Thank you for the thoughtful response!
Some clarifications:
- Public Funding - I was intending to suggest the exact opposite I believe; that the only “legitimate dollars” spendable on election influence must be derived from a voter (or at least a voting eligible US citizen, but with access to the voting rolls online, a voter is easier to test for). So a corporate funded special interest group could not contribute because the SIG organization itself is not, and cannot be, a voter, and funds sourcing the SIG come from corporations which also cannot be voters. Therefore none of that money can be used for election speech. This also applies to government money. No government entity can vote, and therefore lacks standing/authority to speak. Maybe we understand it the same and you’re seeing something different?
What I think we could in terms of publicly funded support is I believe our government should host and run a free YouTube/Facebook/X like service for political candidates. I didn’t include it in the original proposal because I believe the this is a separate topic and should have its merits discussed independently.
The government is forbidden from abridging speech so it can’t “play favorites” about who gets a channel and who doesn’t. Everyone declared to run for an office anywhere in the country gets a channel. The infrastructure required to host such a service is a relatively nominal cost given the amounts already spent on the federal government’s technology infrastructure. This is “fair” because every candidate gets exactly the same level and support, and every voter or news agency now has a central location by which a campaign can be reached, providing at least a nominal “levelling of the playing field”.
- Cap on Campaign Spending - I’m not advocating either way for Caps on Spending because that, to me, is a different discussion. Generally speaking I’m against Spending or Donation Caps. If we are going to say that using my money to hire others to speak on my behalf or carry my message for me (which is how I interpret the “money as speech” conclusion), then I see no Constitutional principle that allows that speech to be limited in either my Spending or my Donations. There are Constitutional principles we can see that limit the sources of that speech to voters, which is what I’m proposing here, but I do not see that further granting the basis for limiting quantity…
A Spending Cap also assumes that one can predict what a campaign should be allowed to spend. If I wanted to pay a million people to go door to door and introduce myself as a candidate because no one has ever heard of me, that’s going to cost me a lot more than an established political figure who is already well known to the American people. A spending cap would hurt me as a candidate. I am aware that no spending cap would also help my well known opponent. Again, I believe this deserves its own discussion topic.
- Regarding the Citizens United decision, yes, I think it is good law. I don’t think most people have actually read/understood the actual legal issue decided in that case; they’ve simply been told that it was bad because it enables what’s considered a bad thing. In that case a guy made a movie/documentary about the way a president handled a material situation of national concern (it had a bias critical of the president’s handling); money was then spent to advertise and promote that movie and the FEC tried to claim that the advertising of a movie about the past behavior of a political person was “political advertising”. The Supreme Court said “No, advertising a commercial product, just because it is about a political figure currently running for office, is not the same thing as political advertising.” This seems like good law to me.
If Citizens United was overturned we could no longer spend money to advertise commercial content (books, audiobooks, films, live streams, etc) about a currently running political figure because all of that spending would be considered “political advertising”. I see that as absolutely devastating to the most critical form of free speech, political free speech, which I see we must protect at all costs.
I am more swayed by the idea that “real persons” are the entities endowed by creator with the “inalienable rights”. Those “real persons” then establish and endow their government with its authority and subsequent use of power/force. All other entities are an organizational creation of human fiction and are not “real” (including the government itself). Corporations are, in essence, a downstream creation of the people’s government and therefore has no standing to dictate how its creator should operate (influence elections). If the government was magically vanquished, the real persons would still exist, and the corporations would not. I could probably be swayed to agree with limiting Citizens United to only hold true for US voters, but not the general idea that advertising commercial content whose topic includes a currently running political figure is the same thing as political advertising.
Addressing concerns
Enforcement: The way I envision this being done is by the organization receiving the money attaching a “zipcode” to the dollar once it enters the political donation sphere and breaking down the regulatory financial reporting required down by zipcode. I am using zipcode, which is on a person’s voter registration (and now only voters can donate so they must also have a voter registration), as a proxy for what ballot items that dollar is allowed to directly influence. For in-person contributions, say at a rally, where it’s cumbersome to check that, the zipcode where the money was collected is likely sufficient under some threshhold (under $50 ?), otherwise you need to be able to verify the donor.
Another way of doing it is using a consensus based blockchain network to track political activity dollars. This also is a separate idea/discussion. All political campaigns would be required to use this blockchain to transfer money. The collection of all the government entities, and perhaps interested NGOs, would host and operate this blockchain (I consider the set of every city, county, state, federal offices, and interested NGOs sufficient diversity to protect the chain’s integrity). The blockchain would then track what dollar amounts were spent where. This would make all political spending transparent to the American Public (which I believe it technically is already) and potentially allow some modicum of “pre-vetting” that could block transfers that are known to be and detectable as illegal.
Legal Challenges:
Here is where I believe the strongest merits of this proposal lie in that it is grounded in solid foundational American principles (that our government derives its just powers from the people it governs, and therefore they are the only people/entities with standing/authority to “speak” on the matter. It is their government (like you might consider it their property)).
Obviously it will be challenged, and it might lose, but I believe it is built on strongly defensible traditional American foundational values and Constitutional bases that are not summarily dismissible and is compatible with Citizens United. Entities have a free speech right to advertise their commercial content about a political figure currently running for office. If we wanted to regulate that speech, the only legal basis I see is the fact they aren’t an actual voter or real person and therefore do not enjoy the same rights as real persons or voters. But we’d have to first agree/decide that only actual voting persons are the entities for whom that right is reserved.
We can all easily agree that it should be, and currently is, illegal for the government of Iran to create and distribute an ad in the US saying “Elect Kamala Harris”.
Why is that so obvious? What’s our philosophical rationale for that?
I say it’s because the government of Iran is not a member of the US electorate, is not a subject of the US government, and therefore has no standing/authority to themselves distribute that speech within the domain of the US. Not because the government of Iran doesn’t have the right to free speech. It can create a video that says “Elect Kamala Harris” and put it on its own broadcast networks all it wants (i.e. exercise its free speech). If that content was to be distributed in the United States, it would have to come from a US voter, or set of US voters, using their speech to communicate that content (because they have standing to speak). If money is paid to induce those US voter persons for that activity, that can be regulated and prosecuted.
If US voters took that content and chose freely to promote, comment on, or distribute that material on their own, without a directed request to that person from the government of Iran, I don’t see what we can or even should do to regulate that. Iran is not allowed to induce that behavior using its own speech (directed request to a specific person, money, etc).
This proposal is to take that same principle and do a logical extension of that same reasoning. The government of Iran lacks standing, not free speech, and therefore other similar entities without standing should likewise be limited. When you then ask the question “okay, what entities have standing?” you quickly get to the conclusion that “US voters on that the specific election ballot item in question are the only entities with true standing to speak on that ballot item.”
Practical Implementation:
I believe tracking zipcode balances would be sufficient. Every political organization would have the same chart of zipcode accounts, so balances would be tracked by zipcode when funds are transferred. It’s not as easy as one general balance for sure, but it seems like it could be handled by a spreadsheet. The more local the campaign, the fewer zipcodes to be tracked.
Zipcode seems to me a sufficient privacy obfuscator to protect the privacy interests of donors. The main thing prevented here is a wealthy California donor can’t influence an election in Texas. The impact of this is it dramatically weakens the strength of “nationwide organizations” or wealthy, geographically concentrated clusters from influencing elections outside the locality of where the donor money came from.
Public Funding Limitations/Effectiveness:
As I mentioned before, I’m not proposing “cap limits”, I’m proposing geographical boundaries based on the scope of contribution.
Refinement/Conclusion:
I just realized something…
I’m actually proposing two independent things here without realizing it.
The idea of restricting speech to real US voters can be separated from the idea of geographic boundaries based on location of donation source.
For example, if Microsoft wants to make campaign donations, limiting its scope of political influence to Redmond, Washington and Washington’s interest in the federal government all it wants is, technically, a separate thought from the principle of only real US voter persons can influence elections.
Is this split something worth separating out as two independent discussions?
One discussion on the merits of restricting voting influence to US voters, which would be silent on the idea of wealthy billionaires in New York influencing elections in Florida; and a separate discussion on the geographic influence of a donation being limited to those elections for which that donor has a geographic influence (silent on the corporate versus real person entity). …
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