Heard any good arguments against Fair Elections? 
Neither have we!

Ask your incumbents if they are co-sponsors of the Fair Elections Now Act. If they are not, ask them “Why Not?” Then let us know if you hear any arguments that aren't discussed here.

Here are some of the talking points raised by incumbents and other defenders of the current corrupt system of privately funded campaigns:

Money just doesn’t work on politicians!
This will give the government control over political speech.
But, Fair Elections are a waste of taxpayers’ money.
This is nothing more than "welfare" or "handouts" or "food stamps" for politicians.
Show me when campaign money ever changed a vote.
It costs too much.
Right now, election campaigns are free and that’s a great deal for taxpayers.
If the government were smaller and involved in fewer parts of our lives, there would be less reason for anyone to want to influence the government with campaign money.
Public funding of election campaigns is nothing more than an incumbent protection scheme.
There is no problem with the current system.
Publicly funded elections are unconstitutional.
Its no shame to take money from special interests, everybody does it.
But, doesn’t the money for election campaigns already come from “the public”?
My Senator gets only gets 10% of his money from health insurance companies, so how can you say that’s the reason he always votes the way they like?
Won't kooks and crazies take advantage of this and run for office?
I don’t want my money spent on candidates I disagree with.
Now that the Supreme Court has decided that corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts of their money on influencing elections, how can our democracy survive?

Money just doesn’t work on politicians!

Members of Congress do not like to be put in the position where they have to defend the way campaigns are currently financed. It is very difficult for them to defend the current system and not sound self-serving, if not corrupt. This is because, for incumbents, the current system is self-serving and it is corrupt. The best strategy they have for dealing with this subject is to avoid addressing it at all or if they have to address it, to say that we, the folks back home, have it all wrong; money doesn't really have any effect on them or on the work of Congress. Then they change the subject.

While most of us find money to be very useful in getting what we need, we are asked to believe that money doesn’t work that way for people who make large campaign contributions. Incumbents say they don't really have a good idea who gives them money or what, if anything, these people or these PACs want in return.  Anyway, it doesn't affect any of the votes that the incumbent makes. It’s kind of like Superman and kryptonite.  We know that Superman is powerful, just like money.  But, in the presence of kryptonite, Superman loses all of his power.  And, just like that, they would have us believe, money loses all of its power, as soon as it lands in the hands of a politician!

The “money doesn’t work” argument is even more absurd when you know that incumbents spend an enormous amount of time raising enormous amounts of money knowing that, if they fail to do so, they may lose their jobs in the next election.

Incumbents will try to cut off any conversation about the role of campaign money in Washington by saying, "In all my years in Washington, I've never seen campaign money make any difference in the way I or any of my colleagues vote".

But, people are not fools. Polls consistently show that large percentages of voters of every party think that members of Congress listen to those who pay for their campaigns more than they listen to the voters. Recent polls showed that to be true by an 87 percent to 12 percent margin.

This will give the government control over political speech.

Fair Elections funding is entirely voluntary. It is available to any citizen who can show significant public support. Candidates who choose to participate must agree to take no donation larger than $100. Candidates running publicly funded campaigns can be anywhere on the political spectrum. Candidates who choose not to participate are free to continue to raise money the way they do it now.

But, Fair Elections are a waste of taxpayers’ money!

If our only concern was money, we could really save taxpayers a lot of money by allowing the special interests who pay for a candidate's campaign to also pay for our Senator’s salary, and for his or her staff’s salary, for their offices, transportation, living expenses in DC, etc.   These interests would be more than happy to pay and for all the same reasons they are willing to pay for our Senator’s re-election campaign.  They are giving a little, to get a lot.  They calculate that if they can spend some money now to keep your Senator in office, they will reap much larger rewards in the future by being able to influence decisions made by Congress. 

In the end, we, the citizens, end up paying much more that we would if we recognized that paying for election campaigns, like paying congressional salaries, is one of the costs of being a self-governing people.

This is nothing more than "welfare" or "handouts" or "food stamps" for politicians.

According to this argument, politicians should just get out there and “earn” their money.  But, what do politicians have to trade in exchange for the large amounts money they need to pay for their campaigns? 

For incumbents, it’s pretty obvious; they have their vote in Congress.  Rather than having the public provide candidates with the funding they need to run for office, we have put our elected officials in the position where they need to hustle around Washington, night and day, looking for money. 

One night, for instance, they might attend a cocktail party fund-raiser held in their “honor” by bankers and Wall Street executives and then, the next morning, they sit down in Congress to make rules about what these same financiers are allowed to do with our retirement money.  That isn’t very smart of us to put them in that position, is it?

As long as we don’t provide a source of limited public monies for election expenses, we can expect our elected officials to continue to “sell us out”.   They can do it in the form of plain old bribery or by just “getting along by going along”, or by doing nothing when something desperately needs to be done.  We shouldn’t be surprised when good people do some awful things in the process of “earning” their campaign money.

“Show me when campaign money ever changed a vote.”

Although there are probably times when money changes hands in exchange for a vote, the real problem is the corruption of the whole system. 

It’s like you are at a baseball game.  The home team is down by one run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.  The count on the batter is three balls and two strikes.  Then, the umpire calls, “Time out!”, and goes to the mound.  The pitcher pulls a couple of thousand dollars out of his pocket and hands it to the umpire while the whole stadium watches.  The umpire puts it in his pocket and returns behind the plate.  Here comes the pitch, “Strike Three!”, yells the umpire.  The game is over, the home team has lost.

Now, did the money the pitcher gave to the umpire buy the result he wanted?  Was it really a strike?  Is the umpire corrupt?  We actually know the answer: what "really" happened doesn’t matter.  The point is that the entire stadium saw what happened.  They feel cheated and angry because it is apparent to them that the game is fixed.  They have lost trust in the integrity and honesty of the game.  The whole game is crooked.

When average citizens see powerful people hand over large amounts of campaign money to members of Congress, and then see that these same people get the results they want from Congress, we feel cheated, angry, powerless, and cynical.  The whole game is crooked.  Congress cannot be trusted.

That’s why umpires’ salaries and expenses are paid by the baseball league and the reason that elected officials’ salaries are paid by the public.  And it is also the reason that the expense of running for office should be paid by the public, too.

It costs too much.

Our ability to choose our representatives, by vote, in a fair election, has been paid for many times over with the blood and lives of our fellow citizens and our ancestors.

But it you want to talk about money, the cost of implementing the Fair Elections Now Act, depending on how many candidates choose to participate, is estimated to be about $1.5 billion per year (out of the 3,518 billion dollar federal budget). This is less than $6 per citizen.  That’s a lot of money, but compare it to the cost of  so-called “free” election campaigns that we have now (below).

Right now, election campaigns are free and that’s a great deal for taxpayers.

We, the citizens, are already paying for election campaigns in indirect, undemocratic, and extremely expensive ways.
The most obvious examples are the no-bid contracts and earmarks to companies that make payments to the incumbents' campaign funds. 

Someone once said that, “the real scandal isn’t all the illegal things that go on in Washington, it’s the things that are perfectly legal”.  This article provides a good example.  It is about a House ethics committee ruling, “that seven lawmakers who steered hundreds of millions of dollars in largely no-bid contracts to clients of a lobbying firm had not violated any rules or laws by also collecting large campaign donations from those contractors.” 

The biggest examples of the cost of “free” elections are the recent bailouts of Wall Street and the banks and the resulting government bailouts and deficient spending to avert a financial meltdown.  Financial interests are always among the biggest patrons of incumbent members of Congress.  They have used this power over the years to reduce the ability of the government to make and enforce rules that prevent fraud in the market and that prevent dangerous financial conditions from developing, such as institutions that are “too big to fail” and institutions that take on more obligations than they can meet.

As a result of Congress working to please this powerful group of campaign funders, oversight became lax, dangerous situations were ignored, and the economy came very close to a collapse.  We, the citizens, lost trillions of dollars in our retirement and investment accounts.  We have put hundreds of billions at risk in order to save these financial institutions and we have borrowed hundreds of billions to prevent the economy from collapsing.  And a lot of us have lost our jobs. 

But Wall Street and the banks still continue to resist putting in place safeguards that can prevent this from happening again.  Because Congress is still dependent on them for campaign money, few in Congress are willing to stand up to them.  Unless we get our Congress back from the campaign financiers, our savings will not be safe.  We are likely to repeat the same cycle.  The incumbents and their financial patrons will win and we will lose, again.  A pretty high price for “free” election campaigns. 

Finally, the most common, daily examples of the enormous cost of privately funded campaigns to the public are the artificially inflated prices we pay every day.  One of the uses that industry makes of campaign money is to get the government to help eliminate or reduce competition in the marketplace.  Less competition means higher prices for all of us.  For instance, by using their ability to grant (or withhold) campaign funds from members of Congress, the health insurance industry has been able to protect itself from competition by maintaining its anti-trust exemption and the drug manufacturers have been able to prohibit Medicare from bargaining on drug prices. There are many, many such examples.

At $6 per person, per year, the cost of Fair Elections is just a tiny percentage of the cost that the public is already paying for “free” elections campaigns.

If the government were smaller and involved in fewer parts of our lives, there would be less reason for anyone to want to influence the government with campaign money.

As long as we have privately funded elections, the day of small government will never arrive.  As Lawrence Lessig points out, in 20 of the last 29 years our country has been led by presidents who have repeatedly called for "small government", but the government has consistently grown. 

Interactions between Congress and individuals or industries wanting something from the government (a tax-cut, a de-regulation, a new regulation, or a contract) are seen by members of Congress as opportunities to raise money for their campaigns. Bigger government means more opportunities to raise campaign cash.

As long as they have no alternative source of campaign money, incumbents will look for new opportunities to do favors while protecting their old patrons by maintaining the funding already in place, funding a new project, or expanding funding of an existing project. Year after year, the government will grow larger and larger in this self-perpetuating process.


Public funding of election campaigns is nothing more than an incumbent protection scheme.

Between their high re-election rates, the ever-increasing cost of beating an incumbent, and the fact that incumbents have a fundraising tool that their challengers don’t have (their ability to vote in Congress), incumbents have plenty of protection already.  This is why many incumbents are so resistant to co-sponsoring the Fair Elections Now Act.

If Fair Elections were good for incumbents, it would have passed a long time ago.

Publicly funded elections are unconstitutional.

"Clean Elections", a type of publicly funded elections, has been working in Arizona and Maine for almost a decade. This system has survived many court challenges. A U.S. District Court judge has recently declared one feature of Arizona's Clean Elections system to be unconstitutional. That feature is not part of the Fair Elections Now Act.

As long as publicly funded elections are voluntary, that is, candidates can choose to participate or not, the Supreme Court has said that they are constitutional.

There is no problem with the current system.

If you are an incumbent and you are only interested in yourself, this is probably true.  Incumbents almost always out-fundraise their opponents. Often they have no well-funded opponents at all, and they usually win.  The current system works great - for incumbents.
 
Its no shame to take money from special interests. Everybody does it.

True.  Until we have Fair Elections, people running for Congress will have to rely on the current system of privately funded elections in order to run a campaign; they have to get their money from somewhere, after all. 

What is shameful, selfish, and destructive to our democracy is when current members of Congress, who have the power to do so, refuse to support the Fair Elections Now Act and to responsibly deal with the corrupting influence of privately funded elections. 

Incumbents who are not co-sponsors of the solution are co-sponsors of the problem.

But, doesn’t the money for election campaigns already come from “the public”?

Most of it comes from a very, very, tiny part of the public.  In the 2008 election, 60% of all the money came in amounts of $2,300 or more and it came from just one-tenth of 1% of the population (that’s only one person out of every thousand Americans).

A lot of money comes from Political Action Committees (PACs), legal entities connected to businesses, unions, and other organizations.  They gather money from members of the organization and give it to the campaigns of candidates who have (in the case of the incumbents) helped the organization or who they think will help in the future.  The payments they give to the re-election campaigns of incumbent members of Congress who have behaved to the PACs liking, are not to be confused with illegal bribes.  They are legal. 

Learn more about the money and candidates in this and past elections at www.OpenSecrets.org.

My Senator gets only gets 10% of his money from health insurance companies, so how can you say that’s the reason he always votes the way they like?

The fact that he has many interests groups paying for his campaign (bankers, oil companies, lobbyists) doesn’t mean that he doesn’t serve each of his patrons well.   The real question is, “Senator, what percentage of your campaign money has come from people who are splitting their pills because they can't afford to take the dose the doctor wants them to take?  And how many of your re-election commercials are being paid for by the ‘Sick, Uninsured, and Bankrupt Political Action Committee?’” 

In a democracy we each get one vote to have our voice heard.  Right now, the dollars of the few are drowning out our voices.

Won't kooks and crazies take advantage of this and run for office?

In Arizona and Maine, where public funding for the state legislatures and state offices has been in place since 2000, this has not been much of a problem. In those states a candidate can qualify for funding by collecting a small number of contributions with the maximum contribution of $5. While citizens seem willing to sign petitions without knowing much about the issues discussed on the petition, once they are asked to write a check to a candidate, it seems they are much more careful about who they support.

The Fair Elections Now Act, as introduced, requires House candidates who wish to qualify for public funding to collect a total $50,000 (maximum individual contribution of $100) from a minimum of 1,500 people in their state. The requirements for Senate candidates are higher, roughly in proportion to the population of the state. A candidate who is able to raise that much money from that many people has demonstrated significant public support.

I don’t want my money spent on candidates I disagree with.

None of us agree with every action of our government.  You can be sure that whoever is in power, they are going to be spending money in some ways that you don’t like.  But, that’s how democracy works.  Money is collected in taxes and the Congress, along with the President, decides how it is to be spent. 

Right now, it is very often the case that only the incumbent has enough money to run a credible campaign.  When we don’t have competitive elections, the government is spending all of its money without you having a say.  Publicly funded elections provide that there will be more than one well-funded candidate in the election.

Now that the Supreme Court has decided that corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts of their money on influencing elections, how can our democracy survive?

Fortunately, elections do not automatically go to the candidate who spends the most dollars but to the candidate who gets the most votes.  There is a point at which each additional dollar a candidate spends (or has spent on their behalf) produces very few additional votes.  If candidates have enough money to let voters know who they are and where they stand on the issues, additional spending is less important.

So, the good news is that unlimited spending has a diminishing impact. At the other extreme, there is also a dollar amount below which a candidate simply does not have enough money to make the voters aware of their candidacy and their positions on the issues.  A study of House elections between 1992 and 2006 showed less than 1% of the challengers who spent less than $700,000 were able to beat the incumbent.  The same study also showed that when a challenger spent more than $1,500,000, the money spent above that amount had little effect on the challengers’ ability to win.

The funding provisions of Fair Elections Now Act have been written to provide qualifying candidates with the minimum amount necessary to run a competitive campaign.  After qualifying, candidates would be able to continue raising money in small donations (under $100) that are matched 4 to 1 by public funds, up to a set amount, above which, no additional matching funds would be available.  Funding amounts for Senate campaigns are larger and are in proportion to the size of the state.   

Ask your incumbents, if they are not yet co-sponsors of the Fair Elections Now Act, "Why not?".
Let us know if you hear any arguments that aren't discussed here.