The Chapel Hill crowd most likely to pay — and pay eagerly — obscene prices for a slice of free-range chicken or a chunk of organic aragula thinks the cost of electioneering is immodest and needs to be regulated.

Why, they have hinted and harrumphed, folks poured money into Matt Czajkowski’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign like frat boys filling beer steins at an all-you-can-drink kegger.

His campaign expense reports show Czajkowski spent $35,360 for his 3,783 votes in a second-place finish to Town Council colleague Mark Kleinschmidt.

So, campaign finance watchdogs, is an average cost of $3.97 per vote equate to too much money influence in local politics?

That sum is considerably higher than the average spending-per-vote of every single Town Council candidate. Top vote-getter Penny Rich spent the equivalent of $1.17 per vote, for example.

Yet nearly $4 per vote is exactly what Kleinschmidt – yes, Kleinschmidt – spent; $16,021 for 4,029 votes, according to his tardy campaign expense report. Czajkowski averaged $9.34 per vote.

In the Nov. 3 election, Kleinschmidt and Rich were the only ones to accept the candidate welfare checks in what election regulation acolytes, as they attack free speech rights, gleefully call voter-owned elections.

Spending, it can be readily demonstrated, doesn’t guarantee victory. Mayoral candidate Kevin Wolff spent $74.44 per vote ($7,146, 96 votes) and got thumped. Rival Augustus Cho spent $11.70 per vote ($2,597, 222 votes).

Nor is a tax-paid campaign a barometer of success. Incumbent Councilwoman Laurin Easthom spent less than 10 percent of what Rich did -- an average of one thin dime per vote ($383, 3,886 votes) – and still finished second behind Rich’s tax-fueled campaign.

Still, beneficiary Rich proclaimed, “I would not have made the leap from sixth to first without the voter-owned election program.”

In fact, one might argue that taxpayers got less bang for their campaign welfare buck from Rich than did private donors to unsuccessful candidate Jon DeHart, who spent just 23 cents on average per vote ($650, 2,844 votes), or that excess government money influence skewed the race towards Rich.

Georg Vanberg, UNC associate professor of political science, weighed in on the stated desire of reformers to ensure transparency by restricting private funding and spreading tax-paid campaigns.

“It strikes me as interesting that virtually all of these candidates didn’t meet their deadline for filing their campaign finance reports,” Vanberg said. A law adopted by the town this year requires candidates to file a spending report up to six days before the election so everyone can discern who’s supporting whom. Only Easthom, Czajkowski and successful Town Council candidate Matt Pohlman filed or mailed their reports by the deadline.

Vanberg also fails to see the alarmist mentality about big money donations influencing election outcomes, thereby making successful candidates beholden to special interests.

“It really is kind of strange to suggest let’s get big money out of it when you have a $200 limit” per person, he said.

Then there’s the whole issue of former Town Councilman Cam Hill covertly running a $1,700-plus political mailout supporting Kleinschmidt.

“One of the big proponents of keeping big money out of elections [Kleinschmidt] clearly, in this case, was one of the beneficiaries,” Vanberg said.

Jeff Patch, communications director at the Center for Competitive Politics, a national nonprofit research organization that litigates on campaign finance and political First Amendment issues, noted the closeness of the votes among the top candidates.

“These narrow victories can hardly be construed as clear victories for the [publicly paid] program, especially considering how hard it is to isolate factors in elections,” Patch told The Chapel Hill Herald.

And then there was this on one of Patch’s blog posts: “(T)he Chapel Hill program is almost certainly unconstitutional as it uses a government leveling program to penalize the speech of candidates who opt out by increasing the subsidy to participating candidates with so-called rescue funds.

“In this case, Kleinschmidt received an additional $5,000 in response to Czajkowski’s spending ... A federal judge has preliminarily ruled that a similar taxpayer financing system in Arizona that uses rescue funds is unconstitutional based on the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Davis v. FEC,” Patch wrote.

Oh, well, who needs free speech and a Constitution anyway.

Dan E. Way is editor of The Chapel Hill Herald. E-mail dway@heraldsun.com or call (919) 419-6654.