Count this newspaper as among the most enthusiastic opponents of Mayor Bloomberg’s scheme to eliminate parties in municipal politics in New York City and institute non-partisan elections. We’re delighted that both the Republican and Democratic parties are opposed to Mr. Bloomberg’s shenanigans. But on Friday, in a letter to the mayor, the chairman of the State Democratic Party, Herman “Denny” Farrell, asked Mr. Bloomberg to limit his spending on pushing the ballot proposition to $500,000.

Here we part company with the opponents of the mayor’s scheme. We’d like nothing more than to see the mayor investing in educating the public about his ideas. We have plenty of faith in the voters here. They are smart, they are interested, and they have an enormous stake in the reform debate that is smoldering in the city. Why shouldn’t hizonner be permitted to spend his hard-earned money helping us understand what he’s got in mind?

So far, the billionaire mayor has refused to abide by any of the proposed limits on his spending, citing concerns that so-called “special-interest groups,” such as unions, could add to the Democratic Party’s $500,000 spending total. But he’s going to have a hard time hewing to that position as a matter of principle, because it was the mayor who first introduced the idea that excessive spending would somehow corrupt the process surrounding the vote on non-partisan elections.

He offered a deal to opponents of his proposal early on: I won’t spend if you don’t. Implicit in this offer was the idea that, somehow, the process would be more pure if neither side launched a lobbying effort. Apparently, voters were supposed to learn about the pros and cons of the proposal by showing up at meeting of the Charter Revision Commission or reading through hundreds of pages of testimony on the commission’s Web site. The results have been predictable, as the debate has yet to erupt into the kind of lively slugfest it deserves to be.

It would be nice to think that this will change in the next few weeks, as both the mayor and the Democratic Party and the unions are likely to set in motion direct-mail and broadcast advertising campaigns. But it seems that the entire process of considering and voting on a proposal for nonpartisan elections would have gone more smoothly, and would have been more engaging, had both sides fanned the flames with big, fat wads of cash from the beginning.

Indeed, this issue was bound to turn into a sore point from the beginning, as Mr. Farrell pointed out to The New York Sun, since the mayor has the bully pulpit of his office to promote the measure — something the Democrats understand they can’t match without funds. A study put out this September by the Cato Institute, penned by a University of Wisconsin professor of political science, John Coleman, points to the benefits of free spending. While it is often argued that campaigns with a lot of spending turn off voters and mislead them, Mr. Coleman found quite the opposite. High spending does not reduce voter participation or attention, though it doesn’t necessarily raise it either. What is does is lead to voters knowing far more about an election. Mr. Coleman studied House races and found that campaign spending had a significant correlation to how well voters could identify candidates’ ideology and positions on issues.

Perhaps Mr. Bloomberg and his opponents have been playing a game of electoral chicken — each seeing how close to the wire they could go before lighting up their respective campaign machines, hoping to get a slight edge by striking their match first. But this is no way to undertake fundamental reform of our election system or to try to turn it back. Both sides deserve blame for waiting so long to start the debate in earnest. Mr. Bloomberg bears a special burden for starting this scandalous set-to in motion. It is his civic responsibility to kick off the spending in this fight so that the unions and political parties can escalate, and we can get a full airing of the issues.