This past Friday, former Senator and current presidential candidate John Edwards called for public financing of all elections during an interview on Real Time With Bill Maher. Click here to download and watch the clip (2.5 MB).

Even as votes are still being counted in close races around the country, speculation on reforms to counter the high-cost, special-interest dominated election process is being offered up. Writers at both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Winston-Salem Journal cite the Voters First Pledge, its principles and signers, as showing the way forward.

Last week Nick Nyhart, our executive director paid a visit to North Carolina to talk about the Voters First Pledge and cleaning up Congress -- today the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina spotlights the pledge, including North Carolina candidates who have signed (see second section).

Bob Geary at the Independent Weekly digs in on North Carolina's recent spate of scandals and identifies the problems at the root - one of which is the Assembly's reluctance to embrace the public financing option that has worked so well for judicial candidates.

It's the second time out for North Carolina's judicial public financing system and this article focuses on the matching funds that allow candidates using the system to challenge privately financed opponents.

As posted in our blog back on April 25, Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC) was making it his own personal mission to prevent funding to buy land for a September 11 memorial in Pennsylvania to honor those killed on Flight 93. His excuse? He was worried that enough private funding wouldn’t be raised and the government would have to foot the bill for the memorial.

Read this piece in North Carolina's News & Observer by North Carolina leaders who are calling for the establishment of Voter Owned Elections in that state. They say it best, so here are some excerpts:

There's a scandal bubbling in the Tar Heel state involving political contributions and video poker!

Witnesses testified yesterday that they gave North Carolina Speaker of the House Jim Black political contributions because of his support for video poker and the state lottery. Here are some of his donors who support Black because of his position (as reported by the AP):