Our Elections Are Not Rigged, but our Electoral System is Broken.

In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling reversing a 2002 law that had imposed restrictions on election spending by corporations, unions, and other public entities. The court reasoned that the 1st Amendment did not allow for any restrictions on free speech. Although these restrictions were limited to a narrow reach related to political speech by specific groups, the court ruled that no restrictions could be applied.

Citizens United was a conservative political action group that had been formed in response to the McCain-Feingold Act that imposed certain restrictions in 2002. A series of lawsuits followed that challenged those restrictions that eventually ended up in the Supreme Court.

The immediate impact was the flood of money into federal election campaigns and then into state campaigns. The cost of running a campaign became almost prohibitive, yet it has kept increasing. Politicians spend most of the time raising money rather than considering legislation.

Candidates who could tap into corporate money had a significant advantage over those who could not. Unions didn’t have nearly as much money as corporations. The effect was offset somewhat in recent years with the advent of the Internet and its wide-reaching impact. Candidates could raise millions of dollars simply from lots of small dollar donations through their Internet and social media campaigns at little cost.

In the intervening years, political strategists have called for a Constitutional Amendment to reverse the impact of Citizens United. That would be unnecessary. The ruling struck down specific legislation, so new legislation could be passed. Most say that such laws would be impossible to pass given the current dependence of politicians on SuperPAC money. Starting the lengthy process of getting a Constitutional Amendment is not realistic.

So now we are left with federal election campaigns that cost billions of dollars, and even state campaigns costing millions. If you’ve got that kind of money floating around, it is an invitation to corruption in election campaign financing.

New legislation could put a leash on some of the blackmail by lobbyists. It might even keep some politicians from extorting money from lobbyists. Of course, the media would challenge such an impact on their incomes during the peak political seasons. But fewer ads would reduce my blood pressure by reducing the endless ads on TV, texts on my cellphone, and spam email. Of course, some of that could be done simply by shortening the long campaign season. The British can do it in three months.

To be a politician now you either must be a billionaire or get money from billionaires. That is not what the founding fathers envisioned in the Constitution. Next time we will talk about the unintended consequences of the Electoral College.

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