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By Root 932 0

would be perceived to work. For, if the core problem that dependence corruption creates is the perception among voters that “money buys results in Congress,” then fighting that perception requires a system that the voters would understand, and believe. Yet we live in a nation where people don’t even believe that voting machines are counting ballots accurately. To imagine the public understanding the brilliance of the anonymous donation booth, and believing that, in fact, there is no way for large contributors to prove they’ve made (and haven’t revoked) a contribution, is, I believe, unrealistic. The mechanics are too complex; the sources of suspicion are too great. Even serious scholars criticizing the plan haven’t grasped its basic mechanics. To expect more from the average American is to expect too much.

That’s not to say it shouldn’t be tried; it should. It’s not to say we shouldn’t see whether the mechanism could be clearly explained; we should. But the change here is huge, and the gamble even bigger.

There is a smaller change that we could make with a larger potential payoff.

CHAPTER 16

Reforms That Would Reform

If the independence of our Congress has been weakened—if the intended dependence “upon the People alone” has been compromised by a competing dependence upon the funders—the solution to this corruption is to end the compromise. The simplest way to do that would be to make “the funders” “the People.” A reform, in other words, that reduces the gap between “the funders” and “the People,” so that none could believe that the actual influence of the one was substantially different from the intended influence of the other. Substantially different. No system is going to eliminate the gap completely. But as Robert Brooks commented more than a century ago, “under a system of small contributions from a large number of people, it would matter little even if some of the contributors were not wholly disinterested.”1

Over the past fifteen years, three states have experimented with reforms that come very close to this idea. Arizona, Maine, and Connecticut have all adopted reforms for their own state government that permits members of the legislature (and of some statewide offices) to fund their campaigns through small-dollar contributions only. Though the details of these programs are different, the basic structure of all three is the same: candidates qualify by raising a large number of small contributions; once qualified, the candidates receive funding from the state to run their campaigns.

Arizona, Maine, and Connecticut are very different states—politically, demographically, and culturally. But despite their differences, these “clean money,” or “voter-owned,” elections have had important success. Candidates opting into these public funding systems spend more time talking to voters than to funders. They represent a broader range of citizens than the candidates who run with private money alone. And they have succeeded in increasing the competitiveness of state legislative elections, making incumbents if not more vulnerable, then at least more attentive.2

If America were to adopt any one of these programs to fund elections in Congress, it would be an enormous improvement over the current system. But I believe we can do even better. These bold and important experiments have taught us something about what works, and what doesn’t. They have also made salient the sources of key opposition.3

The principal objections to these state programs are two. First, any system that selected a fixed funding amount per legislative district would be attacked as either arbitrary, too generous, or not generous enough. I share the anxiety of many with any system in which bureaucrats pick the amount of money available to candidates within an election. Elections should be free of that potential for abuse.

Second, some are troubled with the idea of “their money” being used to fund political speech that they oppose. This is not a concern of mine, but I do respect the concern and understand it.

We can solve both of these problems