[geeks] geeks Digest, Vol 157, Issue 2

[Phil Stracchino]

On 05/16/16 09:12, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> I'm not arguing that what Citizens United *intended* to do should be
> undone.  But I do feel that it needs to be re-examined to try to put a
> cap on the things it *was not* intended to do, but did anyway.  The idea
> was good.  The implementation desperately needs work.


Oh, I forgot to add:  I do not have a ready answer as to how the problem
can or should be fixed.  Repealing Citizens United per se is not
necessarily the best solution.  But I really wish there were a mechanism
by which the Supreme Court could go back and re-examine and revise its
own decision in the light of experience of its [apparently] unintended
and unforeseen side-effects.  I hear a lot of talk about a
Constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, and that honestly
sounds like a foolish idea.  But I do think we are reaching the point
where nothing short of a Constitutional amendment will stop the feedback
loop of pumping more and more and more money into politics.  As things
stand, the more disproportionately wealthy the top 0.01% become, the
more power they have to tip the playing field even further in their favor.



Just to toss a thought on the table, here's an idea I came up with a
while back.  It's not so much *public* election funding as crowdsourced
election funding, with three goals - transparency of funding, leveling
the playing field, and eliminating campaigning as a get-rich-quick
scheme.  For every electoral race, establish a funding pool.  And
there's a simple set of rules for that pool, starting with these:

1.  *Anyone* can drop *any amount* of money into that pool at *any
time*, up to 30 days before the election.  Any individual donor who puts
more than $100 *total* into the pool must declare all of their donations
and be publicly listed as a campaign donor.
2.  You can't donate to the funding pool for any electoral office of
which you are not a constituent.
3.  Organizations may make grouped donations into the pool, but must
declare every member on whose behalf they assert they are donating.
They must also state what percentage of their membership supports the
donation.  Any so-declared member of that organization who disagrees
with the donation and believes that the organization was not acting on
their behalf in making it may object to the donation, and the
organization must withdraw the objector's apportioned part of the
donation and return it to the objector.  Retribution should be severely
punished.
4.  The pool gets divided equally among all candidates for that office.
(No new registrations for the ballot are allowed within, say, four
months of the election.)
5.  *All* of a candidate's campaign funding must come from the pool.  No
private funds allowed.  If you boost your campaign using private
funding, from *any* source, by any means *other* than donating into the
shared pool, you are disqualified.
6.  No money may be taken out of the pool less than fifteen days after
it was put in, and at 30 days before the election there is a hard
cut-off on donations.
7.  No new spending or ad campaign launches are allowed within seven
days of the election, EXCEPT that any candidate referenced by name by
another candidate's ad campaign within the previous seven days has three
days to respond.  Any money left in the pool three days before the
election goes directly into the general fund for the constituency.
8.  You must account in detail for every dollar you take out of the
pool.  If you took it out and didn't spend it by the seven-day cutoff,
or can't account for it, you must put it back.


The goal of rule 2 is to prevent anyone from buying electoral results in
constituencies they don't live in.  Do you have any idea how much of the
funding for California Proposition 8 came from Utah?
Rule 3 is an attempt to try to make unions etc actually represent their
*members*, not the union leadership.
Rules 6 and 7 are to try to prevent "surprise" campaign maneuvers such
as last-minute attack ads timed to try to deny the targeted candidate
any opportunity to respond.


There probably also needs to be some way to prevent planning detailed
campaigns a year in advance and then paying for them at the last minute,
but I don't have a good idea of how to do that.  And I'm sure all of
these ideas could stand tweaking, and none of them are a substitute for
replacing our current godawful first-past-the-post winner-takes-all
system with some form of proportional representation balloting system.
A huge amount of our current political woes grow directly out of a
balloting system that actively encourages voting for the lesser evil
over voting your conscience.  But in the long run, a vote for the lesser
evil is still a vote for evil.



-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  phils at caerllewys.net
  phil at co.ordinate.org
  Landline: 603.293.8485