Public Funding of Elections

.Public funding is an alternative to the current system of campaign financing, and it would be enhanced further by caps on campaign spending. Public funding already exists on a small scale. People who mark their tax returns donate one dollar of their taxes to a fund that is used for national campaigns. Candidates have to qualify for these funds by fulfilling certain requirements, just as political parties have to qualify by gaining a certain percentage of the vote in each election or by actually getting candidates elected. We thus already have a mechanism in place by which we can dole out more public financing and through which we can monitor how it is spent. We can also use this apparatus to restrict spending and institute other controls that we can legally impose.

The Supreme Court has ruled that donating money to political parties or candidates is a form of free speech, as Senator Lott notes, but this does not mean the practice cannot be better controlled--even speech is not completely unfettered from legal restrictions. For that matter, while donations may be free speech, how candidates spend those donations may not be. We place all sorts of restrictions on elections, from who can run to who can vote. We allow the political parties to make a number of decisions as to who is on the ballot and how the candidate is actually selected in different states and finally on a national basis at a convention. We already place all manner of restrictions on who can contribute

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