Campaign finance reform

Campaign finance reform

Campaign finance reform is a political effort to remove money as a variable in politics especially in political campaigns. Attempts for campaign finance reform via legislation date back to 1867 through the big modern era of finance reform would be said to have started with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA), in 1974 this they amend this. Fund raising plays a vital role in the chances a candidate is going to get elected into office especially in the United States. A candidate who doesn’t spend large sums of money in their campaign has a significantly low probability of getting elected into office. While the candidates who raise the enormous amount of money do not always win, the correlation is too significant to ignore; this is why a lot of importance is put on raising money as a candidate. Current proposals of reform include plans such as voting with dollars where each voter is given a “voucher” of sorts amounting to a constant value, e.g., a 60 dollar voucher which they will anonymously donate their voucher to the candidate of choice or another plan where the government matches every small donation made by voters up to a point. For example, the government will match every donation up to 100 dollars; this gives more power to small contributions which are deemed to be less corruptive than large donations by large corporations. This among many plans, however, require the legislature to pass so that they could be useful and with most of the candidates in office right now holding seats which were financed by corrupt finances, it is difficult to say that it would be in their interest to do so.