A bill supporters believed could bring transformational change to Hawaii elections was unanimously rejected Thursday by the House Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs Committee.

Senate Bill 2381 would have set up a voluntary system of full public financing for candidates seeking election to state and county public offices beginning with the 2028 general election year.

But the bill did not include the $30 million estimated to be needed to fund the program, nor $200,000 to add staff to the state Campaign Spending Commission, which would be responsible for implementing the system. The $200,000 figure was not in the bill’s language, but commission staff said it would be impossible to run the funding program without the financial support.

Chair David Tarnas said SB 2381 was “fatally flawed” for those reasons but others as well. He heeded testimony from Kristin Izumi-Nitao, the spending commission’s executive director, that her agency would find it very challenging to get the system up and running in just a few short years.

Another problem, said Tarnas, was that the bill would set up an “unworkable system” for verifying qualifying donor contributions.

“I think this bill is really misleading the public by asserting that it sets up a workable, comprehensive, publicly financed election campaign system,” he said. “This bill does not accomplish this. This bill does not set up a workable, comprehensive, publicly financed campaign system.”

The committee deferred SB 2381, which means it is almost certainly dead for the 2024 session, rather than take a vote. But Tarnas allowed his members to comment on his recommendation, and all agreed the legislation — while well intentioned — needed much more work to succeed.

SB 2381 was introduced with great fanfare by supporters like Common Cause Hawaii even before session begin. Its sponsor was Sen. Karl Rhoads, Tarnas’ counterpart who serves as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Rhoads and Tarnas were the conference committee chairs who fought to pass a similar bill in the 2023 session, only to see it scuttled in the final hours.

Colin Moore, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii Manoa who moderated a forum on the proposed measure in January, called Rhoads new bill “one of the most important” before the Legislature.

“The idea behind this is simple,” he said. “It’s that with this bill, it’s possible to really stop this connection between donors and the behavior of legislators. And that’s really what we’re talking about here.”

But SB 2381 did not include the $30 million appropriation that was in last year’s Senate Bill 1543 before the amount was cut to just $700,000 by the House and Senate money chairs.

Under the proposed system, each candidate that sought comprehensive public funding would have to submit an application for certification to the state that contained the minimum number of qualifying contributions of $5 from supporters.

The public money ranged from a maximum of $30,000 for Kauai County Council races to as much as $2.5 million for races for Hawaii governor.

Supporters argued that the funding system would level the playing field and get more people elected who do not have to rely on campaign contributions from special interests such as businesses, unions and political action committees.

But that argument also came under fire during oral testimony Thursday. Chuck Freedman, a veteran Hawaii political and government operative, warned that super PACs like Be Change Now would still spend large amounts of money to influence the outcome of elections.

Freedman pointed to the $3.2 million spent by Be Change Now to try to defeat Sylvia Luke and elect Ikaika Anderson lieutenant governor in 2022. The campaign appeared to backfire, however, and Luke won.

Evan Weber, managing director of Our Hawaii — a main backer of SB 2381 — agreed with Freedman but said that was due to the Citizens United decision from the U.S. Supreme Court that determined business and labor unions can spend an unlimited amount of money in elections.

But Weber said SB 2381 would have given candidates the option to not run on private donations, thereby taking a significant step forward in addressing “the question of money in politics.”

There were other reasons for SB 2381’s rejection. Tarnas said he had been approached by House colleagues who raised concerns that the state would be paying for candidates running for county offices, “and they didn’t want to do that. They wanted the counties to pay for the publicly financed elections for people running for county offices.”

There was also concern that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a quasi-autonomous agency, should pay for OHA candidates, in part because OHA Board of Trustees candidates run statewide campaigns.

“So with all of these flaws, I really cannot in good conscience recommend that this committee approve this legislation,” said Tarnas. “It needs a lot of work. We cannot compel future legislatures to appropriate funds. And that’s what this bill is tacitly doing. We’re setting up a program that would bind a future legislature to appropriate $30 million to implement the program.”

He continued: “And while it might not violate the letter of the law and our restrictions, I think it really gets close to violating the spirit.”

Another bill, this one increasing the amount of partial public campaign financing available for all elective offices, passed the House last week and now awaits Senate action.