Dem
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GOP
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Poll after poll has shown that most Americans are wildly against the idea of billionaires buying elections. Many of them want some other kind of system, such as public financing of campaigns for Congress and lower offices. As usual, be careful what you wish for.
New York State has a new system for public financing of statewide and legislative races. Small donations (under $250) are matched 6:1 for statewide offices, so a $100 contribution from a small donor yields $100 + $600 = $700 to the candidate. This makes it possible for candidates who appeal only to small donors to make a race of it. For the state legislative races, the match ratio is degressive, from 12:1 under $50 to 8:1 for over $100.
In theory, this makes life tougher for candidates supported by fat cats, since their donations are not matched. Unfortunately, it makes life easier for scam artists. Investigative reporters for The New York Times have discovered that this law can also be used to benefit shady candidates or even outright scammers.
What the reporters turned up is that candidates can provide the state with a list of small donors and how much they donated and the state just matches it according to the formula in the law. The state doesn't check if the donors even exist, let alone have donated. For example, one candidate for the Assembly, Dao Yin, claimed a donation of $40 from a Queens taxi driver named Raheem Zadran. His brother gave $25. His son gave $50. When the reporters checked this out and talked to the "donors," none of them had even heard of the candidate, let alone donated money. The candidate could have gotten a list of residents of his district from a phone book or any online source, and then made up a phony list of very small donations and submitted it for matching. In this case, the candidate was nailed because a couple of intrepid reporters had a hunch and checked out the donations.
If a national scheme for funding congressional races were adopted, there would have to be a serious enforcement mechanism. Otherwise, scammers would file for office (which usually requires only a modest filing fee and perhaps a small number of signatures), make up a list of fake donations, and submit the list for matching. (Paging "George Santos.") The matching has to be done quickly or the whole scheme would be pointless. You can't have a candidate submit a list of donations in September and not get any money until January after an investigation and still have the system work. By the time the state found out that all or most of the donations were fake, the "candidate's" bank account would be empty and the candidate would be nowhere to be found.
This is not to say that public funding of campaigns can't be made to work, but it has to be thought out carefully. Maybe the government could set up a website like ActBlue or WinRed—say, DonatePurple—and all allowable donations would have to be made via that site using credit or debit cards. The software would check that no card number was used for more than the limit ($250). Then the state would know how much actual money was donated. Scammers might try to use stolen credit or debit cards, but the site could check electronically with the credit card companies and banks to verify that they were valid numbers. In any event, this should be a lesson. (V)