Voluntary Public Finance System: A public finance system should be adopted through legislation for all judicial candidates in the State of New York.  Candidates opting into the public financing system should be subject to contribution limits, campaign spending limits, and threshold requirements to qualify for the finance system.  Candidates who meet the requirements should be provided with public matching funds to ensure adequate resources to operate a campaign, particularly in cases where an opponent has opted out of the campaign finance system.  To ensure a candidate's right to free expression, any public finance system should be voluntary.  The proposed campaign finance system should be similar to that used by the New York City Campaign Finance Board.

Disclosure: For judicial candidates inside and outside the voluntary public finance system, there should be a timely campaign donation disclosure requirement, indicating the candidate's name, donor's name, donor's affiliation, date of donation, dollar amount, and source (individual/corporate/law firm/political action committee) of each campaign contribution.  Further, candidates should be required to submit detailed campaign expenditure reports, and the donation and expenditure information should be easily available to the public through the Internet.

Voter Guides: Voters should be provided with meaningful and objective informationabout judicial candidates in advance of an election.  The best method to achieve this is to include judicial candidates in voter guides produced by a Board of Elections or other independent organization.  Voter guides listing each candidate's qualifications, professional background, and screening panel and other ratings should be distributed to all eligible voters prior to an election.