On both sides of the Hudson, this year’s campaigns have been notable for the huge sums of personal wealth which were poured into them. Mayor Bloomberg created a hopelessly lopsided race by spending $75 million of his own fortune to ensure his reelection against Democratic challenger Fernando Ferrer, whose war chest topped out at $6.6 million.

In the New Jersey gubernatorial election, multimillionaires Jon Corzine and Douglas Forrester dug deep into their own pockets to create a hailstorm of television advertisements, particularly negative ones. Both of these races vividly illustrate the danger of allowing candidates to spend vast amounts of their own money in two separate scenarios.

The Bloomberg-Ferrer scenario reminds us that extreme disparities in candidates’ finances make for precariously unbalanced elections, while the New Jersey race provides a perfect example of what happens when opponents both have deep pockets and are willing to use them: excessive use of negative advertising. Studies suggest that these do little but disillusion voters, leading to lower voter participation overall. The injustice of this year’s mayoral election is obvious. Fernando Ferrer scraped and fought his way through the grueling Democratic primaries, spending most of his money along the way. By the time he emerged as the party’s candidate, Mr. Bloomberg had had his war-machine in operation for almost a year.

As if the benefits of incumbency were not enough, Mr. Bloomberg is a billionaire, and demonstrated in his first election that he is more than willing to use his own money to advance his candidacy. Mr. Bloomberg’s aides created extensive voter indexes like never before, borrowing a method from senior Republican strategists who helped Bush win his election and reelection. These data banks delved further than the traditional breakdowns do, surpassing matters like race, ethnicity and religion for what kinds of cars people drive and the magazines they subscribe to.

This resulted in an unfortunately one-sided race, in which Mr. Ferrer worked under the radar while voters were bombarded with Bloomberg advertisements in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and other languages. It was extremely unfortunate that Mr. Bloomberg was unable to exercise any financial self-restraint, as his impressive track record of low crime and an improving economy alone could have warranted his reelection.

In the New Jersey race, Senator Jon Corzine (who would eventually win the election) and Douglas Forrester spent $40 million and $33 million respectively (Both are big businessmen turned politicians). Even when compared to the venomous presidential election of 2004, this was a particularly bitter campaign. Both candidates were forced to defend themselves from accusations of sexual scandal and attacks became extremely personal. In the last weeks of the campaign one ad by Mr. Forrester quoted Mr. Corzine’s ex-wife in order to attack the integrity of the senator.

The danger of this scenario, in which both candidates have huge fortunes to draw upon, is that it allows for large amounts of television time to be bought for negative, or attack, advertising, which shrinks the electorate and increases political apathy. As Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University wrote in their 1997 book, Going Negative, “Attack advertising actually suppresses voter turnout...We would even go so far as to say that negative advertisements may pose a serious antidemocratic threat”. The book’s authors found that negative advertising’s most significant effect is to inject “cynicism and alienation” into would-be voters, because truthfully, who cares about politics when the candidate’s sexual encounters are paramount to any real issues like taxes, spending and foreign policy?

Of course, negative advertising can be used in races in which candidates do not have access to hundreds of millions of dollars, but attack ads pop up more and more frequently when there is excess cash lying around, especially in closely contested races such as the New Jersey gubernatorial, where Mr. Corzine’s led in the polls by only 2-12 percentage points.

These scenarios offer two valid reasons as to why campaign finance laws need to be rethought. More specifically, those who defend the individual’s right to use personal wealth as he or she pleases must look at these scenarios and ask themselves whether lopsided and extremely negative races are the ideal. Politics should be about issues, not sex and money.