PHOENIX–It’s not easy being clean. At least not the first time around.

Arizona’s Clean Elections Law was passed in a statewide referendum in 1998, the same year Massachusetts approved its own. But, unlike the Massachusetts law, which applies for the first time to the elections in 2002, the Arizona system went into effect last year. So just as Floridians were counting chads long after Election Day, Arizonans were still tallying up the casualties of the state’s new publicly financed campaign system late into the fall.

Now, don’t get me wrong. For the most part, the Clean Elections Law was a success. But behind the scenes, heads rolled, checks bounced, and blood pressure skyrocketed.

First, some background: Arizona is the political mirror image of Massachusetts–Goldwater Country to your Kennedy Country. The Republican stranglehold on politics is as natural to us as a 115-degree day in June. Such lopsidedness discourages political participation in our state, particularly at the State House level, just as it does in yours. So we desperately needed reform–something the state’s voters realized even if, ironically, that tireless proponent of federal campaign-finance reform, our state’s senior US senator, John McCain, didn’t. (He’s opposed to public financing of political campaigns.)

Under Arizona’s new campaign-finance system, a candidate can raise $3,000 in $100 chunks as seed money, then has to collect a prescribed number of $5 contributions and signatures from constituents to become eligible to receive public money for primary and general election campaigns. The candidate can also get matching funds if his non-clean opponent goes over specified spending limits. Every candidate, clean or not, is required to report contributions and expenditures electronically. All of this is funded by court and lobbyist-registration fees, so it is not dependent on legislative appropriation, as the Massachusetts system is.

The Arizona Clean Elections Law passed easily, but implementation proved hairier. Court challenges by the state’s chamber of commerce, which didn’t like the method of selecting the commissioners who oversee the clean elections process, kept the law in limbo until mid-June–so far into the campaign season that many would-be clean-elections candidates gave up on it and started raising money the old-fashioned way, just in case.

So, in the end, we had relatively few candidates choosing to go clean. Here are the numbers: Arizona’s Clean Elections Fund gave out a little under $2 million to 60 candidates in the primary, 44 of whom made it to the general election–most of them legislative hopefuls. All 90 legislative seats were up, and publicly financed candidates won 12 of the 60 House seats and two of the 30 Senate slots. In addition, clean-elections candidates grabbed the two open seats on the state’s three-member Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities and corporations. But the most significant number is the increase in contested races: a 60 percent rise in total candidates over 1998. Not bad, considering the late start.

Beyond the numbers, of course, judging where public financing made a difference becomes an inexact science. Clean-elections boosters here are touting one winner, a guy named Jay Blanchard, as their poster boy. Blanchard, an Arizona State University professor and political novice, decided to put himself on the Democratic ticket against the biggest Republican bully in the Arizona Legislature, House Speaker Jeff Groscost, who was looking to move up to the state Senate. The district, in the southeastern corner of metropolitan Phoenix, is as conservative as they get. No one can remember a Democrat ever winning the seat. Everyone–myself included–laughed at Blanchard for going off on such a fool’s errand. Then he won, walloping Groscost in the state’s biggest upset.

But Blanchard’s win had nothing to do with clean elections and everything to do with a scandal that erupted at just the right time.

In September, it came out that a bill that Groscost had pushed, giving rebates to people who buy alternative-fuel vehicles, could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. At that point, people would have voted for a trained chimp over him–and in that district, a pro-choice Democrat is not much different.

Sharlene Bozack of the Arizona Clean Elections Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group, credits public financing with making it possible for Blanchard to run. If he hadn’t, she says, Groscost likely would have been unopposed in the November election, thereby winning the seat despite his troubles. But Blanchard, though he’s a big fan of clean elections, says he would have run even without the public campaign funds.

“I made a decision that if the clean [elections money] didn’t come through,” Blanchard says, “I would have funded it myself.”

Blanchard and his fellow lawmakers will consider legislation next year that would tweak the clean elections law. One proposed change: Make it illegal to use clean-elections funds to pay a family member to work on your campaign–as happened in the 2000 cycle.

They’ll also consider ways to toughen the system against fraud. Jessica Funkhauser, Arizona’s elections director, says that in a handful of incidents candidates forged signatures to try to qualify for public funding. A Tucson Democrat, Colette Ann Barajas, withdrew from her race after she was accused of faking signatures. She pleaded guilty in November to attempted fraud. Other cases are still pending.

The biggest surprise of this first go-round for Arizona’s Clean Elections Law may be that there wasn’t more of an impact–more fraud, more abuse, or more of a sea change in Arizona politics. In many cases, lobbyists ran around gathering up those $5 contributions for their favored candidates–all legal, but not quite what the law’s authors had in mind.

Above all, voters didn’t seem to much care whether a candidate was “clean” or not.

“There had been a belief that the whole idea that someone was running a clean-elections campaign–not taking corporate money, PAC money, union money, anybody else’s money–would be such a phenomenal advantage that when they ran against someone who was in the old system, that just the idea, the labeling, would have an effect on the election,” says Bob Grossfeld, a Tempe-based political consultant and pollster who represents “progressive” candidates and causes. But the clean-elections brand seemed to carry little weight, he says. “There was no halo effect, and, conversely, there was no devilish effect.”

Grossfeld is already looking toward the next great reform. In November, Arizona voters approved the creation of an independent redistricting commission that will redraw political boundaries for 2002, a move that will truly change Arizona politics, Grossfeld and others maintain. So now Arizona, like Massachusetts, awaits 2002.

Amy Silverman is a staff writer at Phoenix New Times.