Getting My Wish (almost) And Learning To Live With It (or not)
Copyright 2003 D. Frank Robinson
“Be careful what you wish for, you just may get it."
- unknown
Never has the saying rang so ironically in my ears as it has while studying the Voting With Dollars proposal by Professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres. From the mid-Eighties through the Nineties, I must have complained dozens of times to friends and acquaintances how I wished some academics would have the same epiphany as I and launch a campaign for anonymous political contributions from their lofty platform. They have; and the effect on me has been - well, very therapeutic.
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Watergate scandal. It began to unravel with the break in of the Democratic Party National Headquarters by CREEPs. Yes, that's what they were called, operatives of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (Nixon). It was discovered that the CREEP 'plumbers' worked for the White House and were financed by political slush funds raised as campaign contributions. Out of that scandal came the political stampede to enact the basic elements of the campaign finance regime we have today.
The original motivation in 1973* was to stamp out political slush funds as a corruption which could lead to a lawless secret police state. I was possessed by a kind of intellectual demon - campaign finance reform by using 'secret' anonymous contributions - like voting with dollars. At the time I thought the idea was fiendishly ironic - using secrecy to fight secrecy.
The response of my peers at the time: it's to simple to work or it would work too well, meaning no body would give. (Almost nobody was giving then.) No one has ever been able to explain why people still vote anonymously, but they would be totally unwilling to give anonymously. Of course, what the speaker means is that “not enough people will give as much as I think they should.” That kind of thinking was discouraging and partially deterred me from pushing the idea, but I was also restrained by my own reservations about the complexity of my method of 'shuffling the money' to assure anonymity. Remember, this was back in the dark days before cheap computers, automated teller machines and public key cryptography and other things we have today to implement the machinery of anonymity. There are still problems, but I think they are solvable and the other authors think so as well. Of course, in 1973, it was already to late to stop the grease being laid down in Washington to railroad a 'reform'. And, people had not had thirty years of experience with failure which they now have. Time may or may not turn out to have been on the other side. We have yet to see if the present system can be rehabilitated.
Instead, the notion of full disclosure of contributions and expenditures in 1973 became modus operandi for legalizing threats and reprisals, punishing and rewarding political contributors. What had been a shadowy underground political activity was simply converted into a regulated monopoly utility - the FEC (controlled by incumbent politicians).
The notion of applying the analogy of the secret ballot to campaign finance occurred to me while I was working for Mickey Edwards, later Congressman, at Private Practice magazine. I wrote a short paper outlining the idea which I contend, but I have not been able to verify, is buried among the pre-1977 records of the U. S. Copyright office. My records were destroyed in a house fire on Independence Day in the mid-1980s. I wrote another essay presenting a considerably modified version of the basic idea in 1993 and registered the copyright in 1994. This fact is verifiable through the online records of the U. S. Copyright Office. Search on TXu 620-390, or “Slashing the Gordian Knot of Campaign Finance Reform: A Plan for Anonymous Contributions.”
Nothing about my claim of priority diminishes the independent originality of Professors Bulow, Ayres or Ackerman. Furthermore, all four of us must yield to Professor Alexander Heard of the University of North Carolina for his presentation of the basic concept in his The Costs of Democracy, 1962! This is a fact which escaped me until 1983.
It might be interesting to research the writings of Progressive advocates of the secret ballot in the late 19th century to discover if some of them extrapolated that idea to campaign donations. I would be somewhat astonished that no such record could be found.
Now, let us turn to a comparison of Bulow, Ayres and Ackerman plans to mine - with due deference to Professor Heard.
The original paper by Bulow and Ayres in 1997 was titled The Donation Booth and that accurately describes the essential notion we have in common. The modified version of the Donation Booth with Ackerman's Patriot Dollar additions was presented in the Voting With Dollars (VWD) book in 2002.
For brevity, I shall refer to my plan as the 'Gordian Plan', that of Bulow and Ayres as the 'Booth Plan', and that of Ayres and Ackerman as the 'Patriot Plan'. Heard's plan will be referred to as the 'Heard Plan'. All of these proposals involve some way of “voting with dollars” anonymously.
The Machinery
The Heard Plan used a special form of postal money orders as a ballot to vote with dollars. For the times that mechanism was probably the most efficient means available.
The Gordian Plan originally resembled absentee ballots for donors with sealed envelopes within envelopes to shuffle the deck and expenditure vouchers for candidates, but after the introduction of automated teller machines and public key encryption in the later 1970s I evolved the idea into a booth with pairs of special 'smart cards' for donors and debit cards for candidate expenditures.
The Booth Plan anticipated using checks mailed to trust companies administering blind trusts and issuing checks to candidates for expenditures.
The Gordian Plan used banks as a location for secure booths with special ATM s, but the banks were mere conduits and transferred ownership of the funds to a government administered centralized trust agency called the FACCT Fund. The FACCT issued debit cards to the candidates.
The Patriot Plan is similar except for the inclusion of the subsidy feature. The authors' of all plans answer objections to the reliability of the mechanics of securing anonymity with very similar arguments in greater or lesser detail.
I have mentioned the basic machinery of anonymous transfers first because this is the least interesting and the details quickly become tedious and technical. This issue is vitally important, but the authors have no significant disagreement that the processes are practical and can be reliable with existing technologies as far as I can tell. The Gordian Plan specifies that all the machinery be exposed to public scrutiny - except the transient cryptographic keys used to effect anonymity and those can be tested for reliability.
The Mechanics
The disagreement between the others and I arise over the underlying philosophical justifications and the ends which the Plans ought to serve. I have a few normative bones to pick because my political orientation differs from that of Ackerman and Ayres. I recognize that some apparent differences are no more than rhetorical flourishes because they and I are primarily addressing different audiences. Nevertheless, I find substantive grounds to disagree with some of the arguments for either the Booth and/or Patriot Plans.
Although A & A (Ackerman & Ayres) quite cogently criticize the traditional regime of campaign finance reform as too ”command and control” oriented, they too seem unable to break free of the wage and price control doctrines of the past. They accept as legitimate the enforcement of a norm of limitation on the amount of cash inputs some can offer into the political environment - even when they are anonymous. Private money in politics is still seen as a polluting substance for which there is no acceptable substitute, so it must be put up with to a certain point.
This view leads them to introduce an antidote which purports to partially neutralize the polluting effect of cash from the 'wrong' neighborhoods - the wealthy. This is Professor Ackerman's Patriot Dollars subsidy which is supposed to help people in the 'right' - less affluent - neighborhoods cancel most of the effects blowing in from the other side of the tracks.
A & A are unable to resist the impulse to tack a sack of distributive justice on the side of their plan for anonymity and introduce a gratuitous element of coercion. Of course, the Patriot Dollars amount to just another quid pro quo proffered to the less Stalinist elements of the traditional reformers. Patriot Dollars are taxpayer dollars. Taxes are paid substantially by the very wealthy - excluding Social Security taxes. I would like to see citizens offered an alternative to using the Patriot Dollars to fund candidates' campaigns. If citizens could use Patriot Dollar to, in effect, vote for 'None of the Above' by putting the voucher in their own tax free retirement plan or to pay medical expenses, then it would become slightly less odious. Regardless, Patriot Dollars are a coerced wealth transfer from higher income taxpayers to lower or no income tax payers. A & A would seem very unlikely to agree that Patriot Dollars could be denied to citizens who vote but don't pay income taxes. The facts of the matter are that Patriot Dollars are a diversion of funds that could otherwise be used to fund programs like Social Security and Medicare which are justified as aid to those same less wealthy voters and non-voters.
Why rob Peter to bribe Paul to donate to Mary's election campaign? The concept of Patriot Dollars undercuts the argument that anonymous donations are a way to suppress quid pro quo politics. I must conclude that the introduction of subsidy through Patriot Dollars is a dose of poison pills to the purer forms of the anonymity concept in the Booth Plan and the Gordian Plan.
The Gordian Plan puts no limit on the total amount anyone can contribute, but it does contemplate making them use different machines in different places if the amount exceeds a certain threshold. (If one local client machine is compromised, the central host will still reject on over-limit transaction.) This inconvenient user limitation and certain others may turnout to be technically unnecessary.
Since deals for dollars is the essential problem all of us are attacking, A & A have ably reinforced parts of my previous arguments for anonymous donations. A & A arguments on the merits of anonymity are quite through and commendable and I do commend their scholarship. In fact, I found some of their reasoning so compelling that I am persuaded to consider modifying my Gordian Plan. I would consider moving the line back from universal mandatory use by all candidates.
I think we could all agree that incumbent office holders have more 'pull' on prospective donors than challengers have. The incumbents certainly have the muscle to 'push' donors. Therefore, it makes more sense to me to consider making anonymous contributions mandatory for incumbent office holders and also prohibiting them them from accepting any income outside of their salaries; but allow non-office holding challenger candidates to opt out of the exclusive anonymous donation plan. This modified Gordian Plan addresses the problems which the Patriot Dollars are alleged to mitigate to the extent that I would concede there may be 'equity' problems between incumbents and challengers. Incumbents are government employees, non-incumbent challenger candidates are not employees of the government, therefore incumbents seeking re-election should be more regulated than non-government employed non-incumbent challengers. I think you may see that this opinion derives from the view that the Constitution is a scheme for limiting the freedom of action of all government employees more than the citizenry.
I wish to address one other objective of A & A, as well as the blatant command, control and containment crowd of reformers, which I contend any plan of anonymous contributions cannot solve. No anonymous contribution plan can plausibly contend that anonymity of contributions can induce more participants donating to campaigns. I argue that changes in voter turnout after the adoption of the secret ballot were and continue to be far more influenced by factors other than anonymity of the ballot. The secret ballot may well influence for whom people vote, but not how many people vote. Therefore, I contend there is no basis for arguing that contributing anonymously will induce more people, on net, to give, rather it may change for whom they contribute.
Under the present full disclosure regime about one-quarter of one percent (.0025) of Americans give more than $200 to a federal candidate. The current regime in its BICRA incarnation is designed to keep the elite who finance federal candidates toeing the parties line. The whole existing campaign financing scheme is a subversive political activities control regime directed at the wealthy to maintain the bipartisan political status quo. A group of wealthy people, should they ever peacefully 'revolt' or 'bolt', have the means to mobilize a popular discontent. An elite financed electoral 'revolt' could, if the elections were fairly administered, sweep out an incumbent President, one-third of the Senate, and possibly the entire House of Representatives in one election! Such an event would obviously have more historical significance than the fall of the Soviet Union. But such a sweeping change is precisely what the Constitution contemplates as permissible.
Contrary to propaganda direct at the general population, the present system is designed NOT to deter so-called 'Fat Cats' or 'special wealth interest' from corrupting the government; it is designed to keep the elite in line and to keep their money flowing to the political status quo. It's the same game as the open ballot of the 19th century applied to the wealthy who finance the campaign extravaganzas of the status quo. For 99.75% of the population this arrangement has no apparent relevance to them - why should they be disturbed?
Well, what about a candidate like Ross Perot? Doesn't he refute, by counter example, my argument? Yes, what about the emergence of such a convenient windbag to contain, betray and deflate any surge of discontent from the bottom. The Perot (Reform) Party was an object lesson to drive home the mythology of the 'wasted vote'. Have you ever heard the story of the Trojan Horse? Where is Ross Perot today? ' nary a peep be heard. What happened with Perot was an object lesson to any potential renegades in the elite as well as to the other 99% of the electorate: it doesn't matter whether you trust the status quo or not, just don't try to put your trust in anyone else - not even on a one-time trial basis. Furthermore, just to be sure any electoral insurgency was aborted P. Buchanan showed up to drive a stake through the heart of the poor fetus of the Reform Party in the subsequent presidential election. They never saw it coming. The status quo message was "If you can't finance or vote for us, then don't do anything; we will accept victory by default for another century. Resistance is futile. Thank you very much"
Furthermore, I contend that while A & A, like me, are hoping that resistance is not futile, they are mistaken in their hope that the pursuit of the ideological goal of a larger donor 'turnout' from a specific socio-economic group will defeat certain incumbents. This dubious ideological hope leads them to repeal anonymity with full disclosure up to some limit like $200 and a subsidy for candidates with the Patriot Dollars. In other words, what they argue implies that all contributions of $200 or less are likely vanity contributions. They imply that those minor donors don't need protective anonymity to insulate them from the pressure of PACs. PACs are just a reincarnation of the old ward heelers and precinct captains whose job was to round up the voters like cattle and make sure the cattle wound up in the right 'pen' on the ballot. The Gordian Plan of universal anonymity would send the PACs straight into the dust bin history. People do not vote by battalions, why should they use a PAC to donate as battalions?
Abandonment of the anonymity principle for the principle of the open ballot for small donors is a betrayal and it gains nothing. The status quo establishment can easily yield the point to those small donor people. Why? Because the incumbents don't really give a damn to whom the small donors give their Patriot Dollars - they can safely assume the status quo will get the lion's share of it because those small donors will have no one else to turn to anyway. And why don't they? Because there is no one from the so-called 'elite' who can risk being a venture political capitalist and the seed an alternative for the small donors to rally to. Under the present regime and under Patriot Dollars nothing much is changed. If the small donors opt out and don't spend their Patriot Dollars on any candidates, the incumbent establishment gets the money back anyway. Win-Win for the status quo and it's all for show anyway. Spare us the shell game.
The big donors are where the leverage is. If the big donors are bound and gagged, there is no one to suggest to the small donors that questions need to be ask. And since the big donors are hostages, one of them can always be trotted out as a sham rebel leader to demoralize any ruckus in the cell block.
I have mulled the objective of incentives for linked to anonymous donations for thirty years and I am convinced that other means are better suited to address levels of voter turnout and donor participation. I deal with those other means to address these issues elsewhere. The secret ballot reform was a measure to improve the quality of the vote. The Gordian Plan is designed to secure the same objective in voluntary private donations - to improve the quality of the donation. If the Gordian Plan increased the number of $200 plus donors from one-quarter of 1% by 100% to one-half of 1%, then fine. But the objective is that all such donations are unconstrained by adverse political action and unrewarded with special favors from political authorities. I trust the people, when the people have trustworthy tools to work their will. Today, the citizens' toolboxes are mostly full of junk.
In dismissing the notion of subsidies to induce citizens to pass the cash on to candidates of their choosing I suggest another approach to public financing of campaigns. First bar all incumbent office holders from accepting any remunerations outside of their salaries so long as they have been elected and hold office and then give them a pay raise sufficient to finance their reelection campaigns out of their salaries and bar them from using the anonymous contribution system to augment their campaigns. The expenditures of incumbents would be fully disclosed. If people believe that robbing Peter to finance Mary's re-election campaign is justifiable then give Mary a pay raise and forget about schemes passing the money around the table and out the door and back in the door again into Mary's purse. I leave it to proponents of subsidized campaigns to concoct formulas for allocating the pay raises to incumbents and charge then with the job of listening to all the whining and blustering of incumbents.
If the incumbents' get their subsidies openly, what could be done for the challengers? One possibility would be to setup a fund equal to the total salaries of the incumbents. Then hold a lottery for challengers. For every dollar the challenger raises through the anonymous donation plan they would be awarded a ticket for the lottery in addition to keeping the donated dollar. Proponents of subsidy can devise the formula to allocate the prizes and I charge them with job of listening to all the bleating and cajoling. Challengers could refuse the tickets, or they could opt out of the anonymity regime and take their chances with whatever regime the command and control crowd designs for them or we also allow them to opt out of that legal mine field just allow any challengers to make deals for dollars as best they can just like the 'good old days'. Ultimately the voters will determine the most acceptable approach and reward those candidates who make the 'right' choice at the real ballot box.
If you think I am merely being satirical, think again. Make up your own combination of schemes, the possible variations are almost endless as are the problems compared to those of a straight forward total regime of anonymous contributions for all. After all, think how much variety would be re-introduced if the secret ballot was also optional.
The Watergate scandal served as a pretext to seize control, exert command and stifle the American electoral processes. An example of using the misdeeds of the few to punish to many. The Gordian Plan, had it been in effect in1972 might not have prevented Richard Nixon from trying to run roughshod over the civil liberties of some Americans, but it would have prevented the Congress of the United States from doing it on a nationwide scale with their scheme for a dictatorship the incumbents which we have today.
The real strength of the Gordian Plan for donor anonymity is that does not bias electoral choice. If, by allowing donor large or small to vote with their dollars with anonymous immunity from 'analysis', and then if, those donors were empowered to reveal their honest convictions with those donations, and then a change in electoral choices (new parties, new candidates) did occur. It would be a demonstration how much the present system has been distorting free democratic choice. Resistance to donor anonymity may finally resolve into the fear that people may find out things political may really be worse than than they have dared to imagine. On the other hand, nothing much different may happen, in which case the validity and legitimacy of the status quo will have been vindicated by a new element of honesty. Personally, I wouldn't bet on it, but I can live with being proved wrong on this point.
The Engineers
Quoting Alexander Heard, “A century and a quarter ago, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the private initiative of Americans. They walked across the street, he reported, formed a committee, and handled the matter without a by-your-leave to any bureaucrat.” The Costs of Democracy, page 402, Anchor Abridged Edition, 1962. And your move is?
In closing, I do salute Bulow and Ayres for finding the right track and following it as far as they did. Unfortunately, the Ackerman switch derailed their train. I almost got my wish. I can live without it. What I can't live with is what we have had for thirty years.
The Gordian Plan is at www.geocities.com/dfrank_robinson <http://www.geocities.com/dfrank_robinson>.
The Donation Booth is at
1.www.igpa.uillinois.edu/publications/PolicyForum/PF11-4_tax_donation.pdf
Voting With Dollars is available at your local bookstore or try Amazon.com.
Alexander Heard's The Cost of Democracy is out of print. Sorry.
For anesthesia, read the campaign finance law and regs on Government web sites.
* The years 1973 and 1974 were personally important for me. My son was born in 1974; the local media found the Libertarian Party in Oklahoma, which I chaired, novel and newsworthy; and, I had a hand in almost getting a new congressman elected.