Campaign Finance Reform

By Gloria Purcell

Without real reform and some changes to our system, there will never be enough money for our needs, because too many of our taxpayer dollars will be sucked up by corruption.

Please consider election campaigns for a moment as if you were the candidate. You need to get your message out to the voter, so s/he can be informed about your views and make an informed decision at the polls. It costs money to do that. What, then, in our society, supports this essential democratic process? Almost nothing. Taxpayers do not pay for it, political Parties help to raise and distribute some funds, but usually do not have enough for all and are under no obligation to support all the candidates in their Party. Small Parties are seldom able to provide it. Ordinary voters have never donated a significant percentage. So who has a vested economic interest and also the money to spend? Big corporations, developers and the real estate industry, Unions and other PACs. The situation we are in is not new, it has just exploded in size. Because of this, I support a basic public fund for all candidates of all parties, which would NOT fund the entire election, but would provide a basic means to be heard. This would be the public's support, not motivated by profit, for democracy. Other states are finding it successful; we should do it too. It will save us tremendous amounts of money currently being wasted on subsidies and other deals to benefit corporations that are already bloated with profit. They don't need extra taxpayer support!

Who ultimately receives and profits from the big campaign money everyone is talking about? The media, of course, who just happen to be big corporations too! TV, newspapers, and radio are the main means of getting the message to the voters, especially for the larger races. Before Reagan's administration, we had a law that radio, television and the print media must provide equal time to all candidates and to two sides of an issue (the Fairness Doctrine). He killed that law, which died without a whimper from Congress and of course no publicity from the media, and that is why big corporate money can buy so many ads on TV and why you see so few ads for the other side of many propositions, especially those that involve tobacco or insurance companies (remember Proposition 30 and 31 on the March ballot? The costs of those ads came from your insurance payments!) The Fairness Doctrine needs to be brought back, and the FCC should be investigated also for its giveaway of the public airwaves for profit without any significant benefit to the public in return. Only Congress can achieve this.

If you were a candidate, wouldn't you rather not have to raise so much money? As a voter, wouldn't you rather have representatives that were not bought out before they sat down? I support a basic required minimum of free access to all media for all candidates. Society supports the media's free speech First Amendment rights; they should give something back to support the democratic system that provides those rights to them. What about our rights? I will support an Assembly resolution to be sent to Congress, which is about all that can be done at the State level now.

Limiting the campaign donor's right to give has not been favored in the courts. Let's try it from the other end; limit the amount of money that is needed and save the wasteful spending in campaigns.

Will that be enough? It depends on what you want to achieve. The above measures would be enough to return us to moderate corruption, I think. Is that what we want for ourselves? I don't; I want more for our country. Therefore I support Instant Runoff Voting, which is simply a different method of voting. It allows the voter to choose first, second, third (and on) choices of candidate in order of your preference instead of a single mark as we do now. It gives the voter more power and flexibility and hopefully would inspire more people to vote. It also saves public money, because the first election expresses the voter's choices thoroughly--no more runoff elections, since you already made your second choice as well as your first. It ends the "wasted vote", because if your first choice didn't win, your second choice can count. Small parties would benefit because you could vote Green without fearing that your vote would cause an extreme right-wing runner to win: if Nader, for example, did not win the election on the first count, and there was no clear winner (over 50%), then your second choice would be "drawn". Your vote would never cause a less desirable candidate to win (however you define "less desirable"; this is true for any party, candidate, or viewpoint). This would end the so-called "spoiler" situation. This change can be made easily with local or state legislation; I will carry the bill in the Assembly if elected.

Is that enough? --not to adjust the system so that it adequately reflects the political and philosophical views of the citizens. For that, we need what all the other democracies in the world except England and the U.S. have (we are the two most primitive democratic systems in the world, because we are the oldest); Proportional Representation. (I am not advocating a change to a Parliamentary System, by the way).

Think for a moment about what we do have: Geographical Representation. Every ten years following the census, chaos reigns as the extremely biased legislators draw up new boundaries for voting districts. These are always so bad (known as gerrymandered districts) that they are usually thrown out in court, and a panel set up to re-draw them; the whole process takes up about two years. When they are done, what do we have? A legislator is elected for each district who is supposed to represent every single soul in that land area! All your ideas, differences, and political opinions are represented by one person! Utterly impossible! The only benefit to this arrangement used to be that geographical areas with less population were able to swing as much power as more populated areas. If we still want that, we can keep it in the CA Senate. Pork-barrel spending is encouraged by this system. So is confusion, since we all live in three different districts simultaneously!

So why is Proportional Representation better? Because it is fair; nearly everyone's view is represented (even though there are different forms of Prop. Rep. around the world). You elect representatives who actually think similarly to the way that you think. They don't have to win 50% or more of the vote, they only have to win the votes of people who agree with them, so they can say what they think on the issues, and work to deliver on them too. Political thought is represented by Parties, as it used to be here. Since a broader spectrum of political thought is being expressed, there are naturally more Parties. Each Party wins a percentage of seats, unless they get too few votes to meet a minimum threshold of voters. Thus, if your opinion/Party gets, for example, 10% of the votes, then your opinion receives 10% of the seats in the legislature (or Assembly, or Congress, etc.) Your opinion is heard "at the table" on all issues being discussed and decided upon. Right now, unless your opinion "wins", you are completely out of the picture. No matter where you are, if you are a Republican and the Democrat wins, you are completely unrepresented. Of course, as things stand now, we are all unrepresented due to massive corruption. The only reason we have two Parties at all is that they each win in different locations, often uncontested. Prop. Rep. is why many Green Parties hold seats all over the world, but not here.

Local jurisdictions scattered all over the country do have Instant Runoff Voting, and for years Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia has tried to put a bill through Congress that would enable States to elect Congressional representatives by proportional, instead of geographical, elections if they wished. Because they are complex, acquainting the public with the benefits of these concepts is slow, but it is a growing movement because they are so important. Every small party in the United States has endorsed Instant Runoff Voting (I'm not sure if they all have endorsed Prop. Rep.) Santa Clara County has taken the first steps to enable it (Measure J last election), and it is on Alaska's ballot this November. You should support it too. It will increase your political power, whatever your Party.

Thanks for reading this far! For more information, or to become active, please contact the Center for Voting and Democracy, locally at voteaction@hotmail.com, and please vote for me on November 7.