WASHINGTON – A rash of ethics lapses has given Democrats an election-year headache: how to convince skeptical voters that they’re any cleaner than Republicans they accused of fostering a “culture of corruption” in 2006.

From the conduct of governors in Illinois and New York to the relationship between members of Congress and their campaign donors, Democrats are drawing criticism when it comes to the ethics of public officials.

The party that pledged to “drain the swamp” if given control of Congress during the 2006 elections finds itself sinking in the muck eight months from Election Day, when every member of the House and 36 Senate seats will be put to a vote.

“There’s certainly a sentiment that the public is disappointed that our elected officials misuse their positions,” said Patricia Harned, president of the non-profit Ethics Resource Center.

“The public is getting weary of our elected officials not being able to enter into their offices with a high standard of integrity and maintain that,” she said. “As the public gets exasperated, they become less involved. You would hope the public would become more involved, but in reality they just throw up their hands and say ‘it’s not going to make a difference.’ And that has a dramatic effect” on democracy.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said last week that “we’ve come a long way since I became speaker with the outside ethics groups, and now we have a functioning ethics committee, bipartisan and independent of the speaker.”

She issued a two-page list of other actions Democrats have taken since winning the House majority in 2006, including banning gifts and meals from lobbyists, expanding what lobbyists must disclose about their activities, requiring House members to disclose the earmark requests they make and requiring House members’ official expenditures to be posted online.

But the sword of sanctimony cuts both ways, warned a Republican felled by his own scandal in the weeks before the 2006 elections, as Pelosi led the campaign cry to end “the culture of corruption that has thrived under this Republican Congress.”

“If you claim that you are going to hold a group accountable, as she professed, then it requires you to really be serious about that and not make excuses when members of their own party don’t meet those same standards,” former Rep. Mark Foley, who resigned weeks before the 2006 election because of allegations he pursued former House pages, told The Associated Press.

Even Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., the 20-term veteran who stepped down from the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee last week, acknowledged that hanging on would have prolonged distractions and political pain for Pelosi and other Democrats.

“It’s not fair to her, and it’s not fair to the many freshmen and those who have close districts, that instead of getting their message out, (reporters and constituents) are asking about me,” Rangel said.

Rangel gave up his committee chairmanship after the ethics committee admonished him for accepting corporate-financed travel. Rangel still faces an inquiry over the way he used his position to solicit corporate donations to an educational institution that bears his name, as well as the belated disclosure of hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously unlisted wealth.

Democrats say they should get credit – or at least not be punished at the polls – for trying to clean up Capitol Hill with an independent ethics office that didn’t exist under Republican rule.

But the committee – the Office on Congressional Ethics – has the authority only to investigate complaints. It can’t force lawmakers and their staffs to testify, and it can’t issue punishment.

“They should have more authority,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“The ethics committee should be more bound by what the independent Office of Congressional Ethics has to say,” she said. “I think it’s a problem that (the House ethics committee) can totally disregard their conclusions.”

Washington editor Sylvia A. Smith contributed to this story.