PACs, Parties, Corporate, and individual activities in campaigns.

Individuals, Companies, and Corporations:

No person (including corporations) other than a candidate’s official campaign organization, may pay for political advertising promoting or denouncing any candidate.

Note this does not preclude public statements endorsing or denouncing a candidate, including newspaper and TV editorials. But it must be printed/aired just one time during a campaign. “On demand” reading/viewing of the editorial is allowed, but no person other than the campaign itself is “paying” to promote or advertise said editorial/endorsement.

Political parties:

Political parties are to be funded by donations from US citizens and permanent residents who are constituents of the area represented by that party. Notice that excludes corporations and foreigners. Parties may not pay for activities that promote or oppose any specific candidate, but they may pay for advertising promoting their party “platform”, views on issues, etc. They may also pay for their national presidential nominating convention, and state parties may pay for conventions for their nomination of state governors and other statewide office holders. National parties may not fund state parties nor vice-verse, but they may help promote or hold fund-raising events for each other. This is to ensure that state parties are nearly free or outside influence from other states. Parties may of course maintain, publish, and distribute lists of their candidates and elected members.

PACs:

Political Action Committees are permitted but may only promote or oppose specific issues/laws, they may not promote or oppose any candidate or political affiliation (e.g. Political Party). They can accept donations from US corporations and any US citizen or permanent resident. This is how corporations can express their political views, by forming and/or contributing to PACs that promote or oppose issues of importance to that corporation. Note: this could include churches and other not-for-profit organizations. This prohibition includes purely “internal” communications that promote or oppose specific candidates or parties. E.g. preachers promoting a candidate from the pulpit, memos/email from corporate executives about candidates or parties, etc. PACs may have internal communications about which candidates support or oppose (including undecided or unknown) the issues the PAC supports or opposes, as such is essential to their mission, and they may publish lists of candidates CONFIRMED to PUBLICLY support or oppose each issue/law, so long as they have performed due diligence in verifying the accuracy of those lists before publishing. Candidates who haven’t publicly stated a position on the issue/law may only be listed as “position unspecified”

A Proposal For Election Campaign Finance

My previous posts on Corporations are Not People touch on the problems of unlimited campaign contributions and "dark money". In this post, I offer a specific proposal for publicly financed campaigns that limit the public liability, and give every voter the exact same power in contributing to the campaigns of their choice.

Rather that directly financing any willing candidate, or using capped partial public funding to qualified candidates, two methods that have been used or proposed elsewhere, give every active voter (those who actually voted in any election in the past 4 years) a “debit card” with an initial amount on it that they can donate to one or more qualified/registered candidates of their choice. Such “money” to expire after 4 years, whether given to a campaign or not (thus encouragine regular voting, and limiting the total cost to taxpayers). Then, when a voter actually votes, it will be “refilled” (a few months after the election). The public pays, but the amount is limited, and everyone who votes gets the same amount. Candidates have to convince voters they are the most worthy of donating funds to. Those who don’t vote for more than 4 years, won’t have money to donate until after they vote again. Candidates would be required file reports showing how the money was used, and can be required to repay any amounts that were used for improper or illegal purposes, and/or be banned from being a candidate future elections for a period of years.

Note, I'm not hooked on the 4 year timeframe, that's the minimum I would support. But I don't think it should be more than 8 years. Anyone who doesn't vote for a long time, while knowing these rules, clearly isn't really interested anyway.

Advantages:
• This eliminates all foreign and corporate campaign money. Campaign contributions can come only from registered voters.
• The “money” on the voter's card can only be given to, and used by, a properly registered candidate. It won’t work at stores, etc.
• You can further limit contributions to allow donations only to candidates who will be on the ballot in that voter’s precinct, thus candidates will solely be financed by their own constituents. No outside funding, the elections will not be influenced by outside interests.
• Unused campaign funds can be automatically returned to the Treasury 60-180 days after the election.

You can even have separate pools of money for federal, state, and county/locality elections, funded and amounts controlled, by the respective govt entity.

All of this is relatively easy to do using existing debit card payment technologies.

See my post on PACs, Parties, Corporate, and individual activities. for info on allowed and disallowed activities related to campaigns.