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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> I really want to see the US get to publicly funded elections because full public funding would cost not even a sliver of what elections current run and provide a more even playing field for candidates.

I would be in favor of that if we also blocked media coverage of the election other than strictly objective dates and times style coverage. No opinion sections in newspapers, no “John Oliver” type shows talking about politics, no Fox and Friends, etc.

Otherwise, you give tremendous power to the owners of media companies and then all the previous funds that were raised will go towards buying or starting media companies so they can give your candidate favorable coverage.

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While true—the USA does indeed need election media reforms—these seem like a minute problems next to other issues that the US election system has, including voter suppression/exclusion, non-participation, gerrymandering, as well as all the problems that follows first past the post, single preferential voting with nth degree representation.

If we only fixed the media coverage of the election while still not allowing Puerto Ricans to vote in the Primaries, and still allow super governmental agencies (like the DNC) to conspire with candidates, I don’t think a lot would change.

Maybe you’re one of today’s 10000 https://xkcd.com/1053/

But it’s been widely accepted since West Wing first aired that corruption in America’s electoral system (and politics generally) can be traced back to campaign finance reform as patient-0.

Representatives are constantly campaigning and raising money for the next election and the rest follows from freeing them to actually do their job.

So your saying that any attempt to reform the election system in America is futile?

Edit: I’m not sure which reforms you are referring to, but I bet that corruption existed in American politics before that, even before election financing was a thing. Corruption is a serious problem in democracies that have serious and strict regulations on campaign financing. A prime example here is Israel.

I will have to educate myself on the specifics of corruption in Israeli politics, but we're dealing with a particularly virulent freewheeling kind of graft in American politics where pretty much any curb would be significant.

Right now it is literally all graft and no progress at all to the point that we can barely pass the same bloated terrible budget we pass every year.

No opinion sections in newspapers would be directly against freedom of the press, and I feel like going after cable is just as bad. All of it would be ripe for abuse by the party in power to suppress tthe other too.

While I don’t doubt it would be ruled unconstitutional in the US, election day media bans are enforced in many functioning democracies (including Iceland, Israel and the UK). However, it can be debated how effective these bans are in the wake of social media. Also repercussion for braking this ban is also quite often minimal (two parties were found guilty of violating it in the last Icelandic parliamentary election, and no punishment was given).

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