Over the past few days, I’ve been receiving more and more emails from State Legislative candidates trying to reach the Citizen Elections Program (CEP) goals. To quality for funding State Representative candidates need to raise $5,000, with at least 150 of the donations, ranging from ten to a hundred dollars coming from people living in towns in their district. The hurdle for State Senate candidates is similar, except it is $15,000 from at least 300 people. Some of the panicked emails talked about the deadline being early October.

Since Kim is a registered Lobbyist here in Connecticut as a result of her current role as Senior Organizer for Common Cause in the State, the regulations about spouse’s of lobbyists apply to me. This means two things. First, I cannot contribute. So, to any of you that have contacted me, sorry.

In addition, I cannot help in fundraising activities of these candidates. Otherwise, I would post something here talking about candidates that I would like people to support.

However, I also have another role. I am a citizen journalist. I can, and feel compelled, to write about what is going on with the State Legislative races in Connecticut. In this role, I downloaded data from State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) about the status of the CEP program.

As of this morning, their site listed 299 candidates. 263 of these candidates, or 88% of the total candidates are participating in the CEP. Massaging the data, it appears as if 241 of all the candidates are in competitive races and 58 are not. For those candidates in competitive races, 219, or 91% are participating. 44 of the remaining 58 candidates, or 76% the candidates in non-competitive races are also participating.

Of the 263 candidates, 136, or 52% have already qualified. When you break this down by House and Senate, we have 204 candidates running for the House and 114, or 56% have qualified. On the Senate side, there are 59 candidates, but only 22, or 37% have qualified.

It appears as if the $15,000 hurdle is proving to be larger than people had anticipated. My hypothesis, based on anecdotal evidence is that the hurdle is also tied to how wealthy the district is. The candidates that I’m have already easily met the goal come from fairly wealthy districts and the candidates that I’m hearing are having problems are coming from fairly poor districts with some obvious exceptions.

This isn’t surprising. The difference between the median income in the riches communities in Connecticut and the poorest communities is close to ten to one. When I have more time, I hope to cross reference the data with census data for median income by zip code.

However, before I do that, I hope to clean up the data that I have a little bit. It appears as if the data from the SEEC is incomplete as I’m finding examples of races where no competition is listed that I’m fairly sure are contested districts.

Nonetheless, the data should be looked at more closely to better understand what is working and what isn’t working with the Citizen’s Election Program.