Lawrence Lessig on East-Coast vs West-Coast code

Posted Mar 1, 2014 0:35 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Lawrence Lessig on East-Coast vs West-Coast code by gswoods
Parent article: Lawrence Lessig on East-Coast vs West-Coast code

Campaign finance laws cannot stop negative ads, they can only limit how much is spent directly supporting a candidate.

I don't know why that would be. If you had the stomach for restricting how many good things could be said about a candidate, I think you could write a laws that restrict how many bad things you could say about all the other candidates just as well.

The campaign spending laws I know of that have passed both public and constitutional scrutiny don't limit spending based on the message; they limit it based on who is speaking - so I can independently run as many ads as I want extolling the virtues of Candidate A, or denouncing Candidate B, but I am limited as to how many of either kind of ad I can run as part of Candidate A's principal campaign. (So if I want full freedom of speech, I had better not be discussing my message with A's campaign manager).

Lawrence Lessig on East-Coast vs West-Coast code

Posted Mar 3, 2014 14:19 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

I mean saying good things about a candidate looks to be obviously a "primary campaign" job which can be curtailed by campaign laws. Saying bad things about a candidate could look to be more of an "action of a concerned citizen" which is protected by freedom of speech. "Vote for X!" is clearly a campaign message while "X is an adulterous thief!" is more ambiguous. I'm not sure I can explain it any better.

Lawrence Lessig on East-Coast vs West-Coast code

Posted Mar 3, 2014 20:06 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

so you want to improve elections by limiting how much good stuff can be said?

good luck with that ;-)