Lessig for President FAQ:
Why did you add voting rights and gerrymandering to your reform proposal?
My work on this issue began with a focus on the way money corrupts the system. But pressed by many brilliant souls — Guy Charles, Rick Hasen, and others — I have come to see that the reason the system is “corrupt” is because it denies a fundamental equality of citizens. And once you recognize that, then all the other ways the system denies equality are also important. Though differently important. In my view, the motivation for denying equal voting rights is partisan — it benefits one party over the other. The motivation for denying equal representation is political — gerrymandering is a game both parties play, even if it benefits one party more than another. And the motivation for the corrupted system of funding campaigns is simply power — concentrating the funding in a few gives those few enormous power in the political system.
Why not just focus on campaign finance reform?
The way we fund campaigns is a corruption of our constitutional design. We were promised a Congress “dependent on the people alone,” where “the People” meant, “not the rich more than the poor.” The politicians have given us a Congress dependent on the funders of campaigns — the rich more than all of us.
I have spent the last 8 years fighting to end this corruption.
But the reason this system is a corruption is because it denies citizens a basic commitment of a representative democracy — that it represent its citizens equally.
If we’re going to fight to correct that fundamental inequality of a representative system, we should fight to correct the other inequalities as well. We should fight to enact reform that gives all of us equal political power, and end the general sense that too many Americans have: that Congress doesn’t represent them.