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More from the Twelfth Man

Actually, this article is from Mark Schmitt at the New America Foundation, in which Mark talks about how we will know whether or not the Seattle experiment in democracy vouchers is working.  The takeaway:

The Seattle voucher experiment is important and long overdue. But let's be honest — it's important because it's an experiment, not because we know with any certainty how it will work. If over the next few years, we see shortcomings — candidate participation is low, voters don't use their vouchers, or candidates have a hard time getting started — it won't mean that the core idea is fatally flawed, but more likely that implementation needs to be refined. The numbers can be shifted, or the program can be combined with one of the other small-donor tools, such as matching funds for the first few thousand dollars.

 

 

Seattle and the Power of the Twelfth Man

Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres write in today's Washington Post about the Initiative 122 democracy vouchers adopted this week by Seattle this week:

"The “Seattle idea” can transform the very nature of the campaign. Candidates would no longer spend most of their time auditioning before big-money audiences. Fundraising would become a community affair — a box lunch for 100 could gross 5,000 democracy dollars! These outreach efforts would provoke tens of millions of dinner-table conversations: Who should get our democracy dollars? Who is really concerned about America and its future?"

Indeed, the home of the twelfth man leads the way -- and shows that America is strongest when everyone is involved -- not just 158 or so families.

 

From Mark Schmitt via Vox, the smartest things said yet on Larry Lessig's candidacy for referendum president.

But Lessig, along with Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham law professor who ran for governor of New York in 2014 and has now taken over the Mayday PAC that Lessig launched, has nonetheless made a significant, little-noticed contribution to the debate on political reform. Even if they don't succeed in raising the priority of election reform from "one on a list" to "the first" issue, the substance of their proposals will reframe the debate.

First (and this will be the subject of a longer post to come), Lessig's CEA promises a comprehensive vision of political reform, rather than billing campaign finance reform or voting rights as a silver bullet fix. It reflects an understanding of democracy as a complex system, in which certain reforms can complement one another. For example, Lessig's preferred reform to election structures, ranked-choice voting, pairs well with small-donor public financing systems, and together can make it possible for candidates who start without much money or establishment support to be heard and have a shot at winning.

Second, and more important, Lessig and Teachout have shifted the focus of campaign reform away from a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United, which was the most visible public message for the past three years, embraced by Hillary Clinton and by every Senate Democrat. Lessig has always had a complicated position on the constitutional amendment — he's proposed one of his own, as well as supporting a constitutional convention. He also has a subtle view on Citizens United, which he basically thinks was correctly decided (he's right), but he would reverse the later decision in SpeechNow that create Super PACs.

 

UK Needs a Deliberation Day Before Its EU Referendum

Bruce Ackerman and Jim Fishkin argue in the Huffington Post UK for a Deliberation Day in the UK before its referendum on maintaining membership in the European Union.  Based on extensive experience with Deliberative Polling by Fishkin at the Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy, they note that

In project after project we can show that [Deliberative Poll/Deliberation Day] participants focus on substance not sloganeering....The only serious question is whether the civil service could successfully organize the nationwide system of schools and neighborhood centers required for a country-wide engagement....[A Deliberation Day] will give parliament enough time to consider a second referendum bill that will allow the electorate to move beyond emotional scare-tactics and boring number-crunching as they confront the future of their country in the twenty-first century.

In sponsoring the first Deliberation Day in history, Great Britain will not only enable its people to make their choice with high seriousness. It will be setting an example for the rest of the world -- encouraging it to transform the referendum from a potent device for demagogues into a genuinely thoughtful occasion for the exercise of popular sovereignty.

Deliberative Polling Comes to Tanzania

Credit:: Center for Global Development

Deliberative Polling poses many organizational challenges.  But the cultural challenges may sometimes be even greater, as explained in this NPR story from Tanzania:

This is the first time a deliberative poll has been done on this scale in Africa. The organizers say it raised some particular challenges.

For instance, if you pull together a cross section of Tanzanians a lot of people won't have studied beyond elementary school. So instead of creating written briefing documents, the team had to come up with video versions.

Another problem: How do you do follow-up polls with people who don't necessarily have a phone? The solution: Hand out free cellphones.

But the biggest obstacle may have been the reaction in far-flung villages to the offer of a free trip and phone.

"It was like, 'Why us? What is this?' " says Kinyondo.

Moyo explains that there are a lot of rumors in her homeland about satanic cults, which people there refer to as "Free Masons."

"Anything new in Tanzania that involves money and that people have never heard of immediately gets marked down as a Free Mason thing," says Moyo.

Hats off to Jim Fishkin and his team!

Donor secrecy and the emperor's clothes

Over here at the Washington Post, political science professors Bertram Levine and Michael Johnston make the case that the transparency of direct political donations to candidates is not a solution, but an enabler, of quid pro quos in political campaign finance, or the appearance thereof. 

Ironically, the [Supreme Court's decisions in McCutcheon and Citizens United]...along with the resulting activities of megadonors such as Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, have only added to the appearance of corruption that plagues our electoral process, something that has worried the justices ever since the landmark Buckley v. Valeo decision of 1976.  Is there a better way?

Since the enactment of the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1971, the United States has relied on a combination of contribution limits and transparency — public reporting of contributions and expenditures — to safeguard the political process. But now contribution limits have been rendered largely impotent by the court because of the majority’s contentious reading of the First Amendment: “Money is speech” writ large.

That leaves transparency: mandatory disclosure of contributions in excess of $200. Reformers might take some comfort from the fact that the court has left reporting requirements intact. Sunlight, we are told, is the best disinfectant. But has transparency ever been an effective corruption-fighting tool? Many people deeply involved in electoral politics don’t think so. As former Minnesota representative Tim Penny once put it: “There’s no tit for tat in this business, no check for a vote. But nonetheless the influence is there. Candidates know where the money is coming from."

Yesterday's guilty verdicts in the Robert and Maureen McDonnell corruption trial substantiate Penny's observation.  Politicians know better than to explcitly connect the dots between quid and quo  Instead of preventing corrupition, transparency merely requires elected officials to style corruption as constituent service. 

Virginia's laws simply require the reporting of gifts to elected officials (and in the McDonnell case no campaign contributions were at issue).  In Virginia, gifts to elected officials, as well as campaign contributions, are unlimited.  Transparency is all the law requires.

The McDonnell jury found that the former governor and his wife knowingly abused his office to satisfy the tit for tat requirements of a gift giver, confident that transparency, or even its lack (the McDonnells failed to report a number of the gifts, including free rounds at an expensive golf resort for him and designer clothing for her) would have no consequences.  The convictions rested on circumstantial evidence that McDonnell's frequent constituent service on behalf of the constitutent-turned-star-witness (who was granted immunity from prosecution for his testimony) all too frequently coincided with the receipt of gifts from that constituent. 

Had the McDonnells not inadvertently provoked a federal investigation by firing their official chef for alleged theft of food from the official mansion, transparency would not have prevented the petty sale of the governor's office for private -- and petty -- gain.

Transparency allows politicians to dress up corruption as constituent service.  Donor secrecy would give corrupt officials no clothes.

 

 

Mayday Answereda

Congratulations to Larry Lessig! The Mayday PAC reached its goal.

The PAC raised $1 million in its first month and reached another $5 million by Friday. A storm of donors posted on social media on the Fourth of July about getting “big money out of politics” and ending political corruption. The $6 million raised is to be matched by other donors, for a total of $12 million to spend on the midterms.

The Only Way Public Funding Will Come About

In The Atlantic, Lawrence Lessig again is absolutely on target in arguing that Campaign Finance Reform Has to be Cross-Partisan:

The single central flaw in American democracy today is not the speech within elections—not how much or how nasty or by whom. The single central flaw is the fundraising. America has outsourced the funding of campaigns to the tiniest fraction of the 1 percent. That tiny fraction then leverages its power to enormous effect. It turns otherwise conservative Republicans into “crony capitalists”—the tag David Brat successfully attached to Eric Cantor. It turns otherwise progressive Democrats into the “tools of Wall Street”—think Clinton-led deregulation in the 1990s. Bending goes both ways, pushing the principles on both the right and left off the table. The reality of the need to fundraise is the reality of everything in D.C. And thus it is no surprise that the largest empirical study of policy decisions ever in the history of political science finds a government responsive to the wants of the “economic elite” and “business interests,” but finds “average citizens ... have little or no independent influence.”

Restricting the money spent in elections won’t change this. (Wherever the limit is set, the cash still needs to be raised.) Neither will declaring that “corporations are not persons” change this. (The tiny fraction of the 1 percent that funds campaigns includes no corporations.) The only way to change this is to change the way we fund elections. Both Democrats and Republicans have offered strategies for spreading out the funder influence, consistent with the Constitution as interpreted by this Supreme Court.

None of this is rocket science.  None of it is partisan.  Outsourcing election finance to plutocrats and interest groups of any ideology makes no sense.  Until that changes, Americans are getting as much democracy as they pay for -- which at present is not enough, whether you are an R or a D.

Another reason for public funding...Pity the phone monkeys!

Another reason for public funding is pity for the "phone monkeys," aka our candidates for elected office.   A former phone monkey explains today in the Washington Post:

I was sitting at my desk, ready to start my new job [as a candidate for Congress], when my boss [the campaign conultant] walked into my office and put a monkey carved from wood on my desk. The monkey was holding a phone against its ear. “Congratulations, you are now a phone monkey — start making those telephone calls for money,” she barked cheerfully.

I was unaware that even HBO's "The Wire" had captured the pathos.  High drama!

One episode of HBO’s “The Wire” portrays this campaign reality in a way unforgettable to me. Tommy Carcetti is running for mayor of Baltimore. Carcetti’s campaign manager, Theresa D’Agostino, scolds him to get in a room and make phone calls to raise money.

In response, Carcetti goes into an expletive-laden rant about how much he hates making calls for money and shouts, “I can’t do it anymore! I hate it! I hate it more than anything!” Ultimately, a staffer pushes Carcetti into an almost windowless office to make the calls and D’Agostino tells him he needs to raise $30,000 in the next three hours. “You hit your number or die in this room,” she says as she walks out and locks the door.

Publicly funded elections are a no-brainer.  The phone monkeys should start using their brains.

 

 

Everything you need to know about the future of campaign finance

....is right here.