Voters clearly differed in their candidate choices last week, yet polls of voters of all stripes showed strong agreement on the need to reduce the influence of big-money and anonymous donors in elections.
Seventy-five percent of voters in a poll commissioned by Common Cause and the Public Campaign Action Fund said the amount of money spent on political ads this year represented “a real threat” to the integrity of the nation’s electoral process, Common Cause reported. The same percentage in the national survey agreed it is time to “reduce the influence of wealthy special interests on our elections.”
Two ways to do that are now before Congress. One is the Disclose Act. The other is the Fair Elections Now Act.
The Disclose Act would require transparency of funding and donors for all political ads – especially including those by anonymous corporate donors that hosed the just-concluded election season. That campaign-financing sewer, unleashed by the Supreme Court’s radical reversal last summer of 100 years of settled election law, allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, and to do so without reporting such expenditures in their ads, or publicly, anywhere.
The ruling thus opened a direct, anonymous vein for moneyed corporate interests to unfairly lambaste candidates and spew disinformation with no mention of where the sponsoring advertising money was coming from.