As the Economist put it earlier this month, the results of recent DPs around the world suggest that, increasingly, "their conclusions have real bite."
-- Bill Corbett
The County Election, pictured at left, is a favorite of mine. Painted in 1852 by a successful politician, George Caleb Bingham, it depicts a voter publicly swearing his legal eligibility to vote, a prelude to his publicly casting that vote.
Today, when we talk about the political marketplace, we generally forget that in the the nineteenth century it was no metaphor. In the crowd of The County Election are potential buyers; every voter is a potential seller. Too often, potential buyers and sellers arrived at a price that was right.
Later in that century an Australian innovation took root in America that limited the retail market for votes: the secret ballot. It took time, hard-won experience and constantly renewed political will to make the secret ballot work with integrity.
Does the secret ballot now work? ask Marc Geffroy and R.R. Reno rhetorically in the Washington Post. If yes,
The United States should establish an anonymous campaign system. We need a federally chartered clearinghouse for campaign donations that matches donors to designated, registered candidates and political action committees. Under such a system, politicians would not know who supports their careers, er, causes.
It's a simple but powerful concept. The identity of the campaign donor would be kept secret, which would break the wink-and-nod link between money and the legislative process....
The obvious objection is that anonymity seems to run counter to the idea of free speech. If nobody knows you're contributing, your efforts to signal your support fail. But the First Amendment concerns the unfettered flow of ideas -- not the free flow of money and influence....
Imagine politicians paying you if you promise to vote for them. You can't -- for good reason. The secrecy of the voting booth prevents anyone from knowing whether you are true to your promise. The same would hold for an anonymous campaign finance system.
Politics should be a marketplace of ideas, not cash. Transparency undermined political integrity in the nineteenth century, at the moment of the vote. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, political integrity is compromised every time that a political incumbent or challenger takes money from a private interest that, thanks to transparency, is entitled to access and accountability in return.
Our current system of political campaign finance is like a free lunch. Especially insofar as there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Bill Corbett
With social and economic conservatives increasingly at odds, should the Republican Party attempt to get its two wings working together via a Deliberative Poll at the outset of its 2012 presidential nomination process? The political reporter Walter Shapiro, a veteran of the last eight presidential campaigns, suggests at AOL's Politics Daily that a DP would be an improvement upon the status quo.
Imagine if pollsters selected a random sample of self-identified Republicans and flew them all expenses paid to spend a weekend meeting with all the 2012 Republican presidential contenders at a conference center or on a college campus. This demographic cross-section of the Republican Party (maybe 500 people) would not only hear the stump speeches, but would also question the candidates and their advisers. At the end of the weekend, these now well-informed voters would cast secret ballots for president rendering a verdict on the 2012 GOP field that would put straw polls and name recognition-dominated national surveys to shame.
-- Bill Corbett
Rep. David Wu (D-OR) and Bruce Ackerman propose in the Wall Street Journal on January 27 to revive the system of income tax credits for small political contributions, updated to create a fraud-proof and more user-friendly 21st century system.
"The place to begin is with a tax cut. Each American should get a refundable federal tax credit of $50 that they can use to make contributions to federal candidates during presidential years, and a suitably smaller sum during off-year federal elections."
The Citizen Involvement in Campaigns Act, introduced as H.R. 726 early in the 111th Congress by Rep. Thomas Petri (R-WI) and Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), lays the groundwork. As Rep. Petri said upon introducing their bill,
The concept of empowering small donors is not a new idea. For example, from 1972 to 1986, the federal government offered a tax credit for small political contributions. This provided an incentive for average Americans to contribute to campaigns in small amounts while simultaneously encouraging politicians to solicit donations from a larger pool of contributors. Currently, six geographically and politically diverse states (Oregon, Minnesota, Ohio, Virginia, Arkansas, and Arizona) offer their own tax credits for political contributions. These state-level credits vary in many respects, but all share the same goal of encouraging average Americans to become more involved.
-- Bill Corbett
