A truly wacky idea for campaign finance reform

Someone was asking me today about my political philosophy . . . which reminded me of an idea I had for public campaign financing which is probably quite stupid. . . . but this is the wonder of embracing one’s innner idiot, that you have the freedom to try totally new things.

It's not really the season for this, but, well, anyway, here is my proposition:

As we all begrudgingly know, politics and political campaigns are all about the money.  And as we are currently seeing, the process has always been corrupted by the cash, as congressmen feel beholden to those entities that have raised money for them. 

Public financing would be nice, but one of the reasons public financing doesn’t work is that if you make it “public,” then anybody including me and any other wacko down the street would potentially be eligible for public funds to run for office.  And nobody wants that. 

So what to do?  Well, here’s my answer: 

To start, let’s name a given sum of dough for public financing, then . . . let’s divvy that up by the number of registered voters, and send each registered voter in the USA a voucher.  They can then give it to any candidate of their choice– or just toss it.  It might only be for $3, but that’s okay. 

That way, candidates who normally have to suck up to people with money in order to fund their campaigns would now have the option of appealing directly to voters.  All they need to start is a website.  Everyone would be much more likely to contribute, as it’s just a voucher, not cash.  This would not limit fund-raising from big donors . . . you can still contribute actual cash.  This just adds a different potential populist source of funding.  You would, in essence, vote with your pocketbook.   And fringe candidates would be able to get a little more traction early in the race without necessarily selling their souls to a big contributor or industry.  If a candidate has a populist platform that is against the entrenched moneyed interests, they could still get grassroots funding, and much more easily. 

What next?  my candidate could take that voucher, cash it in, and use the money to further publicize their platform and positions, to get more voucher funding to promulgate their positions, and ultimately, if they are worthy, pass the real final test, i.e., votes in the elections.  And there would at last be a possibility to have elected officials who would not be beholden to the people who now control our government, which are the people who now have the bucks to contribute to political campaigns. 

As it is, the only real chit us regular folks have in the game is our vote, and by the time the election comes around, your preferred candidate party has usually been bought off or defeated by the economic power of those . . . who are already in power.  This way you could get involved in the process much earlier on . . . and there is still the final hurdle of getting a majority of votes, so we would have the option of weeding out the undesireables at the last moment. 

Let’s face it, the money leads to votes– this just cuts out the middleman, and lets us play in the process more directly, in the way that it really works.  

 Whaddya think? 

© Justin Locke