Here's the full letter sent from the Maine Ethics Commission staff to John Richardson detailing the investigation and subsequent rejection of his application for MCEA funding:

Richardson is officially out. His full announcement, sent moments ago by email, is below the jump.

Highlights include the fact that Richardson says the campaign discovered some of the irregularities and reported them to the commission staff themselves and that the disqualified contributions left them 80 short.

Richardson says he never considered switching to private financing (not that he would have had time) and that "this decision, while very painful, does not, and will not alter my faith in Clean Elections and my conviction about how important it is to our state."

Richardson To Shutter Campaign

John Richardson has scheduled an 11am press conference in Brunswick today and all signs point to him using it to end his campaign for the Blaine House.

The Bangor Daily News and Mal Leary today confirmed that Richardson failed to qualify for Clean Elections funding due to fraudulent contributions. Their article gives some interesting details about the process and investigation.

Richardson's exit will bring the Democratic field down to four candidates and ensure the sufficiency of the Clean Elections fund.

Some questions will remain after today's announcement, such as whether employees of Richardson's campaign will face prosecution and who close to the Attorney General leaked information about the investigation to blogger Matt Gagnon.

The Ethics Commission meets this Thursday in Augusta.

A Change at the Top for Mitchell

A press release from the Mitchell campaign last week was signed by a new campaign manager, Jeremy Kennedy.

According to former campaign manager Marc Malon, the switch was long scheduled:

This was the plan for a while; I managed the campaign through the end of the qualifying period, then we had the opportunity to bring on someone with more experience (Jeremy Kennedy) for the final push in the primary. I'm still working for the campaign as hard as ever, focusing more intently on York County, my home (I live in Biddeford) which I believe will play a crucial role.

Kennedy has recently worked as a Regional Field Organizer for the Human Rights Campaign and for No on 1.

Independents on the Ballot

Eliot Cutler has submitted the 4,000 signatures necessary to make the November ballot, as has Shawn Moody, owner of Moody's Collision Centers. Moody has not yet filed his candidate registration forms and his signature campaign flew almost entirely under the radar.

Matthew Gagnon claims to have a source close to the Attorney General who says that John Richardson has been denied clean elections funding and that some of his signature gatherers are being investigated for fraud.

Gagnon also has a bit of a chip on his shoulder for "a sneering political reporter from one of Maine’s largest daily newspapers."

The situation is a bit muddled, but according to A.J. Higgins' late-breaking report yesterday, the Ethics Commission is questioning a number of Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Richardson's qualifying contributions and is giving him some finite amount of time to take steps to prove their legitimacy.

No other coverage of this that I've seen as yet. If Richardson fails to qualify his campaign is essentially dead in the water. Even the current delay in receiving a clean elections disbursement is likely detrimental to his chances in June.

The Libby Mitchell campaign has now collected the 3,250 $5 contributions necessary to qualify for clean elections funding, according to a post by campaign manager Marc Malon on Dirigo Blue.

Mitchell becomes the second candidate and the first Democrat to hit this milestone. Both the McGowan and Richardson campaigns say they're on track to qualify before Thursday's deadline.

Richardson has also released a new web video about his work to get the Washburn and Doughty Shipyard back on their feet after a 2008 fire.

It's a powerful story, but is crying out for an innapropriate remix.

Republican Peter Mills today became the first gubernatorial candidate to claim to have met the requirements to run a publicly financed campaign under Maine's clean election system.

In a recent Sun Journal article, Mills said the main hurdle to qualifying as a clean elections candidate was not raising $40,000 in $100 seed money contributions, but collecting the 3,250 $5 contributions now required by the law.

Apparently, few of Mills' contributions came through the state website. The vast majority were instead gathered through the canvassing efforts of his team of "dozens and dozens" of volunteers.

Full announcement after the jump.

There's one more important result of the Williams decision that I didn't mention at Down East (thanks to newly-elected Bowdoinham Selectman Dan Billings for cluing me in).

Because there will be no publicly-funded Green candidate in the general, the clean elections fund should now remain solvent throughout the election.

According to calculations done by the Ethics Commission staff, even if all four candidates (McGowan, Mitchell, Richardson and Mills) likely to qualify do so, each receives the maximum disbursement of matching funds, and Mills and one of the Democrats go on to the general election and receive the maximum there, the fund will still have a small surplus.

Here's a scenario they proposed which is similar (but not identical) to the largest outlay of money that we could now see.

Under this scenario, the fund would still have an estimated $230,832 left (minus $200,000 if you replace the "other candidate" with a Democrat and if the Republican makes it to the general).

The candidates running clean now have one less thing to worry about.

Update: After a chat with Jonathan Wayne at the Ethics Commission, I realize that there's still a chance the fund could be exhausted. Changing the presented scenario to have four candidates running in the primary, all with maximum disbursements, would increase the cost by $400,000, not the $200,000 I wrote above, and would put the fund a bit into the red.

This however, is not a very likely scenario.

The probable response by the commission to such a series of events going into the general election, according to Wayne, would be for the two candidates to receive their full initial funds and be informed that they could raise a relatively small amount of money in private contributions to make up for any potential shortfall in matching funds. If the third, privately-funded candidate in the race (or independent candidate-supporting groups) spent enough to exhaust all matching funds, the candidates could then spend the money they had raised.

One interesting bit that didn't make it into my column today is Cutler's opinion towards the Clean Elections act. While he plans to run a privately-financed campaign, he promised that he wouldn't be attacking his opponents for accepting public financing.

I've actually been asking all of the candidates I've spoken to, both clean and traditionally-financed, whether they plan to make it a campaign issue.

Democrat Rosa Scarcelli has had the most nuanced opinion on the subject so far. She says she supports clean elections for legislative races, but strongly opposes using the system for a state-wide race under current economic conditions.

She also pledged not to "fault" her opponents for using clean election funds.

Here's the relevant recorded audio from our conversation:

In recent media coverage on the viability of the fund, Scarcelli has been one of the most vocal opponents of public financing. Here's her quote from MPBN:

"What we're seeing now is that lots and lots of people are getting into the race that don't have the capacity of the desire to raise and finance their own campaigns with their own supporters," says Democrat Rosa Scarcelli of Portland, who is staging a privately-funded campaign. She says she opposes the idea of allowing more private money into publicly-funded campaigns.

"I believe that if we have Clean Election funds and we start to change the rules mid-cycle, we're doing a disservice to the Maine people, who probably as they pay attention to this, will find it troubling that we're paying for funding for campaigns, rather than paying for programs, when we're going to cut another $400 million out of our budget in this emergency session," Scarcelli says.

I'm not sure if that can be considered faulting her opponents, but it's certainly coming close.

It will be interesting how this issue shapes up as the legislature and the ethics commission continue to discuss how to deal with a clean elections fund that has been raided over and over again in order to balance previous budgets and may not have enough money left to make it through the 2010 campaign.

For progressives, myself included, the clean elections system that was passed by state-wide referendum in 1996 is now considered a touchstone of a strong local democracy, our Maine tradition of citizen legislators, and our hopes for people-centered policy.

But will these high-minded ideals take a back seat to immediate economic concerns?

I hope not, especially considering that even scrapping clean elections entirely right this moment and draining the entire fund would only close about 1% of the current budget gap.

We all know that political contributions are often made by interest groups, businesses and individuals in order to buy access to legislators and influence legislation. Rarely, however, do these contributors admit in plain language that that's what they're up to.

Maybe that's why I found Republican gubernatorial candidate Les Otten's response to being accused of giving money to Democratic candidates so jarring. He defended himself by claiming that the contributions were made not on the basis of ideology, but were instead just basically bribes given in order to gain influence.

"I’ve been in business in Maine for 37 years and you cannot create jobs in the business world - the real world - by being completely partisan.

Businessmen often contribute to different political campaigns to get the attention of all legislators because important legislation affecting our companies and our employees is created in a bipartisan manner."

If you haven't yet done your taxes, be sure to take a second to check "yes" at the top of the state form to support clean elections in Maine. It's free for you and supports a very worthy program.

As the Sun Journal put it today:

Cheers to checking "Yes" on line 1 of the Maine income tax form to fund clean elections. The state has borrowed heavily from the clean elections fund for other reasons over the years, leaving the program with a $4.4 million deficit. There's talk of getting some of it back, but not in full. (That's how the state works, you know.)

If the budget-counters in Augusta can't fund the program, the public should. Citizens created clean elections, after all; checking yes on the tax form is simply re-stating this case.

The agenda for the March 26th meeting of the Maine Ethics Commission contains some interesting follow-up on two candidates who had previously been accused of defrauding the clean elections fund.

The Attorney General's office reports to the commission that 2006 candidate Debra Reagan and 2008 candidate Bruce Ladd, both York-County Republicans, have been convicted and sent to jail for their crimes.

Reagan had failed to pay back $3,390 at the time of her prosecution and was eventually sentenced to 30 days in jail and forced to make full restitution.

Ladd was indicted for two counts of forgery on his clean election forms. He has since plead guilty and agreed to serve two months in jail. He was never certified as a clean elections candidate and dropped out of the District 133 race in July.

While these successful prosecutions may have strengthened the clean elections process in Maine, recent cutbacks at Common Cause, a national organization supporting government accountability, may have weakened the campaign dedicated to maintaining and strengthening publicly-funded elections in the state.

Jon Bartholomew, the Maine Common Cause representative and a board member of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections (and a blogger) was one of the ones let go. Announcing his employment change on facebook, Bartholomew wonders if anyone is looking to hire a "relatively smart guy with a masters in public administration, lots of organizing experience, and a lot of flexibility."