The Asbury Park City Council recently joined approximately 25 other New Jersey municipalities in introducing or passing pay-to-pay legislation to limit the size of election donations from prospective city attorneys, engineers and other professionals.

And Asbury Park became only about the fifteenth municipality to introduce a companion ordinance to require potential developers to disclose recent campaign donations when applying for major building variances.

In a city like Asbury Park - where several elected officials were recently convicted of crimes ranging from vote-peddling to bribery-conspiracy, and where as far back as 1917 the mayor and police chief were accused of overlooking everything from illegal gambling and liquor sales to prostitution and vote-buying - this is definitely a reason to celebrate.

And, yes, I am justly proud of our city council.

Still, with the need for statewide political reform grabbing the lion's share of daily headlines, I don't believe that such ordinances alone can do near enough to counteract political fraud - at the city, county or state levels.

Electing honest candidates - and, yes, they definitely do exist - is the only real solution.

If there's anything I've learned in my eight years of observing municipal politics here, it's that the ways to cheat the political system are endless. And election fraud is where it starts.

In my February, 2002 columns (available on asburypark.net), I exposed a number of those ploys, starting with the most sophomoric: stealing or defacing other people's campaign materials. And, of course, there's the time-honored technique of placing last-minute newspaper ads or letters charging rivals with a host of totally fabricated sins.

But that's just the start. In the last eight years, I've heard countless tales of smart (and unscrupulous) operators paying people to vote, mis-using absentee ballots, mis-representing recall petitions, and even under-reporting voting machine tallies.

Do such underhanded tactics really affect election outcomes?

Just take my celebrated experience: After the May, 2001 election, I was told that I had lost the city council race by about 150 votes. Then, almost a month later, another candidate challenged the results, and the county Board of Elections discovered that I had actually won. Poll workers had severely under-reported my voting machine totals in two districts.

Think such shenanigans happen only in Asbury Park? Think again. And don't bet that a few months of public outcry or hurriedly enacted state legislation without substantially beefed-up enforcement will be enough to turn our political system around.

Because if there's one thing I've learned the hard way, it's that unscrupulous people will always find a way to cheat the system, and there are frequently very few effective ways for honest people to fight back.

The New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (NJ-ELEC), for example, already issues detailed rules for registering candidates, declaring donations, and other election-related activities. Ensuring compliance, however, is a difficult job for the under-staffed department, requiring a formal citizen complaint and a lengthy investigation.

Following the 1996 Asbury Park city council election, NJ-ELEC fined one successful Asbury Park candidate and his campaign manager $7,125 for campaign irregularities. The process took more than a year.

That fine was never paid - although liens were placed on the offenders' property - and the judgment did not affect the candidate's ability to eventually become an Asbury Park mayor. (He has since been convicted on unrelated federal bribery-conspiracy charges and is awaiting trial for federal income tax evasion.)

Similarly, you would have expected a massive public outcry following the 2001 Asbury Park election when the wrong city council candidate was declared the winner for almost four weeks.

Instead, my opponents grabbed media headlines by taking me to court and accusing me of somehow convincing both the Monmouth County Election Board and the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office to lie about my voting machines totals - an outrageous and obviously unsubstantiated claim that one of my council colleagues still publicly makes today.

Let's put it in perspective: In a city with 17,000 residents and over 7,100 registered voters, you can win an annual Asbury Park Board of Education election with about 300 votes. In return, you'd help manage a projected $78.7 million budget and have considerable say over school hirings, firings, contracts, and policy.

You'd also affect something much more important: the lives of over 3,000 children who represent Asbury Park's future - and present. These children, 60% of whom live in poverty, deserve our best effort.

And that's why the real power to clean up government rests with you. Municipal elections, in particular, are often determined by a painfully small number of votes, and - if someone's not playing fair - then your vote really does count.

So, get registered. (Call the Asbury Park City Clerk at 732-775-2100.) Get informed early about potential candidates. Look at the facts. Don't wait for that last-minute, misleading campaign literature to influence you.

And vote. Vote in our critically important Board of Education election on April 20. Vote faithfully in municipal elections, county elections, state and national elections. Take a friend or neighbor to the polls. In fact, take several of them.

Most of all, never despair about slowly but steadily turning our political system around.

As Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg writes, "If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, or a week, or ten thousand years - we turn on the light and it is illuminated."

In the end, it all still depends on you.