Experts defend, oppose Electoral College, campaign finance rules

The Electoral College is good for democracy and regulation of political campaign financing is generally bad, one expert on election laws told a judicial conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. Another speaker, equally expert, said the opposite.

Organizers of the panel on law and politics at the annual conference of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals were evidently looking for a diversity of viewpoints, and got what they were looking for.

The Electoral College has been criticized as antidemocratic for deciding two of the past five presidential elections in favor of candidates, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, who both lost the nationwide popular vote. But Bradley Smith, a law professor at Capital University in Ohio and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said the institution serves as a useful corrective.

Considering the enormous political power wielded in heavily populated areas on both coasts, Smith said, “I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world that all these folks in flyover country, who have their two senators (in each state), have a little extra influence.”

As for regulation, Smith — author of the 2001 book “Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform” — said laws requiring disclosure of campaign contributions provide little useful information to the public. He endorsed the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that allowed corporations and unions, as a matter of free speech, to make unlimited political donations.

Contrary views came from Richard Hasen, a UC Irvine election law professor whose 2016 book, “Plutocrats United,” attacked the Supreme Court ruling.

“We’re at a very dangerous point in our democracy,” Hasen said, with more campaign spending, less disclosure, and a proliferation of voter-identification laws aimed at reducing minority turnout. The Electoral College, he said, “is in tension with one person, one vote.”

The third panelist, Ann Ravel, a former Federal Election Commission chairwoman who will start work as a UC Berkeley law professor in September, agreed with Hasen that disclosure of campaign contributions “makes a big difference to the public” and does not interfere with free expression.

Ravel, also former chairwoman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission, said she was particularly concerned with high-tech “micro-targeting” of voting populations, aimed at lowering their turnout with fabricated campaign ads and “fake news spread by bots.”

But Smith said voter participation was suffering because “campaigns are now centralized, in part because you have so many laws.”