You say it’s already taxing enough just listening to them, not to mention carting their campaign mailers to the recycle bin? OK, but maybe there’s more to it than that, so read on.

What single-payer is to the national health-care debate, publicly funded campaigns long have been to the movement for campaign-finance reform – a touchstone and panacea for the left even if it is an abomination for the right and maybe just counterintuitive for the many apolitical people out there.

It has been implemented in various states and municipalities, generally in places of a more liberal political tilt though there are some exceptions to that rule of thumb.

Now, as Denverite’s politics and government ace Erica Meltzer reports, Denver voters could be asked to consider such a policy. Petitions probably will start circulating within weeks – courtesy of the group Clean Slate Now – to gather enough signatures to place the issue on the November ballot. Meltzer reminds us this is actually the second such attempt at a ballot question for publicly funded campaigns in Denver in as many years, but last year’s version was derailed by a court challenge.

The plan is complicated – not nearly so simple, say, as giving candidates government vouchers to pay all or a portion of their campaign expenses – so we’ll borrow Meltzer’s description of the proposal’s key components:

So, if you’re not up to doing your own taxes or perhaps assembling your kids’ swing set (the kind with a tunnel slide) in the back yard, this probably isn’t for you.

There is much more to this discussion. Naturally, its advocates / enthusiasts feel it has tremendous potential to clean up politics; smirking skeptics say it’ll merely squeeze the balloon and redirect yet more campaign funding underground. And there are even principled objections to it. Meltzer covers it all in much more informative detail. Give her story a read, and here’s the link again.