Limits contributions to political campaigns for mayor and city council to $1,000.00 per individual donor per election, requires campaign donors to disclose their place of employment, and requires the City to adopt enforcement provisions. If you’ve read the book, “Who Rules El Paso?” or taken a look at the finance reports of our elected city leaders, you know that a handful of wealthy El Pasoans control local politics. This proposition will tie their hands.
Establishes public financing for candidates for mayor and city council who voluntarily agree to limit their campaign contributions and expenditures and demonstrate community support for their candidacy. Cities like Albuquerque have seen an increase in progressive candidates getting elected to office due to public financing programs. In our proposed program, candidates must submit signatures of support from 1% of the registered voters and must also commit to voluntarily limiting their overall campaign contributions and expenditures. This proposition will help community candidates run without the pressure of caving into big money interests to fund their campaigns.
Would eliminate the need for runoff elections for mayor and city council by using ranked choice voting where voters rank candidates in order of preference, and if no candidate receives a majority, candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and the votes they received are transferred to voter’s second choice, and so on until there is a majority vote for one candidate. Austin voters passed ranked choice voting through a ballot initiative and other cities are considering it as well. No Texas city has yet to implement it and we would love for El Paso to be the first to do so. Rank choice voting could help us save money by avoiding runoff elections that tend to have very low turnout rates and would also give voters the option of ranking candidates they may like but may fear are not “viable.”
