The new state commission charged with monitoring ethics has flunked its first test and in the process harmed its credibility with voters.

The state Ethics Commission decided earlier this week that there’s nothing wrong with its six-member board continuing to donate to the partisan candidates they are supposed to be regulating. The board, which is evenly split 3-3 between Democrats and Republicans, voted 4-2 to continue to allow contributions.

“I don’t want to be limited in giving contributions,” said Milwaukee attorney David Halbrooks, a Democrat, according to an Associated Press account. “I don’t think it will ever affect my analysis.”

And perhaps he’s right. But whether the public trusts Halbrooks’ analysis and that of his colleagues is a different matter entirely. And it is the public’s perception of the commission’s actions that determines whether its decisions have credibility with voters. This decision undermines that credibility.

Ethics overseers can make political donations

The Ethics Commission was created along with a new Elections Commission on the ashes of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, which was targeted by Republicans after the GAB was involved in a John Doe investigation of Gov. Scott Walker’s recall election campaign. The accountability board was composed of six former judges and became a nationally recognized model. GAB board members were not allowed to make contributions to partisan candidates.

As Kevin Kennedy, the GAB’s executive director who retired under pressure, put it as the agency was closing up shop: “The people in power did not like being held to account.”

Given the way the GAB met its demise, the members of the new commissions need to act with utter evenhandedness to earn the public’s trust. While state law allows Ethics Commission members to make political donations, two members thought such donations were unseemly. They were right. Staff members at the two new commissions are already banned from making contributions.

“We have, right now, people claiming that elections are rigged,” Robert Kinney, a Democrat and former Oneida County circuit judge, said according to the AP account. “We don’t want to create a situation where there’s less confidence in government, less confidence in fairness, less confidence in nonpartisanship.”

Kinney effectively voted for the ban along with Republican Pat Strachota, a former Assembly majority leader. The actual vote was over whether to table motions that included the donation ban. Halbrooks, former Democratic Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, state Republican Party secretary Katie McCallum and former Republican state senator and Waukesha County Judge Mac Davis voted to table the motions, which put the ban to rest.

The message that vote sent: The board is more interested in partisan politics than whether the public trusts its decisions.