Stopping the buying of candidates

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 09:24 AM 10/17/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>
>There are several swirling threads about the development of crypto systems
>(e.g., "binding cryptography," "key recovery," "one-way traceable e-cash")
>that are designed to allow law enforcement some ability to track illegal
>transactions, catch some criminals, etc.

One of the other items on my wish-list (short of a more, uh, "permanent" 
solution to politics) is a system to actually enforce the anonymity of 
political donations.  What I mean is this:  As bad as a large political 
contribution is, what's worse is that the candidate who receives it knows 
who it is from, and how large it is, etc.  Given the recent flap over the 
Indonesian donations to the DNC, it seems to me that it would actually clean 
up politics if there were a mechanism to collect donations, blind them and 
send them to the proper candidate, but hide the actual source of that money. 
 Hide it from the candidates, not necessarily the anyone else. 

This may sound difficult.  After all, it will be argued that a given 
contributor will want to take credit for a donation and tell those who 
receive it; one way to help avoid this is the assess huge penalities (say, 
10 times the value of the contribution claimed) to the party or candidate 
who is told of the source of a contribution but does not report the breach 
of security.  The system could be set up to actually encourage people to 
test it and report fraud, and perhaps be awarded anonymously for providing 
evidence of misbehavior; and people should be able to (falsely) claim credit 
for donations, at least to the candidates themselves.  

Any donation reported to a candidate must be declared by the candidate and 
is then lost; their motivation for reporting it is that it'll be lost 10x if 
they don't.  

The result should be that the candidates should have no idea where the money is 
actually coming from, only that they are getting it.  The contributors 
should be able to verify (via some sort of encrypted-open-books system) that 
the money they donate is actually being credited to the candidates, but they 
should not be able to use this system to prove to the candidate they made 
the contribution.

I really wish those people who are developing that "binding cryptography" 
proposal would change their minds and decide to work on a proposal such as 
this, one that might actually help fix the political money problem.


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com