Clean Elections Texas through its Education Fund (CETEF) has worked for many years with national and state coalitions to explore steps to assure our elections are accessible, fair, and free from outside influence. Although Clean Elections Texas was founded to work on the issue of campaign finance reform, as were many such organizations around the country, we soon realized that this issue depended on the election of officials who could actually change the laws affecting the financing of candidates and issues. While we continue to work on campaign finance reform, we started exploring the election process in our state and the access and involvement of voters therein and found growing problems. About a year before Biden was voted in as president, we joined a new coalition through our contact with Public Citizen. This coalition, now named Declaration of American Democracy, had as its purpose the defining of the elements of democracy that we wanted to see secured by being expressed in federal laws. Collaborating with these coalitions, we participated in promotion of democracy reforms by actively supporting various major pieces of federal legislation, including the Freedom to Vote Act and The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (VRAA).
Clean Elections Texas (CETex) works in collaboration with several national organizations to expose the influence of large donor and corporate and private PACs’ influence on national elections. We support legislation that would help overcome the flood of corporate and private money that have come into our politics because of the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC and other cases. This uncontrolled spending allows special interests, in effect, to buy elections and even elected officials. At the State Level, we directly and actively engage in advocacy to support a number of reforms including legislation to establish campaign finance limits for contributions to Texas legislative candidates and support small donor/alternative financing of elections, such as democracy vouchers.
