In Seattle we have Democracy Vouchers funded by the city that every voter is sent in the mail and can be used to make campaign contributions.
This led one candidate to hire people to solicit/collect these democracy vouchers. He raised over 350k from democracy vouchers.
When the election came around, far fewer people voted for him than contributed democracy vouchers.
And the program administrative and overhead costs are quite high, approaching the level of total funds distributed to candidates.
Just pointing out that handing out money isn't free (although it is one of the true core competencies of the US federal government), and can have unintended unproductive side effects.
Just want to point out that this is pretty much WAI: a candidate who sounded promising but wasn't getting funding got airtime, turned out not so great, and failed.
Saying a person should be in the race shouldn't mean that you definitely think they should win it, especially in a FPTP system.
> This led one candidate to hire people to solicit/collect these democracy vouchers.
This sounds like what you'd expect an actually successful/winning candidate to do as well (explore all net positive fundraising avenues). The issue is, this guy wasn't actually a good candidate, and didn't excel at anything else.
This led one candidate to hire people to solicit/collect these democracy vouchers. He raised over 350k from democracy vouchers.
When the election came around, far fewer people voted for him than contributed democracy vouchers.
And the program administrative and overhead costs are quite high, approaching the level of total funds distributed to candidates.
Just pointing out that handing out money isn't free (although it is one of the true core competencies of the US federal government), and can have unintended unproductive side effects.