Election Rules

Running for public office costs money. The more important the office, the more is spent on the campaign.

Should there be a limit on how long the "campaign season" is? No. A person who is running for office is using reputation built over his or her entire lifetime, and the right to free speech prevents the government from restricting precisely this kind of (usually positive) political speech. Putting an arbitrary limit on the "campaign season" won't do much to curb the spending, it will just concentrate most of it during that period when all the advertising and traveling is done.

Should private funding of campaigns be prohibited? No. Having the government pay for campaigns is a terrible idea. First, there would have to be a system to determine who is eligible to receive money. Since we have two long-standing major parties, any public funding system would probably end up being very biased towards those two parties the way that the rest of the election system is biased towards them now. Second, there would have to be a limit on how much money is spent on each candidate or in total over all the candidates, and each year lawmakers will waste time debating about raising the limit. Third, I reject the idea of using my tax money to pay for the opposition's advertising.

Should there be a limit to private donations? No. It would be very hard to enforce, anyway, because a person with a lot of money to donate can get around any arbitrary limit by distributing the donation among a large number of supportive people.

Should disclosure of donations be mandatory? Yes. People have a right to know who are major donors of campaigns (for any definition of major) because it may affect what the candidate will do once in office (sadly) and also casts light on some of the candidate's statements. Right now there is a law that campaigns must disclose the names of all persons who donate over $250, but they get around it with "bundlers" who collect thousands of dollars from people and then don't have to disclose where they got it. I don't know how the justice department allows that to go on when it's a clear violation of the spirit of the $250 law.  I think $250 is a fine arbitrary maximum anonymous donation.

Is there any adjustment we can make to get better accountability over the election funding process? Yes. Even though the money should not come from the government and we shouldn't limit the period of time that candidates are allowed to make statements, if we want to be certain that we know who is contributing to a campaign we need to make the accounting transparent. The way to accomplish that is to require candidates to use an independent accountancy firm that has a license from the government to manage campaign funds. Anyone should be able to get a license to do that job by reading a book with all the campaign finance laws and signing an agreement to report faithfully what is going on with the campaigns it manages.  Every candidate would hire their own "treasury firm" to manage income and expenses for the campaign - actually the licensed accountancies should be allowed to manage the finances of only one candidate running for any one office. So for example the same firm could manage the campaign of a person running for mayor and another running for congress but not the campaign of a third person who is running for the same mayoral or congressional office. The firm would accept all donations and issue checks and debit cards for all expenses. It would publish (publicly) a list of all people and corporations who donated more than $250 to the campaign (or whatever the maximum anonymous donation is) and the government would access the same published data that everyone else can access. People would still be able to get together, form an organization, and donate through that organization to the campaign - but that would still allow investigators to find out the identities of the people behind that facade.

Also, campaign income and expenses would have to be defined as being specifically about the candidate. That is separate from income and expenses of the candidate's party to promote its platform without naming a specific person who is running for office.  Any trip that the candidate makes in which the candidate performs even one speech about election is considered a campaign expense. If it's paid for by some other person instead of coming out of the campaign fund, then the accountancy firm must simply list something like "trip to (wherever) and meals paid for by (who) estimated at $xxx" so the public knows about the donation. This allows people to contribute equipment, food, parties, or whatever with assets they have instead of having to convert that to a monetary donation while still being accountable to the public for their support.

Is it proper to make a candidate's election finances public? I think so. Candidates who are elected for public office will be managing public funds and there is no privacy there - so why should there be privacy for people who want to attain such positions? The people have a right to know who they are voting for, and a person's finances have a lot to tell.

What else can we do? If we're concerned about minority party access to the public during a campaign there should be non-profit associations who set up debates and donate radio, television, or newspaper ads to campaigns by minority parties (anyone not a Democrat or a Republican).

I also think that how political parties choose their candidates is not government business. All sorts of "primaries" and other nonsense should not be funded by nor regulated by the government.