A year ago I wrote in this section that I was not going to chec off a dollar for the Presidential Election Campaign Fund on my 1040 income-tax form. I noted that I was going with the flow, as I will again next week. The number of taxpayers who checked off has been going down every year since 1980. The fund was established in 1974.

I looked ahead to 1996, when I predicted there would not be enough money in the fund to give presidential candidates the money they were "entitled to" and said it might be a good idea to see what would happen if the fund ran short.

(Checking off a dollar to the fund does not increase one's tax liability. The fund draws on the general treasury. Not checking off limits the amount in the fund.)

It now appears the fund is going to run short not in 1996 but in 1992. The percentage of taxpayers who checked off went down again last year and is expected to dip further this year, according to Internal Revenue Service estimates.

What is going to happen? That is yet to be determined. Among the ideas making the rounds in Washington are these:

* Borrow money to make sure the candidates get all they qualify for, then pay it back with later 1040 check-offs.

* Double the amount taxpayers can earmark for the fund.

* Supplement the earmarked funds with appropriated funds.

* Stop limiting candidates to earmarked funds and appropriate the full cost of the campaign, whatever it is.

I cannot imagine ideas less connected to public opinion -- unless it is the idea being pushed by some members of Congress to start using taxpayers' money to pay for congressional campaigns.

The Federal Election Commission manages the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. Concerned at the declining level of taxpayers checking off -- it went from more than 28 percent of 1040 filers to below 20 percent during the past decade -- it commissioned a study of attitudes toward public funding of presidential elections.

In November and December of last year, six focus groups -- guided discussion sessions -- were held in Portland, Ore., Chattanooga, Tenn. and Fort Lee, N.J. Citizens who did and did not check off for the fund discussed politics and campaign finance with marketing consultants.

Here is what the marketing team concluded after the sessions:

"No one could specify any of the benefits the program had produced that reflected its goals; they couldn't identify a 'poor' candidate that had come forth; 'politicians' continue to be highly engaged in fund raising; 'politicians' continue to be 'bought' by PACs and other major forces such as 'big business;' and political campaigns have not been elevated to a 'higher level' nor have become 'less dirty.' "

To read the summary of the focus groups is to sense the skepticism the public feels toward public funding of presidential campaigns. Those who have read the transcripts say it goes beyond skepticism to hostility.

What did the marketing consultants who conducted the study conclude? "There clearly is a lack of information among the general public when they make their decision either to contribute or not to contribute to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. In this regard, citizens are not making an 'informed' decision."

It's your fault, Mr. and Ms. Uninformed Citizen! Armed with this insight, the FEC spent $72,000 to produce a "public service" radio and television message to get you stupid citizens to check off.

The chairman of the FEC, John Warren McGarry, and his colleague Thomas Josefiak must know this is not going to work. No amount of public education is going to save the fund. People don't like it. Informed people.

Those two FEC members have gone public with recommendations that supplemental funds be appropriated when the fund runs low (McGarry) or that "Congress should simply eliminate the checkoff box from the 1040 tax form and provide sufficient funds to meet its pledge of public funding to presidential candidates under the law" (Josefiak).

How can they believe the public wants this? The fact that fewer than one 1040 filer in five checks off suggests to me landslide opposition to the idea of public financing of campaigns.

I'll tell you something else. The public is "informed" enough about this topic to form a legitimate objection to the fund. What the members of those focus groups said was right on target. "Poor" candidates have not won nominations over well-financed ones. Presidential candidates continue to spend a lot of time and effort (and promising and compromising) in order to raise private funds. Big business and PACs are more influential than ever. Political campaigns are as negative as ever, at least in modern times.

The members of the focus groups may not have been informed in the sense of knowing the specifics, but they sure hit the bull's-eye about special interests' continued spending and influence. There is no wall between presidential candidates and fat cats, not even a low one. This, the one element of reform that justified the whole experiment, is the reform that never was.

In the 1987-1988 election cycle, political candidates and

committees at all levels spent $2.7 billion on all forms of campaigning for all political offices, according to Herbert E. Alexander, director of the Citizens' Research Foundation. The total alone is not cause for alarm. Proctor & Gamble spends more than that on advertising every two years.

But the presidential campaign cost $500 million of that $2.7 billion -- nearly one-fifth of all money spent on all the thousands of candidates from dog-catcher to governor and senator. What a maldistribution.

That half-billion is -- in constant dollars -- the most ever spent on a presidential election. It is half again as much as was spent in the first subsidized presidential election in 1976 and four times .. what was spent in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, according to the Citizens' Research Foundation.

Only $177 million of that 1987-88 total of half a billion dollars came from taxpayers. Special interests of one sort or another spent $323 million. That is almost exactly what the private sector spent in 1972, the last completely privately financed presidential election. Using the 1960 dollar as the base for comparison, $98 million was spent in 1972, $94 million in 1988.

The 1972 campaign was thought at the time to be the most shamelessly dependent on private contributors seeking favors in modern history. It was the prime motive for the 1974 reform law. The stated aim was to take selfish special interests out of the picture.

You judge for yourself how successful it has been. One way to look at it -- my way -- is that by spending $177 million of Treasury funds, we cut fat cat spending by $4 million (from $98 to $94 million).

Senate Democrats are now pushing a campaign reform package that would create a tax-supported fund for congressional candidates. This could cost $1 billion over the next full congressional-election cycle of six years, according to Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla.

The author of the proposal is Sen. David Boren, his Democratic colleague from Oklahoma. Senator Boren wrote an article in behalf of his bill. It appeared in this section last Sunday. He said, "The Senate is considering a bill that would establish voluntary [spending] limits for candidates, with incentives to encourage compliance." He did not say that those "incentives" were public subsidies.

L Give him credit for that. At least he's ashamed to admit it.

Theo Lippman is a columnist and editorial writer for The Sun.