In the 2008 city election, 63 percent of the electorate voted to require public campaign financing to be made available to candidates for city office. The purpose of this measure, as presented to the voters, was to restrain the potentially corrupting influence of private campaign donations on our elected officials.

The council has now passed the necessary laws and appropriated the needed funds to offer this form of financing to council candidates. The election campaign under way is the first in which the candidates have had this choice available to them. Five of the 10 candidates, including at least one candidate in each of the four council districts, have chosen to avail themselves of this system and to run their campaigns exclusively with public funds.

These candidates are: Patti Bushee in District 1, Bob Sarr and Peter Ives in District 2, Chris Rivera in District 3 and Carol Robertson López in District 4. These five candidates have chosen to forgo any form of private campaign funding. If they should be elected, they will take office owing favors to no one and having obligations only to the city and to the voters who elected them.

The other five candidates are financing their campaigns with private donations. Only one of them, Houston Johansen in District 1, has a plausible justification for this business-as-usual approach, having fallen barely short in a serious attempt to collect the number of $5 contributions that were necessary to qualify for public funds. The other four privately financed candidates -- Elizabeth "Dolly" Luján in District 2, Gilbert Martínez and Marie Campos in District 3 and Bill Dimas in District 4 -- have offered various excuses for their decision to pass up public funds, but none of their protestations stands up to serious examination.

These candidates' arguments boil down to a complaint that the city should not be spending taxpayers' money on political campaigns. But the voters have already expressed their overwhelming preference for spending their money in precisely this way. They have evidently made the judgment that the one-fifteenth of 1 percent of the city's budget that it spends for public financing will bring a sizable return by way of reducing the cost to the city of the favoritism toward special interests that inevitably results from city officials' dependence on private donors to finance their campaigns.

As if to prove the voters right on this point, by far the largest total contributor to the privately financed candidates, as revealed in initial campaign finance reports, has been the city employees' union, the very organization that has the biggest financial stake, year in and year out, in the decisions of the City Council. The union has donated $1,000 each to the campaigns of Johansen, Luján and Campos.

The silver lining on this cloud is that things would have been worse had the council not made another recent beneficial change in the city's campaign law, placing a limit of $1,000 on contributions to privately funded council candidates. Without this, the attempts at influence-buying would have been even more extravagant, as they have been in other recent elections.

But just to say that it could be worse is no excuse for continuing to tolerate a shabby system of financing campaigns. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that candidates cannot be forced to forgo private funding: That must be their free choice. But the voters have the last word. When some candidates have made the right choice and the others haven't, the voters should know what to do.

Jim Harrington is a retired lawyer in Santa Fe and is chairman of the State Governing Council of Common Cause New Mexico.