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As a society, we need acknowledge that using money to influence voters is simply a way to increase voting power beyond "1 man, 1 vote". One way to mitigate tha
by politician 15y ago
As a society, we need acknowledge that using money to influence voters is simply a way to increase voting power beyond "1 man, 1 vote".
One way to mitigate that is to ban independent advertising on behalf of candidates (SuperPACs), require all donors to donate into a common pot which candidates may draw equally from, and require all media companies to provide equal time to candidates on their networks.
A downside of this approach is that many insincere candidates may exhaust the common campaign financing pool. Requiring failed candidates to pay back a percentage of their spend may be a way to mitigate that (e.g. a "co-pay").
- pavel_lishin 15y ago> Requiring failed candidates to pay back a percentage of their spend may be a way to mitigate that (e.g. a "co-pay"). Doesn't this also create a pretty powerful disincentive for the non-wealthy to run?
- politician 15y agoThere would need to be a mechanism which prevents insincere candidates from looting the common campaign financing pool. As you pointed out, the challenge is to find the least bad one. In this country, many health plans require a co-pay of $10-$20 in order to see a doctor. The purpose of the co-pay is to deter would-be patients from flooding doctors with trivial inquiries who would then be able to bill insurers for their (wasted) time. So, yes, a co-pay is a disincentive, but arguably less so than the disincentives present in the system it's proposed to replace.