Opinion

A Common App For Campaign Finance?

Brad Crate CEO, Red Curve Solutions
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Are there any limits to government power nowadays? A fisherman was prosecuted for a Sarbanes-Oxley violation. The Supreme Court creates rights out of thin air. The government can force you to purchase health insurance or face a steep penalty enforced by the IRS. If the government is going to overreach, why not make campaign finance rules easier for all?

Right now, if you run for federal office, you register and report your activity with the Federal Election Commission. If you run for state office, you need to register and file campaign finance reports with the relevant state body. But you may have to be creative to find them, because they all have widely different names. In Massachusetts, the body is called the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. In Georgia, it is called the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission. In Texas, it is called the Texas Ethics Commission.

Once you locate the correct regulatory body, be aware that each state has vastly different laws with different contribution limits and different source prohibitions. For example, in Massachusetts, an individual can contribute $1,000 per calendar year to a statewide candidate. In Texas, you can give an unlimited amount to a statewide candidate. In Texas, a corporation cannot contribute to a candidate. In New York, a corporation is permitted to contribute to candidates but is restricted by applicable limits.

In addition to different laws and regulations, each state has vastly different disclosure forms, requiring different information expressed in a different format. These forms are filed at different frequencies. Some states require monthly filing, while others require quarterly, semi-annual, or annual filing. Some have special “late contribution” reports or time sensitive reports that disclose contributions or expenditures of a certain threshold amount.

No one can dispute the beauty and diversity of our “laboratories of democracy.” But each state’s approach doesn’t exactly reflect the will of its people after a careful balance of free speech and regulation. Often, state campaign finance rules are decided without fanfare, and are often kept in place for decades without change until a court ruling at the federal level forces an update.

Instead of keeping this patchwork system of bureaucratic red tape, allow me to propose a different way that might save millions of tax dollars and millions more on regulatory compliance. Let’s keep the current system but allow states to opt-in to using a uniform set of campaign finance disclosure forms. This system would operate very much like the college common application. The state’s unique contribution limits and source prohibitions would remain, but the form in which campaign finance is reported will be uniform throughout the country along with the filing frequency. The reports will be filed and reviewed by the same regulator (whether it be the FEC or a comparable body equipped to deal with the extra 50 state workload).

Putting constitutional concerns aside, there would be some clear advantages to a uniform campaign filing system. There would be consistency and ease of administration across the American political land for both regulators and political actors. People would learn the forms and know how to properly fill them out and review them. One’s geographic location or office sought would no longer matter in that regard. Americans would know where to find every campaign finance report and be familiar with how to interpret and analyze them. No one would get lost in a maze of confusing state databases or complex state forms.

This would further erode state sovereignty, but would also streamline the whole campaign finance endeavor in a way that would save state taxpayers money.

Of course, maybe neither the federal government nor the state government should have any regulatory power over an individual’s expression of political speech. But this is not a solution to that question – it’s merely a proposal to make candidates and campaigns lives easier, and save the taxpayers money, no matter their state of residence.

Brad Crate was the CFO of Mitt Romney’s campaign for President in 2012 and is the founder of Red Curve Solutions, a FEC compliance company