How to (Easily) Fix Our Electoral System

A segment on last week's Moyers & Company covered campaign finance law and looked specifically at New York City's system, which matches small donations with public money at a ratio of 6 to 1. One of the guests, an organizer and the executive director of New York's Working Families Party, Dan Cantor, argued that since money can't be kept out of politics, "(his) ambition isn't to keep private money out. It's to get enough public money in so that even when you have somebody who is not part of the system spending a lot, the other person gets to a threshold that makes it reasonable."

I agree with that sentiment, in part. Electoral competitiveness should not be determined primarily by access to lots of cash, but cash isn't going to be kept out of campaigns. There is plenty of evidence that campaign finance laws that limit spending, however nobly erected, will be circumvented, and the First Amendment creates a real and formidable barrier against limiting political speech, especially as it has been construed by the Roberts Court.

A strong pubic financing system is itself imperfect, though. Some of the strongest opposition to public financing comes from reasonable citizens who don't want to have their (tax) money given to politicians so that those politicians can air attack ads or otherwise advance their careers. Furthermore, public financing is, in effect, a public subsidy to broadcasters because the bulk of campaign money gets spent on broadcast ads.

All of this points to what I think is the best -- and also least discussed -- option for public support of campaigns: a requirement that broadcast licensees give airtime to qualified candidates. Television and radio broadcasters get their licenses from the federal government for free in exchange for serving the public interest. It's not hard to make the case that opening electoral competitiveness and reducing the need for endless fundraising by officeholders would serve the public interest.

The free airtime would not need to be used for droll infomercials or even given as part of news programming (though that could also serve as an improvement), but it could continue to be parceled out as thirty-second ads, with the only difference being that a better-financed candidate could not so easily overwhelm his or her opponent with them.

Just how the airtime would be distributed and how to qualify for it would need to be worked out, as with any other public financing system. Like other public financing systems, it would improve competitiveness in elections, but it would do it with no cost to taxpayers. Likewise, it would avoid the constitutional problems of limiting speech that other reform efforts can raise.

Broadcasters wouldn't like this plan because they make so much from selling campaign ads, but should we really sacrifice the integrity of our electoral system to safeguard the profits of broadcasters -- who get to use the airwaves for free?

So then, why not do this?