We’ll never eliminate corruption, but we can limit it. Sure, you could still bribe people with sex or gifts, but exactly how much influence would you sell just to get laid? Offer a few million dollars and lots of people would vote to outlaw their own grandmothers. Just getting laid? Maybe I’ll help you get out of a speeding ticket.
How about to keep your wife (or your constituents) from seeing those pictures of you with the hooker? Stamping out corruption with laws is like playing whack-a-mole with a fly swatter.
That was designed by flies.
Another issue that I see is how do you prevent media companies from weighing in on their favored candidates. Especially when those media companies are owned by wealthy people with a political agenda.
Public funding of campaigns exists right now. Today.
Oh sure, there are a few restrictions.
Presidential candidates also must agree to:
- Limit campaign spending for all primary elections combined to $10 million plus a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). This national spending limit was $48.07 million in 2016.
- Limit campaign spending in each state to $200,000 plus COLA, or to a specified amount based on the number of voting age individuals in the state (plus COLA), whichever is greater. In 2016, state limits ranged from $961,400 in Wyoming to $23,092,100 in California.
- Limit spending from personal funds to $50,000.
Those limits apply to presidential campaigns. In our real world, the presidential campaigns in 2020 spent $4.1 billion.
So all people have to do is get the campaigns to downgrade spending by 99%.
Or, allow Congress to up the sums to reflect reality and vote to spend billions of taxpayer dollars. Many billions. Total campaign spending was $14.4 billion in 2020.
This is a classic example of the “neat, plausible, and wrong” answer to a complex societal problem. The problem was built up out of a thousand changes to society over decades. Therefore, the solution will take a thousand changes to society and decades.
Corruption is another issue entirely. One could argue that the direct corruption seen in politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been mostly eliminated. What people now talk about is more indirect and built into the system. No single reform can have significant effect on that until the system itself changes.
If you downgrade overall campaign spending by 99%, the only people who will win are celebrities and those connected to power. What chance does an unknown person have?
If you make campaign spending very hard, I would expect the corruption to migrate to the media, which will support certain candidates while claiming their reporting is not an in-kind contribution.
Haven’t we seen lately that campaign spending has limits anyway? There are people who lost to their opponents despite outspending them 10-1. In the era of social media, I’m not sure formal campaign spending has as much effect as it used to.
And the last major party Presidential candidate to accept public funding was John McCain in 2008.
I wouldn’t expect to this to totally eliminate all corrupt influence in politics. Also, what I am talking about wouldn’t allow matching funds or spending your own money at all and force all candidates to accept public funds or run their campaigns with $0. Also, offering someone sex for a vote is basically out and out bribery and taking secret pics is extortion, both of which are already illegal. I’m trying to eliminate this legal form of bribery. The only thing that a lobbyist should be able to do is convince a politician that something is a good idea, not vote my way and you’ll be in Congress as long as you like.
While you could make a 1st Amendment argument that this curtails freedom of speech, I would argue that as long as sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, the public’s interest in not having politicians in thrall outweighs someone’s right to spend money on their election. And as mentioned, I don’t think that runs afoul of Citizens United.
I’m a tad surprised at the strong opposition to the OP. Or perhaps you are all reading the OP strictly, rather than asking whether it would be a good thing to lessen the impact of $, and how that could be done? I thought a great many folk thought Citizens United was wrongly decided. Sure, it is the law of the land, but that doesn’t mean it is right, does it?
How do other ostensibly free and democratic countries manage to have elections that are so much shorter and involve so much less spending that the US?
I’m not sure current spending leads to “corruption” per se, but it DOES IMO skew policy-makers’ view of what constitutes the public interest. And it would be nice if Concresscritters were free to spend their time doing their jobs instead of perpetually chasing after campaign $.
Sorry I don’t have too much to add. I’m really pretty ignorant about much elections finance law. I guess I just interpreted the OP more generally as “Would it be desirable to lessen the impact of $ in elections.”
Thank you and hear, hear. I was after constructive criticism rather poke holes in the idea and imply that if it doesn’t eliminate corruption 100%, it’s not worth doing. I hear this sort of thing from talking heads on Faux talking about the latest gun control measure. Feel free to poke holes but try to give your best suggestions to plug them up.
Well, part of that is corruption, part is your weird way of running your elections, and part of it is just that you’re the richest, most powerful country in history, so the stakes are far higher. If Canada had your money and power, it’d be a safe bet that our elections would be just as much a target for corruption.
Nothing is 100%, and there are upset victories, but by and large, money wins elections:
How strong is the association between campaign spending and political success? For House seats, more than 90 percent of candidates who spend the most win. From 2000 through 2016, there was only one election cycle where that wasn’t true: 2010. “In that election, 86 percent of the top spenders won,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign fundraising and spending.
If there were anything else with a 90% correlation like that, most of us would be pretty comfortable drawing the conclusion that it really matters.
Orville: This airplane will be the first to fly!
Wilbur: It’s a rock.
Orville: Stop poking holes in my ideas. You can throw a rock, can’t you?
Contribution limits in Canada
In Canada, only real people can donate to electoral campaigns at the federal level. Not corporations, not unions, etc. Only living, breathing people.
There are limits to how much a living, breathing person can donate. I think not much more than a couple of thousand per electoral district, and limits on how much you can donate to the party central.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a millionaire; same donation limits apply to you. You have to work to earn people’s votes, and also their donations. You can’t make a major donation to your own campaign. Some years ago, a candidate went to jail for making a “loan” of about $20,000 to his own campaign.
These restrictions were brought in by the Chrétien government in its last days, because Chrétien had the quaint idea that democracies should be controlled by voters, not by millionaires.
Ironically, the new donation rules hurt Chrétien’s Liberals the most, because they were the party that had the most access to big corporate donors. Suddenly they had to re-jig their funding to attract more, smaller contributions from living breathing people. The new Conservative Party had grown up that way, so the new election contribution rules favoured them.
There used to be direct public funding, based solely on the number of votes a party received. The Conservatives axed that, because they didn’t think that government money should be used to campaign to get elected to government. I can’t remember if there’s anything of that left at the federal level.
Spending limits in Canada
In addition to contribution limits, there are also spending limits. Here we get into the real arcane and complicated stuff, and I don’t pretend to understand it, but during the writ period, a national party and the district candidates are both limited in how much they are able to spend. It’s tied to things like the size of the riding, the number of voters, etc. I’ve seen some poli-sci talking heads saying that the contribution limits are actually more important than the spending limits, in keeping elections under the control of voters. Spending limits are important, but banning contributions from anyone but real people, and putting caps on that, has done more to keep the elections clean.
Non-party advocacy groups are limited in how much they can spend during an election period. We don’t have PACs or super-PACs here.
Election time in Canada
A big difference between the two countries is that we have a parliamentary system, and you have a presidential system. In practice, that means that your national presidential nomination process is part of the presidential campaigns, and the nomination process leads straight to the general election.
For us, party leaders are chosen a long time before the election, in some cases years before. And our leaders, to show their worth, are already in Parliament and we get to see them in action. We don’t need a long time just before the election to introduce us to the leaders; we’ve been watching them for months or years, long before the writ drops.
For instance, we currently have five parties in the House of Commons. I’ve ranked them and their leader in order of caucus size, followed by the year that the leader was elected leader of the party, and the year they were elected to the Commons:
Liberals - led by Justin Trudeau, leader of the party since 2013; elected to Commons in 2008
Conservatives - led by Pierre Poilievre, leader since 2022, in Commons since 2004
Bloc Québécois - led by Yves-François Blanchet since 2019, in Commons since 2019
New Democratic Party - led by Jagmeet Singh since 2017, in Commons since 2019
Greens - led by Elizabeth May since 2022, in Commons since 2011
The next election isn’t expected until 2025 or so (there’s currently a minority government, so it could be sooner). We’ve got plenty of time to watch them, so no need for the long primary season that merges into the general election.
Plus, if you’re a member of Parliament you’re generally required to be at the House when it’s sitting, so you can’t be a member and campaign full-time.
ETA: Weird. I thought I was replying to @Dinsdale , but it shows the reply is to @Horatius . No idea how that happened.
I guess I ought to research exactly what the justification is for PACs/super-PACs. If they are a good and necessary thing, how is Canada able to do without them?
By the limits on contributions and spending. My understanding is that PACs are set up by candidates to collect money and spend it on elections; super-PACs exist to allow advocacy groups to collect money and then spend it in elections, provided they don’t collaborate with a candidate “nudge nudge, wink wink”.
In Canada, there are the strict limits on how much anyone can donate to any one candidate, mentioned previously, so no need for a PAC.
There are also strict limits on how much advocacy groups can spend during the writ period, so no need for super-PACs.
We don’t have either in our system.
You also don’t have the First Amendment, which is what prevents us from putting in similar limits.
There was a court challenge to the contribution and spending limits, based on the Charter’s guarantee of freedom of expression, using similar analysis as in the US. Our Supreme Court rejected the challenge, on the basis that while the Charter guarantees free speech, and campaigns are part of free speech, the Charter also guarantees one person, one vote. The Court held that unlimited spending could have a corrosive effect on the guarantee of one person, one vote, because of the “force multiplier” effect of money. The free speech implications had to be balanced against the constitutional protection for individual voting rights. The contribution and spending limits were therefore constitutional.
If you want to read the case it’s here:
Harper v. Canada (Attorney General), 2004 SCC 33.
The plaintiff, Harper, became Prime Minister two years later.
Yes, and our court ruled otherwise.
As I said, the problem is one of the system, and many things about the system must be changed before campaign funding.
As usual, if the powers that be agreed that there was a problem, solutions could easily be found. They do not.
The worship of money does not count in the separation of church and state in the U.S.
Thanks, pal. I really needed yet another example of how our northern neighbor does things more reasonably than we. 
Yes, I know, but I was addressing Dinsdale’s question of how they do it in other countries. How they do it in the US is not an answer to Dinsdale’s question.