Tag Archives: Clean Elections

In campaigns, it’s not all about the money

Last July, I wrote a column that implored you to ignore fundraising reports and polls in the gubernatorial contest. Today is your first test to see whether you listened or not. The end of year filing deadline has come and gone, and the January 2018 reports are now public. We now know who has raised […]

The Death of Clean Elections?

I can only hope. On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down a law in Arizona which provided what are known as “matching funds” in its public campaign finance system.  Arizona’s law was modeled on Maine’s Clean Elections law, including the matching fund provision. For those unfamiliar with the system, Maine and Arizona allocate a specific […]

John Richardson Officially Withdraws From Race

Told ya so.  (Sorry, couldn’t resist) Today, John Richardson held a news conference to announce his withdrawal from the Maine gubernatorial contest.  He also sent out his official campaign announcement to his supporters today, which essentially threw the offending collectors of clean election checks under the bus, while highlighting the work done by the rest […]

Matt Gagnon Discusses Richardson Controversy On WGAN With Ken and Mike

This morning, I had the pleasure of visiting with Ken and Mike of WGAN’s “Morning News” program on 560 AM (Portland). We discussed the stories I broke over the weekend about John Richardson having been officially denied clean election funding by the Ethics Commission, the accusations of fraud being leveled at his campaign, and his […]

More Details On The John Richardson Controversy

This afternoon, I spoke at length with a person who is close to and has spoken about this issue (the Richardson investigation) with Attorney General Janet Mills, and here is the breakdown of what has taken place. The Ethics Commission has found that John Richardson is ineligible to receive clean election funding due to fraud […]

John Richardson Looking For A Way Out Of The Race

As has been reported widely last week, John Richardson is in hot water over his clean election funding.  The problem focuses on the irregularities with the qualifying checks used by Richardson to qualify for the several hundreds of thousands of dollars from the state to use for his campaign for Governor.  It has been described […]