Posted at 11:00 a.m.
Would it be possible in the United States to limit election expenses and ensure equal opportunities between candidates? It would limit the action of lobbyists who influence elected officials.
Pierre Rousseau, Quebec
You put your finger on a big problem in American democracy: the influence of money in the electoral process.
The short answer to your question: As things stand, it is unfortunately impossible to limit campaign spending and political contributions by wealthy citizens and interest groups in the United States.
Why ? Because the United States Supreme Court has found that freedom of speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, includes the freedom to make near-unlimited financial contributions to election campaigns.
In 2010, in Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that a person or company could spend as much money as they wanted during an election campaign as long as they did so through independent entities. (e.g. Super Political Action Committees, or Super PACs), not by paying the money directly to the candidates.
These independent entities should not coordinate directly with the applicant. But in practice, since they spend large sums of money to elect or defeat candidates, the result is the same.
Already significant, the influence of the Super PACs and the dark money increased a lot since 2010. (What is the dark money ? These are contributions from which we do not know the origin, because they come from non-profit organizations which do not have to reveal the identity of their donors.)
For the 2020 presidential election cycle (2019-20), the Super PACs raised more money – US$3.4 billion – than the two leading presidential candidates (US$1.6 billion for Joe Biden and US$1. .1 billion for Donald Trump)!
The only way to reverse this worrying trend is for the Supreme Court to reconsider its position. In the short term, that won’t happen. The Court, which has six out of nine conservative judges, including five ultra-conservative judges, should become more progressive again.
The US Supreme Court has also interpreted freedom of speech very broadly in other cases to overturn election laws. Thus, one cannot impose a total limit on an individual donor (McCutcheon judgment in 2014) nor distribute public funds to reduce economic inequalities between adversaries if one of the candidates has unlimited electoral funds (Bennett judgment in 2011).
Seen from Canada and Quebec, these American decisions are dizzying…
Freedom of expression also exists here, but it does not confer the right to give as much money as one wants to a political cause, have ruled the Canadian courts.
Election laws in Quebec and Canada are very strict. Companies cannot make campaign donations. In Quebec, the campaign contribution limit is $100 per year. There is no Super PAC.
Expenditure by independent groups (unions, pressure groups, associations and other third parties) is tightly regulated. For example, at the federal level, they cannot spend more than $350,000 (per organization) during an election period.
In 2000, the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative pressure group, challenged this last rule.
In Harper v. Canada (the decision refers to Stephen Harper, President of the National Citizens’ Coalition in 2000), the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that freedom of expression in Canada did not allow unlimited spending during an election. The Court espouses the egalitarian conception of the electoral system, which “is based on the idea that everyone should have an equal opportunity to participate”. Rules limiting third-party spending allow “those who wish to participate in the electoral debate to do so on equal terms,” writes the Court.
This is a much more egalitarian conception of the electoral system. A thousand leagues from that in force in the United States!
With Vox and OpenSecrets.org