I share Professor Malbin’s sadness in learning from his email to the election law listserv that

Herbert E. Alexander, the dean of campaign finance scholarship in the United States, died of cancer on Thursday April 3.  He was 80 years old.

Alexander was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Southern California and had been director of the Citizens’ Research Foundation from its inception in 1958 through his retirement in 1998.  For twenty years, he also served as chairman of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Political Finance and Political Corruption.   For the past ten years he lived in Silver Spring, Maryland for the past ten years, with his most recent work – a comparative project on disclosure in collaboration with the International Foundation for Election Systems – published in 2003.  A longer obituary will be printed in coming months in PS: Political Science and Politics, a publication of the American Political Science Association.