Voting has a dual role—not just determining the winner, but also demonstrating to the losers and their supporters that they lost fairly, in the most transparent way possible. How do you convince the losers that the winners did not cheat on their budget reporting? How do you account for “unpaid” volunteers? How do you account for “uncoordinated” spending by non-candidates?
Hm? With the current system, at least the final vote counting process is relatively transparent. Yes, there are some opportunities to cheat on the margin of election finance laws, but importantly that opportunity is before the vote count, so has to be balances against the negative electoral consequences of being credibly accused of cheating. With you system, the final accounting happens after the vote, and in a close election, there is just too much incentive to cheat at that point...
The advertising has to be visible, but who exactly paid for it does not have to be. And there are plenty of less obvious spending (e.g. paying people to go door-to-door, phone calls, etc, etc—pay people, then claim they were volunteers?).
Voting has a dual role—not just determining the winner, but also demonstrating to the losers and their supporters that they lost fairly, in the most transparent way possible. How do you convince the losers that the winners did not cheat on their budget reporting? How do you account for “unpaid” volunteers? How do you account for “uncoordinated” spending by non-candidates?
These are all problems with the existing system as well so they are irrelevant for A-B testing the two options.
Hm? With the current system, at least the final vote counting process is relatively transparent. Yes, there are some opportunities to cheat on the margin of election finance laws, but importantly that opportunity is before the vote count, so has to be balances against the negative electoral consequences of being credibly accused of cheating. With you system, the final accounting happens after the vote, and in a close election, there is just too much incentive to cheat at that point...
it’s hard to cheat on paid advertising as it has to be visible
The advertising has to be visible, but who exactly paid for it does not have to be. And there are plenty of less obvious spending (e.g. paying people to go door-to-door, phone calls, etc, etc—pay people, then claim they were volunteers?).