Most voters are familiar with the pork and earmark money that comes into their districts. They are made aware of these funds by their representatives through newsletters and campaign literature.
But those funds come at a price and representatives, while they tout their successes, don't publicize that price.
Here is a simple method of campaign reform.
It should be made mandatory that representative's newsletters, which, after all, are paid for (whether they want them or not) by the constituents, must contain the voting record of the representative on all issues. It should also be mandatory that all campaign donors and their donated amounts be listed. Candidates running against an incumbent must also list all their donors and campaign contributions. In the event that the opposing candidate has a previous voting record it should also be listed.
These transparencies will give voters the information needed to make an informed voting decision.
If the representative doesn't want to list his/her voting record or their campaign contributions in his/her newsletter he/she must at the very least list them in a local newspaper.
If nothing else, we may find that our mailboxes will be stuffed with less useless political material.
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2 comments:
Your idea is excellent, but how are you going to get anyone to run? They won't have any means of raising money for the next election. They won't be able to raise funds, unless they are an Obama. There's only one of those.
They'll have to wait until they are out of office to get on the lecture and book selling circuit.
I will take your deal on the newsletters--we pay for these newsletters and they don't tell us much at all so in exchange there should be some required info. like votes and contributions. my only change would be that it may not be possible to list every donor since it might fill a whole newsletter so should be some type of summary and a link to the campaign finance website for more details. Otherwise these newsletters are used for propaganda and nothing of any critical nature is in there and while that is fine if you are paying for it yourself, given that this is public money there should be some strings attached to insure that the public gets some benefit for its dollars. Tony
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