Yet, whenever it comes to a matter of advertising, everyone gets up in arms about how the person with the biggest advertising budget wins. It doesn't matter whether it is for a product or a political contestant. The complaint is always the same "oh, he only won because of all the money he got from X so now he's going to be beholden to that entity."
So which is it? Are people smart enough to make their own decisions and vote or not? If they are, then you don't get to blame the advertisements they see for their decisions. If they aren't, guess what: You still don't get to blame the marketing to which they were exposed. Being stupid is a defect, not an excuse.
The problem isn't that Johnny Politician gets too much money from entity X. The problem is that someone can win an election using a lot of campaign funding even when they are a complete douche nozzle. In other words, let's not blame campaign funding for the bad decisions that voters make.
You may ask "Okay, so maybe people are too dumb to make their own decisions, shouldn't we control the media to which those people are exposed?" The first and most obvious answer to that question is "You should probably replace 'people' with 'we.'"
The fundamental problem you are trying to address is that people are gaming the system... at least, that's what some of you believe is happening. I defy everyone reading this to come up with a true example from history wherein adding a layer of rules to a system reduced the extent to which that system could be gamed.
If you want better decisions to come out of elections, your only real option is to try and get the voting population to be smarter or at least to be better decision makers. You have a lot of options you can try. Here are a few of them, and I'm not recommending any of them:
- Educate voters in critical thinking so their behavior is more their own
- Provide incentives that entice intelligent voters to activate
- Provide incentives that entice unintelligent voters to deactivate
- Provide a filtration system that weeds out stupid voters
- Reduce the number of stupid voters to raise the average
Education is controversial if you are teaching the issues. It's not so controversial to teach critical thinking skills themselves. The real problem with that kind of education is that most people who think the can teach it actually cannot. I'm guessing we have something like 1% of our population that can even approach objectivity when considering something. Maybe less.
I'm not sure what incentives you can provide for intelligent people to get them to vote more. The thing that would get me voting would be if voting were worthwhile, so maybe just doing other things to get the quality of the voting population up would do the trick.
Incentives to get dumb people not to vote aren't hard at all. The main obstacle is giving someone the ability to prove with reasonable certainty that they didn't vote. Once you've done that, almost any trinket would do. I bet you could keep five percent of the worst voters away from their ballets for $100 a head or less. The great part is, so long as you don't run out of funding, you don't even care if someone managed to defraud you. After all, if they can outsmart even the simplest amount of bureaucracy, it's probably okay for them to be voting.
A filtration system is dangerous as anything that is not opt-in would be. It could quickly convert from a quality-assurance tool to one of oppression. I can't imagine any system where the government says "no, you cannot vote," that doesn't degrade into something Orwellian in decades.
Reducing the number of idiots in the world has the same problem. Or, at least, it did until the advent of modern birth control. Offering free vasectomies in exchange for small prizes would let the worst portions of our population select themselves out of the gene pool while leaving them, the entities that are already born, free to enjoy the rest of their lives.
Whatever the case, the problem we have right now isn't the few who have the funds to buy ad-space for their favorite candidate. It is the many who are so easily influenced by such parlor tricks.
