Even clean elections get dirt under their fingernails, which is why lawmakers should scrub Maine’s trailblazing public campaign financing program every session. Leading the nation along this particular path is an exercise in constant cuticle care.

Legislators should get past, though, discussing whether the program should exist. More than 85 percent of candidates used clean elections funding during the past cycle; though a bill, LD 205, is being heard today to repeal the program, it seems unlikely to pass.

The better debate is fixing flaws of clean elections as identified. When this has occurred, clean elections have gotten better – Maine now has higher thresholds for gubernatorial candidates to qualify for public funding and a new system for “clean” candidates to accept qualifying contributions online, as two examples.

And each time the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices scolds candidates for expenses or actions outside the spirit or sense of clean elections, the program gets stronger through the precedent.

The debate can go too far, though. There are ideas before the Legislature this session to carve the governor’s race from clean elections, leaving it for only legislators. This seems nonsensical, because if there’s one office from which special interests should be curbed, it’s the executive.

But policy debates about clean elections turn moot if not enough money exists for the program. Clean election advocates think funding is the program’s greatest threat, and rightly so; the deficit is more than $800 million and clean elections funding has been raided before.

For the governor’s race in 2010, the program needs $6.6 million that, right now, it doesn’t have. Gov. John Baldacci has pledged to restore some of the $8 million that’s been taken from the fund over the years, but its still about $4.4 million short and the clock is ticking.

If lawmakers in Augusta want vigorous clean elections, which their rampant participation certainly indicates, and would resist undermining it by statute, they shouldn’t then weaken clean elections by default by failing to reasonably fund it.