[arcticbull]

My ideal system is to eliminate all private money from elections. You as a candidate are given a stipend by the FEC at the beginning of the campaign season, the same amount as any other candidate for the same office, and you are free to spend it. You ran out? Tough. See you next election cycle.

Nobody is allowed to give you money or anything else of value (including free airtime) -- not individuals, not companies, just the FEC. Anything else is bribery, and a crime. That way, you're not going to do things just to please your benefactors and get you an edge over your opponent next time, as your war budget is already accounted for. Instead you can focus on doing what's best for the people.

[visarga]

If you really want money out of politics then you replace all of them with sortition (assemblies of the people). They are representative, being drawn at random, for the whole population and they are not elected, so they don't need to campaign. Similar to politicians, they need to be supported by experts and advisors in the specific topic they are working on. I'd rather trust a group of random people deliberating than a bunch of professional liars. Sortition is a way for people to participate in democracy more than voting once every couple of years and posting on FB.

[noir_lord]

My approach is different, two houses (assemblies) one elected and one via sortition.

Elected can propose and pass but sortition house can block.

Basically the commons/lords setup but with the lord's replaced with random people.

That way the politicians answer directly to the people (or a random sample) of them.

[brigandish]

I have been thinking exactly the same. I now have to wonder if you work at Facebook and have "read my mind" via my likes… ;-)

I been musing on whether there should be some small barriers to joining, as there is in jury service - perhaps the elected get to oppose a certain number of candidates, or they must pass a civics/governance test first so at least they've some technical knowledge going in. I can see that being twisted into something bad though.

Much as I dislike the Lords Spiritual in the current system, I wonder if the sortition should embrace it and be a "tulip farm" of certain interest groups e.g. 20 each for religion, business, justice, commoners etc, as then there's a definite base of understanding in important areas.

However it would be arranged it'd be hard for it to be worse than having the Lords full of lords though.

[andrewfong]

OK, what if people with money want to spend that money on political speech _without_ coordinating with the candidate? That's the Citizens United problem.

There's no quid pro quo bribery, but if the NRA spends a bazillion dollars attacking your opponent but not you, it'd be hard to say there's no influence on your decision making process. At the same time, it's really tricky to ban. Is something like Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 a form of political advertising?

[AnthonyMouse]

> Is something like Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 a form of political advertising?

Not only that, is CNN or Fox News coverage of a sitting politician who is running for reelection a form of political advertising? How they choose to report stories -- and which stories they choose to report -- can certainly affect how the voters view the candidates.

Probably the best solution is to just have a signature requirement where if you get that many signatures, the government gives your campaign an amount of money equal to the average amount of private money raised by successful candidates running for the same level of office in the previous election.

Then the average privately-funded campaign will have twice that much (if they get the signatures too), but a factor of two isn't huge here. It's more of a threshold situation where once you reach a saturation point it's diminishing returns. Get the candidate to that point with public money and the value of trading legislation for private money would be much diminished.

Of course, you still have the problem that too many people vote for who cable news tells them to.

[umanwizard]

This is reasonably similar, AFAIK, to how it works in France (and I assume many other developed countries).

Campaigns do spend their own money but it is capped at some low value to even the playing field, and they also receive public funding. TV stations are required to give equal time to all candidates (in the 2007 election there were 12 candidates, only 3 of which had any realistic chance of winning, but major TV stations spent equal time interviewing all of them).

[smsm42]

> Nobody is allowed to give you money or anything else of value

That sounds like a form of extreme boycott - and however I despise politicians in general, subjecting them to essentially expulsion from the society (at least temporarily until the election ends) and complete gag order and media blackout (because otherwise I could promote a candidate without giving them money directly - I would just publish ads under my own name but would be praising the candidate in them) just for wanting to be elected seems a bit extreme to me. Not to say at least in the US it's probably incompatible with at least half of the constitutional amendments.

[ARandomerDude]

Well you'd have to toss out the 1st Amendment to get that idea off the ground.

[infinite8s]

The courts have already supported certain restrictions to free speech, so it doesn't require a wholesale toss of the 1st.

[memmcgee]

Yes, the idea that campaign donations = speech is a new one as well. Tbh I think we need a constitutional convention to really solve all the problems with the American political system.

[ARandomerDude]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

[Thorrez]

And what if a candidate wants to spend that stipend on Facebook ads. Is Facebook not allowed to have a salesperson take that money and sell ads to the candidate?

[why_only_15]

What does free airtime mean in this context? People used that term a lot about the coverage of Trump during the 2016 election, but forbidding news outlets to cover a candidate is obviously absurd.