Thursday, November 11, 2010

Things They Should Invent: make all political donations anonymous

Currently, political donations are a matter of public record in the name of transparency, and there are all kinds of limits on who can donate and how much they can donate to prevent people from buying influence.

Better idea: make it mandatory for all donations to be anonymous. Donations are paid into some central organization and then distributed to the party or individual for which they are earmarked. This is done electronically and double-blind whenever possible, so no one knows or can find out how much anyone donated to anyone. (Yes, they could tell each other, but people who want to influence politicians could also lie about donating to them.)

Maybe they could even aggregate the money and pay it out to the politicos at regular intervals, so the politicos don't know the individual amounts. Why might this be important? Suppose I was trying to influence a politician, so I tell them that I donated a large amount of money to them. To prove to them that I actually made that donation, I could make it a strange number (like $1,097) and then specifically tell them the number.

3 comments:

Whitney said...

Would the central system be in charge of monitoring how much money a person donates total? I'm ignorant of the Canadian method, but in the U.S. there is a donation limit on each person, and I think it's a total amount limit, not per candidate or party.

impudent strumpet said...

I was under the impression that the intention of the donation limit (we have one too) is to prevent people from being able to buy undue influence. If that's the case, the anonymous system will make it unnecessary. If the intention of the limit is something else, it would depend on what the intention is.

laura k said...

In the US, the limits are completely meaningless, as there are all kinds of legal ways around them.

Anonymous donations are a completely excellent idea. It would pretty much end political patronage and influence-buying.

No wonder it hasn't been instituted.