Issues of scale

If I choose to be the only Republican in our neighborhood, my neighbors know who I am and I know who they are. If there is shunning, it is shunning with a face to it, and if somebody is going to yell at me he knows I can yell back. All the players have skin in the game.

If I create and fund a black propaganda campaign that purports to be on behalf of one of our senators, the public interest in honest debate demands that I be forced to come clean and admit my contribution. And the public interest in knowing who is buying influence requires that we know who the big contributors are to campaigns—whether as direct contributors or auxiliary supporters.

But in between those scales is a region where vulnerability meets anonymity. If, not my immediate neighbors, but a wider circle are notified of my political contributions there’s no face-to-face anymore, and I am vulnerable to organized intimidators. Yard signs are stolen all the time, and sometimes tires are slashed and windows broken. (typically those of republicans)

It isn’t legal to take my religious or political views into account when hiring me, but there’s no way to prevent searching contribution databases to look for who I might have preferred.

There are going to be tradeoffs in whatever election system we design, but right now we’re looking at a known problem--hidden influence buyers—which we can deal with by open records, and a growing problem with intimidation of small supporters, which open records makes worse.

I know that the link above is about studying how to suppress contributions, not intimidation, but California had plenty of examples of intimidation and vengeance recently after the big referendum.

The above does not accurately reflect either my neighborhood or my finances or my political party.