Who should pay for elections? This is a perennial question. The theoretical or philosophical perspective is straightforward. People contest elections to perform ‘public service’, therefore it is not fair to expect them to spend their personal money on contesting elections. Public money should be spent for the purpose. This is what gives rise to the demand for state funding for elections. But before we come to that, a few issues need to be sorted out.
The first issue is what exactly is ‘state’ funding. Assuming that it means the government should pay for all the expenditure. . .
