back on the grass roots bandwagon, starting NYCCE (pronounced "nice").

NYCCE started meeting at the end of 2000, using the same strategy Irene learned in New York City. They set up house parties, using a video tape with Bill Moyers explaining clean election campaigns, handing out brochures, and explaining their campaign. They met with the Kiwanis club, and senior citizen organizations, labor groups, other good government groups. They put up tables at county fairs with their brochures, and talk to just about everyone. They go to political rallies, and ask gubernatorial candidates H. Carl McCall and Andrew Cuomo what they think. The write letters to the editor.

This little growing group fired up Citizen Action again, who have now become involved in clean election reform. They are training organizers on how to campaign for this issue.

Clean Election reform in New York is modeled after the Maine and Arizona campaigns. Here candidates for state office will agree to accept no private, soft or PAC money. They will accept $5 donations only from constituents in their district. Then this is where the information gets a bit fuzzy, even in written form. A slick brochure handed out by NYCCE states only that "Candidates who qualify for the same office receive the same amount of campaign money." When Irene explains this issue, she only says that there is full public funding.

The idea behind all this is that with public funding, corporations will not have as much power over the political process, or so they hope.

Once clean election candidates are elected, corporate influence will still loom large, through lobbying, promises for jobs in legislative districts, or threats of job loss. Maybe in tangent with full campaign finance reform, as is currently making its way through the state legislature recently passed by the Assembly, corporate influence may be diminished.

But so will the influence of labor unions, environmentalists, women's rights groups, child advocates, racial and gay equality. While NYCCE believes that the clean election candidates will balance out this loss of influence by voting progressively, that will only hold true if clean election legislators agree with progressive issues. They could just as easily be conservative, rolling back funding for education, senior citizen benefits or the environment. There can be no constitutional safe guards in clean election laws to prevent that.

Clean election reform is only step towards evolving a dying democratic system, where people have a tenuous connection to the electoral process. It certainly won't fix the election problems itself. Ballots will continue to not be counted, and the threat of another president select stealing the executive office will remain. People of color will still have to navigate around blocked polling places. Political parties will still be under represented by the majority of Americas with low or moderate incomes.

Clean elections may open the field of politicians to those who may not have run otherwise. This may or may not work as hoped. Just because some one has the time and inclination to run for office, can raise the requisite five dollar donations and qualifying petition signatures, does not mean they are any more competent than the currently inept legislators who for the past 18 years cannot get a budget passed on time, as required by the New York State Constitution.

Many letters to the editor sent by NYCCE members focused on Enron, and their influence in Congress. New York State passage of clean election legislation will have absolutely on effect on corporate influence on Congress or the White House. Clean election reform will have no influence on multinational corporations taking New Yorker's jobs away to third world countries. We live in a free capitalist society, and there should be no laws stopping corporations from locating where ever they chose.

Clean election reform may put politicians in office who want to finally pass a New York state budget on time, but they will be up against entrenched incumbents who continue to play politics with the peoples' money.