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The (Practical) Ineffectiveness of Anonymity

The incompleteness of transparency has led some to suggest its opposite: anonymity. If the core problem with money in a democracy is the risk of corruption, whether in the crude quid pro quo form or the more subtle dance of a gift economy, then maybe the simplest way to solve that corruption is to make all donations anonymous to the members as well as the public. Obviously, laws banning quid pro quo corruption need to remain, but if we could make it impossible (or really, really difficult) for a member to know who gave his campaign what, we would make it impossible for the member to give favors in exchange for the gifts that have been given.

Put aside for a moment the obvious question—how could you ever really make a donation anonymous to the recipient?—so that the contours of this ingenious solution are clear. If the problem with money in politics is that the money will bend policies, this requires that the politicians know something about who their money comes from. Add anonymity, and that essential condition gets removed. Remove that essential condition, and it just could not be true that “money buys results.”

The inspiration for this idea comes from the nineteenth century’s solution to a similar problem with money in politics: vote buying. Until the late nineteenth century, voting was public: a voter would openly and publicly cast his (and it was just his) ballot. That publicity was thought to be an essential part of the integrity of the vote. It may have been, but publicity was also an essential element to vote buying, a very common practice in nineteenth-century democracy.7 Because I can see exactly how you vote, you can easily sell your vote to me.

Enter anonymous voting, which made it impossible legally for me to be confident about how you, the voter, votes. No doubt, you could promise me that you’ll vote as I wish, but you could just as well promise the same thing to the other side. The price I’d be willing to pay, then, for your vote is much, much less (discounted for the possibility that you’ve also sold your vote to the other side). And by lowering the price, this ingenious reform lowered the significance of vote buying substantially.

That’s the same intuition behind anonymity in contributions. Sure, I could tell you that I contributed $10,000 to your campaign. But if you couldn’t be sure, there wouldn’t be much reason for you to respond. My incentive to give would thus be weakened substantially—at least if the motive of my gift were to buy a particular result. That decline in incentives would thus weaken the market for buying policy.

Professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres have done the most to describe this system, and in describing it, they have developed an elaborate system for protecting this anonymity.8 The two critical elements are, first, an anonymous donation booth, which takes in contributions and then divides those contributions into random amounts, which it then passes along to the candidates; and two, the right to revoke any contribution once made. It is this second element that does most of the work: for even if you watched me make the contribution to your campaign, I would still have an opportunity to revoke that contribution the next day. Once again, you’re free to trust me when I say I haven’t revoked it. But just as with vote buying, the need for trust will severely weaken the market.

The Ackerman/Ayres solution is ingenious. Indeed, its biggest danger is that it might work too well: without substantial public funding, it could severely limit the amount of money contributed to campaigns, at least if the contributions were for the purpose of influencing legislation. (This was the result from one well-known example with anonymous contributions to judicial elections in Florida.9 Once contributions were made anonymous, contributions dried up.)

My concern with this solution is not whether it would actually work. It would, in my view, for the architecture is genius. My concern instead is about whether it