Slashdot Mirror
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.
Those sub $300 PCs with Linux and Apache are looking more attractive, at least to not be labeled your own political action committee.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
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?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
We're all laughing at another wacky us government decision. But like all the rest, it's a case of a law for the public good being stymied by the unforseen use of the internet.
Supposing you had a private plane that you used in your spare time to fly all over america, co-incidentally stopping at every city where your favourite presidential candidate was speaking. If you were going anyway, where's the harm in offering him a lift? The net extra cost is zero.
Same thing here.
I'm not trying to defend the bill. Well, I am, but my point is that law these days is so complex that there will always be unforseen consequences. When these arise, the thing to do is inform the relevent parties. If nothing happens, then bitch and complain and post to slashdot.
We're at the bitching and posting stage now, because legislators still haven't realised that the internet is unlike anything they've dealt with before.
Give 'em time. Twenty years should be enough for them to cop on.
Until then, let's all give thanks for the ACLU.
What does it matter is my ideas are expressed on the net using a $50 PC or a $10,000 PC? Does it change my ideas any? This law should not apply to web sites. At least not in this fasion. Maybe is their was a law specifically saying (in abstract political mumbo jumbo), "all web pages, containing political views, to be used to aid in a canidates campain, must be registered with _____.." etc. But judging somone's ideas by the cost of the computer they are on is bogus.
"I couldn't give him (Bill Gates) advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology." Linus Torvalds
If you were to staple a pro-[candidate] flier to a telephone pole, would you then have to register as a PAC? Surely, telephone poles cost easily over $1000 apiece...
-cp
It's not tax-deductible, in general, if the IRS thinks the non-profit is political. Political activity is grounds for removal of non-profit status; e.g. if a public university uses official assets to support an Al Gore rally, for instance.
{sarcasm}Not that would ever happen...{/sarcasm}
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Political speech has always been free speech. Now, because I'm using technology to amplify my speech I will need to register with the government? A Web site operator should enjoy the same protection that a newspaper publisher enjoys. There's plenty of political speech in the Op/Ed pages, but you don't see them registering as PAC's. And a newspaper is an enormous capital outlay compared to a Web server.
This doesn't sound right. I'm going to have to call my representatives.
Automatic Sites, LLC
"Vote Tom Swiss (Independent) for Galactic Emperor, I mean President. He promises to completely shirk his duties, never even come to the White House, and return his Presidental salary to the Federal Treasury."
There, I've now made a political statement using /.'s computers, which undoubtedly cost more than $1000. Is /. a PAC? Am I? Are you, if you're reading this on a $1000+ machine?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
When I read this, I was astonished -- momentarily. Then I realized this was exactly the sort of nonsense that would arise from the cry for more campaign finance regulations. I'm sure there are plenty of clueless folk out there who would rather call this a "loophole" than a bad ruling.
The solution is simple: throw out all the ridiculous regulations on campaign financing and simply require full disclosure. If the FEC (which would probably lobby against this, since it would threaten their existence) decided it wanted to classify your site as a political expenditure, all that would be required of you is to have your name there.
Has the FEC targetted anybody but the pro-impeachment feller?
{smirk}Not{/smirk} that I'm suggesting anything here, but...
Unless they're willing to go *THWACK* beating on sites left and right -- discussion groups such as Slashdot included, and almost everybody that posts to certain USENET groups, and so forth... but it smacks of retribution.
It'd be nice if somebody asks Gore, Hillary (who, apparently, wishes to appear in favor of campaign-finance reform... yeah, whatever, Hillary), George the Younger, Dole, and McCain 'bout this move.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
But if anybody tries to HONESTLY AND OPENLY express their personal opinion, they automatically get a sizable bill through the mail.
Conclusion: It's better to infiltrate and pervert a voluntary organisation, and subliminally gain popularity, than be sincere or genuine.
Is there something wrong with this picture?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...this is totally un-Constitutional BULLSHIT!!! If we ever decide to move back from the brink (or back up from OVER the brink) of a police state, we have to scrap ALL the federal laws and start over. If a bill does not meet STRICT observance of the Constitution, it does NOT become law. PERIOD. If only the founding fathers had listened (fully) to George Mason .
If I buy a $2,000 PC, and spend 50 hours/month playing Quake, and 2 hours/month writing opinionated rants on my webpage, couldn't I argue that the value of the "donation" is only $80?
Also, if your diatribes are not posted on sites that you are physically hosting, wouldn't your donation be what the ISP charges?
If I were this guy, I'd argue that since the site did many things besides the political ads, the amount of the "Donation" should be prorated using the amount of server space used for the ads. It is insane to work any other way. Otherwise, you have paradoxical situations wherein if I were to host two sites, one for each of two elections, I'd be "donating" twice as much money as I actually spent.
Hell, by this theory, Geocities has made one hell of a campaign donation!
The cake is a pie
See Citizens' Guide to Contributions and the Law, put out by the FEC.
If you advocate the election or defeat of a specific candidate, you may need to put up a notice, and report it to the FEC (if the value exeeds $1K), according to the section on "Independent Expenditures". However, it may perhaps be unlimited if it's *not* targetted at/for a specific candidate, and is independent of various organizations and political folks...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Whilst a heavily loaded server such as slashdot, or a main party web page costs a LOT to keep running, you can run a small-medium web page for very little these days.
;)
Just the cost for a domain name, and a little for the hosting.
If it were so expensive I dont think the porn pages would do so well
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
The article says he asked the FEC for an advisory ruling. The FEC doesn't seem to have known anything about him before that. Also, there's no mention of the FEC trying to enforce any kind of ruling. I suspect they would just as soon not waste time on him.
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,
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
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.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
But if I spend $1000 on computer equipment, I still have the equipment. I didn't give it away and I didn't lose the equipment after the campaign was over. So how the hell can that be considered a donation?
It also ignores the fact that the computer is not necesserily being used exclusively for this purpose and no other. If I had a home business and used my home PC to run it, but also used it for games, I would only be able to declare a percentage of the PC's cost as a business expense rather than the entire cost. Why is this any different? Is that computer doing nothing but running this one political website?
If I drive my car to a political rally, and my car cost me $18,000, does that mean I have donated $18,000 to the campaign? Of course not. I only used a teeny tiny percentage of the car's lifespan to drive to the rally. And if a webpage is up on a good OS, it will only amount to a teeny tiny percentage of that computer's time and money.
The people who came up with this ruling are technical illeterates who know nothing about computers or how the 'net works. They have no idea that a webserver does not take up the majority of the computer's time unless its a really slow computer or a really busy website.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Rules can always be manipulated.
So far it's only in the discussion stages, but the FEC's rules on independent TV spots is ripe for abuse. The scheme goes like this: Assume that you are trying to defeat the Hon. Cross Palmer. You register as a PAC and place ads showing archive footage of Rep. Palmer at his stupidest, along with double-meaning captioning written by a really good satirist. The upshot is that the Palmer not only becomes a public laughingstock, but YOUR budget gets charged against HIS spending limits.
It's the TV equivalent of a Joe-job. The same tactic works even better on the Net. You register as a PAC and put up a page on Geocities with the Best of Palmer done in slack-stick and then report to the FEC listing the Geocities server farm as a contribution. Now multiply by the thousands of people who think that the public has been serviced enough by Palmer.
MUCH more practical and cost-efficient than television. But then we knew that, didn't we?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
But, er, what does he gain? There's diminishing returns.
There's only so many ads that one can buy, before the nation gets sick of the buyer. This is particularly so if said billionaire already has a high profile and a not particularly sterling reputation...
Look at Perot; his wealth did not help him overcome his eccentricity. Forbe's wealth may actually count against him, by stirring up resentment -- particularly if he opens his mouth on taxes.
Unless you buy up the media itself -- and no one entity is allowed to dominate, say, radio; probably the same for television, as well, and possibly newspapers -- you can't prevent your opponents from being heard, either.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
You make an excellent point. It is high time these people started getting more informed counsel.
A better way, if they must have something, might be to take into consideration the revenues of a site that runs an endorsement, especially advertising revenues. The true value of an endorsement is bound up with who is doing the endorsing and how big their audience is, not how much the equipment cost (what if they used the same rule for radio advertisements!?!). There is a direct relationship between the size of a site's audience and their [advertising] revenues. Thus, the value of the "donation" should be assesed by how much the site would charge a third party for an endorsement of similiar size/content.
If an endorsement is placed on Joe Hackestoop's Personal Home Page, it can and should be ignored by the government, regardless of what hardware he is running. However, if amazon.com or E*Trade placed endorsements for candidates on their sites, I should think those endorsements would be very valuable to their candidates and should be accounted for. The problem is not that the FEC wants to get a handle on this somehow, but the way they are doing it.
The flip side of this is that most commercial sites would never run endorsements on their pages for fear of alienating customers.
JAD
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) 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:
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:
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
I'm aware that the line between censorship and freedom is a fine line. My concern here is not people expressing their opinion, it is monies and similar contributions being given in return for actions on the part of our various legislators.
Put it this way, if you owned a company, would you allow your vendors to give money and other favors to whichever employee is in charge of purchasing and acquisitions? Absolutely not. You can't just say, "oh they can accept goods, but they can't show any consideration." That just isn't practical to enforce. You have to draw the line and simply say, No.
Yet, every day both republicans and democrats alike moonlight with various lobbies. It has only gotten worse and worse since Clinton has been elected (despite claims to the contrary).
One notorious company which is known for its lobbying is ADM. They've created whole industries for themselves with effective lobbying. For example, the sugar tariffs. Its in the name of protectionism, to protect domestic sugar growers from foreign competition. The unadvertised side effect is that domestic sugar remains 3-4x higher (if memory serves) than foreign sugar. So guess what, many sugar consuming companies turn to cheaper alternatives. Guess who just happens to own most of the corn syrup production? You guessed it, ADM. We're talking billions upon billions of dollars?
There are many examples like these. The fact of the matter is that you're never going to be able to prosecute either party no matter how illegal you make consideration. There are always going to be loop holes. The money is going to end up in campaign coffers no matter what is done.
You have to ask yourself, what is worse? Creating a universal law which evens the playing field for all politicians, thus making such campaign contributions worthless, and as a side effect killing a certain area of free speach, but doing so in a consistent and fair manner. Or accepting the status quo: failed attempts at regulation and continued aggressive lobbying, causing inequitable spending, law making, and policy making.
I don't think the answer is black and white. But i'm not inclined to run in fear just because it happens to put a clamp on a small area of speach. This is not the first time that speach, as defined in the constitution, has been restricted. You're not allowed to yell fire in a theater. You're not allowed to liabel. Commercial advertisements are constantly restricted. Television and radio content is censored by the FCC for nudity and language. Some of these shouldn't exist. But others are simply necessary.
Until I see a perfect answer, I will continue to consider such methods. If you have a better idea, please do tell.
PS: Pulling apart words (snip snip), and paraphrasing (putting words in my mouth) are not appreciated. There are other ways more polite ways to discuss disagreements without being so catty. Particularly on a forum such as this, where exact syntax, and other such considerations play a small role. Its not witty, and its most certainly not informative (particularly in this case). It may be your prerogative, but a little etiquette goes a long way. Thanks...
It may go a long way. But unless those thousand people pool their interests, its most likely going to be a rag-tag distribution of money. Whereas the billionare or pooled interest (pre-funded) is decisive. They can, and do, allocate it all to one particularly promising campaign. Given a reasonably equal number of dollars, this will be far more effective. E pluribus Unum...Out of many one.
However, that being said, I think corporate speech (lobbying) has a place, though it is much abused. Innocent (and not so innocent) actions by the ignorant masses and politicians can cripple perfectly legitimate industries in a matter of days.
Is the immediate desire of the voting population, to outweigh their long term economic interests and the interests of the company (shareholders, employees, bondholders, management, etc)? Perhaps companies should be given the same right to contribute that voters are (they are already basically viewed an an individual legally). The question is, how do you weight it, and who decides what is equitable. Its a tough call.
It is a widely held populist belief that if we allow big money, then the rich will control everything.
Straw man. The belief worth defending is that if we allow the amount and effectiveness of speech to be proportional to wealth, then the rich will control more than they should be entitled to.
The burden of proof, it seems to me, is on someone who opposes that belief, holding e.g. that wealth should automatically confer entitlement to have one's speech more effectively heard. I guess you think that, but you don't give a reason for it; you only say it doesn't matter if it does, because "rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum", which is doubtful at best. What is certainly true is that rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum that is commonly represented, but that's just a consequence of the current arrangement in which wealth DOES confer the right to more effective speech.
I mean, look, if wealth is so irrelevant in the shaping of political discourse and electoral decisionmaking, why do viable candidates in the US now have to acquire so damn much of it? And why do you think this situation can't be changed for the better?
--Seen
"I used to be a dilettante. Then I thought I'd try something else for a while."
We were told that killing the equal time rule would give us more and better political discussions. Yeah. I've seen mud slinging and rapidly escalating campaign expenses instead. Bring back the equal time rule, and we'll get some moderation back again, without having troublesome first amendment issues complicating an already difficult problem.
When Russia was setting up for its first real elections, I read we were sending campaign consultants to help their candidates out. Am I the only one who suspected that simply nuking them would have been kinder? At least radioactivity has a known half-life.