A reader suspects that anonymizing political donations wouldn’t do much good:
Ayers’ and Ackerman’s proposal on campaign financing makes sense on its face, but it would be pretty easy to exploit. Quoting Dylan Matthews on the plan:
It sounds batty until you realize the authors’ key insight: for a quid pro quo to work, the paid-off party doesn’t just have to receive a kickback. They have to know they’ve received a kickback.
Hiding who made the donation might work if there was no other way to determine who the donor was. If you have a conversation with a potential donor and they say they are going to send you $100,000 tomorrow, and then you get $100,000, it’s pretty obvious where it came from. Worse, it’s more obvious the larger the donor. Sure, any given $20 donation would get lost in the shuffle. But big money would be quite clear.
Even for smaller amounts, there’s been a long running practice of adding cents at the end of a donation to indicate the source. So if a group tries to put together a big money bomb for a candidate, they could tell donors to add .02 at the end of each donation to indicate where it came from.
Another adds:
It’s not going to help when the “quid pro quo” benefits an entire sector instead of just a handful of company. For example, the coal industry and the oil industry will donate to carbon-friendly groups or PACs, and they will in turn help elect respective politicians that would help further assistance for their particular industry. Do you honestly think it’d make a difference if the Koch Brothers’ money becomes even darker? The grand purpose is still served to help benefit and enrich them. The only thing that they might not get is an ambassadorship from a GOP president.
Update from a reader:
I obviously don’t expect you to embed the entire Dylan Matthews piece on Ayers’ and Ackerman’s proposal, but it does appear as if the readers you quoted expressing skepticism about the idea didn’t click through to get the full picture. Ayers and Ackerman have anticipated the concerns raised by your readers and their plan includes two key provisions to address them.
The first is to distribute donation funds to candidates on a periodic basis (weekly for example) rather than passing them through immediately as they come in. That process would happen based on:
an algorithm which would smooth out sudden spikes in donations in a given week or month (or whatever other interval at which donations are released to campaigns), so they don’t appear to be spikes to campaigns. “We could just have a randomization algorithm, so that if a huge amount kicks in, you get it over 14 weeks,” Ackerman says.
So no one’s getting a check that says “$100,000.22 Love the Koch Brothers.”
The second idea is basically to use public financing to dilute the proportional influence of private campaign contributions:
every registered voter in America gets $50 per election cycle to give to candidates for federal offices, whether they’re running for president, the Senate or the House. Ackerman and Ayres call these vouchers “Patriot Dollars.”
The goal is for federal elections to be roughly two thirds financed by public dollars, with those funds allocated at the discretion of individual voters.
I’d encourage people to read the whole Matthews piece, because I have to say the idea is pretty damn elegant. Obviously it won’t fix every problem we’re facing due to money in politics, but the fund distribution algorithm combined with the dilution of private money’s proportional influence would stand a good chance, it seems to me, of meaningfully altering the landscape of campaign finance.
The Dish 