Voting is a Private Matter

Directly influencing the outcome of elections is not illegal. It's at the core of our Democratic system. We each get a little influence. It's called a vote.

Some of us exercise this small allocation of influence, some do not. But the power is small enough that none of us, by either voting or not voting, can single-handedly affect the election in an undue way.

And so it remains a personal matter. We don't have to tell people who we vote for because we each have the same small power.

If, by contrast, one person had the responsibility to vote for his whole family or whole town, we might require that the vote be public, so those affected could audit the use of the special power. But with votes distributed equally to all, we are each responsible only to ourselves, and no disclosure is needed.

Should Contributions be Private?

People seem to gravitate toward simple political statements like “disclosure is good” or “disclosure is bad.” Such statements might sound simple, but the desire to make the wording simple introduce injustices. In the name of good old-fashioned human justice, I'm going to argue for a more nuanced view.

For regular people, campaign contributions are limited by law. We're each allowed to contribute in a small way to the campaigns of politicians we like. And because the contribution is small, it needn't be disclosed. The theory is, and I think most of us would believe it, that none of us can unduly influence an election by making a modest contribution subject to legally specified spending limits.

I suppose to avoid the situation where one person gives a series of small contributions in lieu of a large one, the campaign must take the names of people contributing in order to show that it's abiding by these rules. This is important because that's where the money is adding up. My single contribution of $25 might not matter on any given time, but if I get a thousand or a million such contributions, it could make a critical difference because others might not be able to afford to match my contribution, and I could end up “buying the election.”

Conflicting Goals in Privacy

Already the situation is becoming complicated. Neither the government nor any private citizen has any need to know who I give money to, as long as I give within my allotment. But the government does have a need to know that the allotment is not being exceeded. So we require people making donations to make that information public, but it's important to remember the reason. The reason is not that my neighbor has a need to know.

We audit contributions because we have observed that there is a tendency when they are not audited for people to try to unfairly use money to magnify their own preference in a way that we think might affect election outcomes. And, importantly, we generally agree that below a certain line, the mere fact of making a donation does not constitute such an unfair attempt to affect election outcomes.

Given all this, small contributions by individual humans are very much like votes: they are little bits of power we allow each citizen to wield without fear that doing so makes them ethically compromised.

And yet the information is public. And so we arrive at a curious case where other citizens have information for one purpose that they are not really entitled to for another. This should raise red flags about any potential use of that information other than for the purpose of auditing campaigns for undue influence by an individual.

Auditing Corporate Donations

Much fuss has been made about the recent Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. The ruling in that case requires that a corporation, which is not a human being but nevertheless is regarded as a legal person, is able to spend unlimited amounts to help political campaigns.

Yes, “unlimited.” And this is not some abstract hypothetical. Very large amounts were freely spent by corporations in this last election in ways that could not have been done by humans. It is not a stretch to say that such large amounts might really sway or even have already swayed an election.

And even the Supreme Court, populated as it is right now by a majority that is plainly business-friendly, upheld requirements for disclaimers and disclosures, presumably to make sure these potentially unlimited contributions could be audited and discussed by the public, ultimately so that voters could take such large spending into account when choosing whether to consider the various messages streaming at them during elections.

Many think this isn't enough protection, but that's a topic for another day. For today, it's enough to note that pretty much everyone agrees that if you're going to allow such large contributions, disclosure is necessary.

By contrast, I argue that disclosure of the small contributions human beings are allowed to make is both not necessary and not advisable. The fact of having a spending limit at all is enough to make disclosure unnecessary. As for the part about it being unadvisable, read on.

Confronting the Urge to Meddle

I want to discuss a few scenarios that inform my belief that privacy is critical to humans. Let me start with a favorite quote of mine, from a very stirring speech I was fortunate enough to see given in person:

So the obvious importance of this statement to our discussion today is that if someone, an employer perhaps or some other party with a hold over you, has access to how you vote, they have the means to know when to punish you if you have not voted as they want. If they have no such access, they can still punish you, but not in a way that relates to how you voted.

And the same is true for financial contributions.

Would they even want to do this? Well, just to offer a couple of examples, Newsweek says Wal-Mart attempted to influence how its employees voted in the 2008 election, and The New York Times reports McDonald's tried to influence employees in the 2010 election. These are probably not isolated examples. So, yes, if they were allowed to actually monitor an employee's votes, I think some companies might indeed want to do so.

And sure, some might say that contributions are not votes. But at minimum they reveal information that's very related to one's vote. One usually does not give money to the opponent of someone they plan to vote for. It defeats the purpose. But let's go beyond that and work some examples.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

We've said that an individual's allowed contribution is small and not worth reporting. But what about a company of 1000 people. If the company could make each of them contribute to the same campaign, the amount of money in play would be a thousand times as much. That's a lot more money all directed toward one candidate over another. It's illegal, and I think we'd all agree that it's properly illegal.

What about if two candidates, A and B, are running. What if the company said that no one can contribute to candidate A? I think we'd all agree that's pretty bad. It would seem to favor candidate B and we don't like that. I imagine it's illegal.

But now suppose my 1000 person company company just says “we want everyone to contribute” but does not say who to contribute to? Or what if it says “we don't want anyone to contribute to anyone”? That might sound fair. No candidates are mentioned. But here's where the subtlety of information warfare comes in. Suppose I want to favor candidate A. If I know that more of my employees favor A than not, let's say 650 like A and 350 like B, all I have to do is say that ”everyone must donate $100 to the candidate of their choice” as part of my “campaign for civic involvement.” That might mean that $35,000 goes to candidate B, who I don't like. But it means I've forced $65,000 to candidate A. So I've forced a net gain in funding to candidate A.

Likewise, if I wanted to prefer B, I might say “We're a company that must appear neutral, so no one must contribute to anyone.” It sounds fair and even-handed. But if I did so knowing who was already leaning one way or another, it's possible it's not. Consider that I might have chosen to have no one contribute rather than everyone contributing knowing that the typical person will donate $100, so I'm guessing $35,000 will not go to A and $65,000 will not go to B. Suddenly now I have found a way to bias things for A.

What I'm really getting at is that it's hard to assure that employers don't find out this information, so it's necessary to assure they cannot act on it. There is no reason a company should be interfering with votes. It might well be that I work for a farm that raises beef for slaughter just to get money to pour into an anti-red-meat lobby. If so, that's my private choice. It might even cause me to lose my job one day. But that's my choice. That's what it is to be involved in politics, and if businesses can control what employees do, then employees will one day have no rights.

As it is now, due to the Citizens United case, they're badly outgunned in the public square. The corporations have megaphones and regular citizens are just increasingly straining their paltry human voices in a losing struggle to compete.

Summary

We shouldn't be allowing large corporate campaign contributions for many reasons. But given that we allow it, requirements for disclosure of who is behind the contributions must be enforced. Otherwise, corporations have the advantage.

By contrast, for contributions made by individuals subject to the small limits required already by law, ought by right to be private matters. Presently, the information is not private because of the need to audit campaigns, and so that implies that the protection should be on use of the information. It may be that an employer can find out how an employee voted, but there should be very strong restrictions on any use of that information, whether to encourage or discourage contributions. No human should be forced to disclose his or her own contribution and no employer who finds out about that contribution from another source should be allowed to act in any way on that information.

We saw a recent example of such abuse in yesterday's incident with MSNBC suspending Keith Olbermann. My remarks here speak as well to that incident. The reasons I've advanced here are not the only reason I think MSNBC did the wrong thing. But they're among the reasons.

Voting is a private matter. Personal human contributions should be a private matter as well. MSNBC is not a person, it's a corporation, so it has no interest in this discussion. This is about something that is beyond corporations.

I don't really care what contract Keith signed and then later violated. I care that no corporation should be allowed to write such contracts, and then we'd have no reason to talk about people violating them.