Campaign Finance Reform

I agree that effective campaign finance reform has increasingly become a necessity for our county, especially since the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, where it was determined that corporations have no ceiling on political expenditures as long as the money is not in direct support of a candidate. The movie "Big Sky, Big Money" clearly depicts how this ruling has increased the amount of money coming from unknown sources through organizations such as Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s. As a result, these oftentimes unknown, outside voices receive a tremendous amount of power to change the results of an election because people will vote for the candidate who the external forces want and have monetarily supported enough to take precedence over a lesser-supported candidate.The money from these groups is put towards ads that are supposedly issue-based , but are clearly candidate-centric, and as a result has a lot of power. Consequentially, this is a detriment to democracy - wealthy donors have a huge say in election results while small donors do not, and so there is an unequal distribution of power that favors one faction -the rich. In the article, a solution to attract smaller donors was proposed by John Sarbanes and entailed the combination of  a voucher system with a public matching system, with the idea that the government would provide a $50 refundable tax credit for candidate donations and would match funds based on what the campaign accepts. This solution is favorable to other possibilities because it ascertains that smaller donors still have prominence in the result of elections and can use their free speech to the fullest extent (it's not free speech unless someone is listening). The possibility of a public matching system may also be just what our country needs to increase voter participation - if people are given a better chance to have their voices heard, even among donors who previously had most of the power, they would be more inclined to spend money on a campaign and vote, since they would have a much greater influence on the election results. While I do think that there ideally should be some additional regulation in the form of laws to override the currently infinite, unregulated amount of donations that can be given to Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s, there will always be an inevitable "leak" for money to find, and so I think that incorporating this kind of voucher/matching system will create a way to combat this leak by strengthening the voice of those who are most affected by it.