Campaign Finance Meets the Web

tristan writes "According to the Federal Election Commission expressing your political views on a personal web site constitutes a campaign contribution. How big a contribution? You can start tallying it up by adding up the cost of the server hardware and software. If it's over $1,000, you need to register as a political action committee! The ACLU has a story here. "

The ACLU's solution to the campaign finance mess is to advocate more public funding of elections. Are there other solutions? I'm interested to hear what slashdot readers have to say.

Truly bizarre.

If speech is a contribution, then so, arguably, is volunteering for a campaign or simply doing ANYTHING remotely related to politics. How might they compute the cost? Well, using the FEC logic and extrapolating, factor in food, shelter, transportation and all the other necessities...

Newspaper editorials become contributions.

Showing up at a rally and providing a boost by expressing your support on national TV is a contribution.

Delivering a sermon against sin could easily be taken as a contribution.

Oops. Has anybody at the FEC read the Constitution lately?

campaign finance is free speech

Of course advocating for a candidate is covered by campaign finance laws. Limiting campaign financing is limiting speech, equals-equals it's censorship.

It is a widely held populist belief that if we allow big money, then the rich will control everything. The proper ACLU-approved response to this is it doesn't matter, free speech is absolute and the proper rational response to this is it doesn't matter because it's not true.

The reason that free speech is important is that ideas are important and it's important to hear all sides and judge. Everybody gets to vote, rich or poor, nobody's taking that away. Yes, if unlimited free speech is allowed (yay!) then the rich will get more of it, but they already have more of it, campaign finance law has not and will never change that, and it's specious anyway because rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum too, from BarbAra Streisand to Charlton Heston. In fact, it is easier for the little guy, a dark horse candidate to convince a few rich people to support him/her than it is for that candidate to pound the pavement and fly all over the country raising peanuts here and there and ultimately getting nowhere. That's how George McGovern got in. It's only nowadays after we've had campaign spending limits lots of good candidates are complaining that they can't raise enough money.

When speech is controlled by the government, that's when you lose freedom. Campaign finance law is part-and-parcel of dictatorship, as is public financing. If we were to get public financing, do you think any current office holders or entrenched civil servants will not use it to their own advantage?

And, right back on topic, if you attempt to limit free speech/spending speech you are always going to get people figuring out how to get around it as we saw with PACs, soft money, private individuals running advocacy ads (banned) and private individuals setting up private websites (which has to be banned for the same reason).

The answer is simple: stop limiting free speech, whatever form it takes, and how ever much it costs.

Of course, I feel compelled to add, sometimes free-speech (in the form of campaign shindigs) does equal free-beer if you can wangle an invitation.

I think this case is ridiculous, but...

This case is ridiculous. However, campaign finance issues do need to be addressed. There should be restrictions on contributions. Lobbying (of all kinds) is arguably a form of free speach. Though there are clearly huge abuses that simply can't be allowed. Its not just fortune 500 companies either, its unions, interest groups, and many others.

I basically feel that the greater good would be to disallow active advertisements. eg: TV ads, magazine ads, banner ads, etc. They tend not to be informative, and resort to scare mongering, and mud slinging.

"Passive" ads on the other hand would be allowed. eg: Web pages comparing and contrasting the candidates. The Federal government should provide a web site, call it election.gov. Which would basically provide the forum for each candidate and interest group to speak their minds, and distribute meaningful information. Hopefully, it would be conducive to constructive and intelligent criticism, ...rather than what is normally seen today in politics.

I know it wouldn't make it absolutely equitable, but that is not my primary concern here. I don't think we can, as a country, afford to have our promulgators and policy makers to be enticed by financial considerations given by various lobbies.

...anyways, i'm out of time. hasta

Re:Amen

I agree absolutely. Let everyone contribute as much as they want. There are thousands of people who contribute one dollar for everyone that contributes one thousand dollars. And there are thousands of them for every one that could contribute one million.

But I would add one other requirement: contributions from eligible voters only. Not only would this eliminate the foreign funding scandals that are arisen in the US, but it would also eliminate corporate funding of campaigns. If the CEO of MegaCorp wants to support George Dubya, then it should be his money/stocks, and not that of the shareholders. Ditto for the unions.

Learn the facts before flipping out

Is it me, or is /. becoming home to any sort of FUD that will get people whipped up? (Unless it's against Linux, of course :-)

This is a classic case of the ACLU and some hyper-active first-amendment activists blowing things out of proportion and slanting the facts to suit their purposes.

I actually went to the FEC's web site and citizen's guide (http://www.fec.gov/pages/citnlist.htm [fec.gov]) for some information before posting this reply and learned some interesting things.

First, volunteering does not make someone a PAC as some people have immediately starting yammering on about. From the site:

Personal Services

An individual may help candidates and committees by volunteering personal services. For example, you may want to take part in a voter drive or offer your skills to a political committee. Your services are not considered contributions as long as you are not paid by anyone. (If your services are compensated by someone other than the committee itself, the payment is considered a contribution by that person to the committee.)

As a volunteer, you may spend unlimited money for normal living expenses.

Further, what the article is talking about when you personally make a web page about a campaign is called "Independent Expenditures" -- meaning that you are doing it as an individual and independently, not linked in with some candidate campaign. Again, from the site:

Independent Expenditures

Independent expenditures provide yet another way to support Federal candidates. An independent expenditure is money spent for a communication that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate. It is "independent" only if the individual making the expenditure does not coordinate or consult in any way with the candidate campaign benefiting from the communication. Independent expenditures are not considered contributions and are unlimited. You may spend any amount on each communication as long as the expenditure is truly independent.

You may, for example, pay for an advertisement in a newspaper or on the radio urging the public to vote for the candidate you want elected. Or you may produce and distribute posters or yard signs telling people not to vote for a candidate you oppose.

When making an independent expenditure, you must include a notice stating that you have paid for the communication and that it is not authorized by any candidate's committee. ("Paid for by John Doe and not authorized by any candidate's committee.") Additionally, once you spend more than $250 on independent expenditures during a year, you must file a report with the Federal Election Commission, either FEC Form 5 or a signed statement containing the same information.

There are a couple of relevant caveats in that. First, you have to say that you are independent. Second, if you spend over $250, you have to file a form. This DOES NOT mean your free speech is being restricted. All it means is that the goverment is requiring you to register how much you spent on your speech. Why? So that political campaigns can't get around federal law by pretending to have lots of independent contributions.

You can download the form from the web site. It's about a page long. Name, address, how much you spent. Not much more than that.

Finally, I personally think it would be hard to say that a page on your website with a political message should be "calculated" as the cost of the machine, web-space, etc., as the marginal cost of adding a page to an existing site is essentially zero. If you had a dedicated machine, they'd have a better case.

In any case, people should go looking for the facts (since they're in plain sight) before overreacting to whatever FUD people want to use /. to spread.

-XDG