[giantg2]

It seems corporations are the ones influencing laws with spending. Even then, it's the constituents that are the problem. Are they really so gullible that a new attack ad funded by donations to the politician will sway them? Are they even paying attention? It's the attention and strength of the constituency that will make a democratic society better.

If you really want to fix the voting in a somewhat realistic way, you will completely do away with campaign spending, allocate a government website with a page for each candidate to display their positions, have the site searchable by your address, and have an alternative that you can request by mail if you don't have access to a computer. You also need to ban the news from reporting on the campaign to get around this, including the observation biases that come from all those early polls. Suddendly campaign funding becomes a non-issue, and we're likely to see less manipulation.

Even if you eliminated the wealthy altogether, you could still have outsized impacts by many groups due to the most extreme people being willing to donate more. This is essentially what we see primary elections due to the low voter turnout - the most motivated/extreme people have a larger say.