Sheldon Silver hasn’t even been sentenced yet, and already the left is plumping for public financing of elections. Or to put it another way, if Albany is going to lose its access to graft, why not force the taxpayers to pay up?

Our Democrats couldn’t care less that Silver sold his office for reasons that had nothing to do with raising money for his campaign. They know that he represented a safe district on the Lower East Side, winning easily (in 2008 he got 100 percent of the vote).

No, it wasn’t to fund his election campaigns that Silver committed his crimes. He aimed to get rich, pocketing $3.3 million from his share of legal fees (the “quo”) from cases referred to his law firm by a doctor who got state grants (the “quid”).

Yet we’re already hearing how his conviction is grounds for the Legislature to force the taxpayers to pay politicians’ election expenses. The New York Times greeted the verdict with an editorial calling for “public funding of elections for all state offices.”

By which the Times means the governor, comptroller, attorney general, state Senate, and Assembly. That echoes Gov. Cuomo, who threatened in January to “fight for the creation of public financing of elections.”

He wants “a steady funding stream” for wannabe (or already-elected) pols. And he wants it for “all statewide and legislative races.” What a fortune that’s going to take out of the hides of the long-suffering New York taxpayers.

Can you imagine? You get home from slaving at whatever job you managed to get in the Obama economy and there’s the guy from the state tax department demanding a few extra rubles to pay some Communist to run for the Assembly.

The Times isn’t alone. The jury had barely spoken when the Green Party of New York rushed out a statement by co-chair Gloria Mattera arguing that “only full public financing of elections will put an end to this ‘pay to play’ system.”

The Daily Snooze issued a column calling for yet more restrictions on the people — limiting how much they could give to a candidate they like. Then it would force taxpayers to pony up with a government “small donor matching system.”

Another advocate of taxpayer financing of elections, Public Citizen, is taking a bizarre angle. It’s sending around an “editorial board memo” suggesting that, had the money that went to Sheldon Silver gone through a Political Action Committee, the scheme would have been legal.

Yet what put Sheldon Silver on the road to the Big House is the jury’s conclusion that there was a quid pro quo. Not only did he steer state grants to a doctor who sent his firm clients. He also backed legislation wanted by a real-estate company that gave business to a law firm that shared fees with Silver.

Such quid pro quos would’ve been illegal no matter what kind of organization the cash was routed through. Yet Public Citizen is using the Silver case to up the ante in its fight for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United.

That ruling permitted a not-for-profit to distribute a film critical of Hillary Clinton even though she was running for office. Imagine that. Public Citizen reckons New York’s Senate is only one vote from making us the 17th state to seek to protect future Hillarys from such criticism.

Taxpayer financing of elections and other reforms have nothing to do with Silver’s grafting. On the contrary. Silver himself has been an advocate of forcing the taxpayers to underwrite candidates for public office in New York.

Less than three years ago the future felon introduced the Fair Elections Act of 2013. “The Assembly Majority has supported campaign finance reform, that features a system of public campaign financing for many years,” Silver boasted in a press release at the time.

Mercifully, the scheme got watered down to a pilot program — which is what Cuomo is threatening to expand. So Albany could yet force taxpayers to cough up for their pols’ election outlays.

How fitting it would be if they called the measure the Sheldon Silver Fair and Honest Taxpayer-Funded Elections Act of 2016. They could hold a signing ceremony just up the river — right in the yard of Sing Sing.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.