I’m Eric Neyman, a grad student working on mechanism design at Columbia. I am working with Yash Upadhyay, a student at UPenn (and previously Y Combinator Summer ‘19), to build a platform that would match donations to opposing political campaigns and send the money to charities instead.
Here’s the basic idea: let’s say that in 2024 Kamala Harris (D) will be running against Mike Pence (R) for president. The platform would collect money from donors to both campaigns; let’s say for example that Harris donors give us $10 million and Pence donors give us $8 million. We would send matching amounts ($8 million on each side) to charity and donate the remaining amount to the political campaign that raised more ($2 million to Harris). The result is that $16 million more gets sent to charity, while not changing how much money the campaigns have relative to one another.
From a donor’s perspective, one way to think about this is: if you donate $100 to the platform, then in the worst case, your money will not end up matched and will go to your preferred campaign (as it would have gone if you’d contributed directly). But in the best case, your money will be matched with $100 on the other side, reducing the opposing candidate’s cash on hand by $100 and causing an extra $200 to go to charity. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation: $7 billion was spent on the 2016 election cycle, a number that has been rapidly increasing. If just 0.1% of the money spent on the 2016 election had instead gone to effective charitable causes, that would amount to a few thousand lives saved.
If you’d like to read more about this idea, see here for a more extensive write-up and here for an analysis of possible incentives issues with the platform, as well as possible fixes.
This idea has been tried before: during the 2012 election, Eric Zolt and Jonathan DiBenedetto tried to create a platform like this and called it Repledge; here’s a Washington Post profile. Unfortunately they didn’t get past the testing phase. Yash and I talked to the two of them a couple weeks ago to learn what worked and what didn’t. They told us that the primary obstacle they ran into wasn’t a technical one (web infrastructure etc.) but a legal one: campaign finance law is complicated, plus the political parties won’t like you (you’re taking their money) and will very likely sue you. Dr. Zolt said that these lawsuits are dangerous despite an FEC ruling saying that Repledge was legal, because there are various ways to interpret the ruling. He gave us a ballpark estimate that creating something like Repledge would cost a quarter of a million dollars. (We are working on getting a more granular estimate for the legal and marketing costs individually, but the largest component would probably be legal.)
The purpose of this post is basically to gauge interest and ask for advice. Here are some concrete questions:
- If we successfully built this platform, would you consider using it? If your answer is “it depends”, what does it depend on?
- Do you think building this platform is worth the cost? If so, do you have suggestions for how we might be able to finance this project? What grant-awarding organizations might be a good fit for our project? In particular, would it be reasonable for us to contact the Open Philanthropy Project?
- One thing I didn’t specify in the description above is how exactly the charity donation process will work. Our tentative plan is to offer a list of charities for donors to choose from; whatever fraction of a donor’s money gets matched will go to the charity they chose. If you have a suggestion you think is better, we’d love to hear it. But if we end up going with this plan, how should we choose the charities? I think the right answer is to strike a balance between two extremes. One extreme is having only GiveWell charities and the like; the other extreme is to have charities that maximally appeal to potential donors (but which are not as effective). How do we choose charities that will seem like a fair list to both Democrats and Republicans? My prediction is that we’ll have a lot more trouble attracting Republicans; should we bias our charity selection toward things Republicans respond particularly positively to (e.g. veterans’ charities) to mitigate this? It would be really helpful to talk to someone who’s studied donor psychology and has opinions about these things!
- Are you sold on this idea and interested in helping us? If so, shoot me an email at eric.neyman@columbia.edu! I’d love to hear from any of you, particularly if you’re a lawyer or law-adjacent and have advice on how to handle the legal challenges I briefly described. Of if you know any lawyers who might be able to help, that would be great too!
Thanks for any thoughts you have for us!
potenti[I either came up with a similar idea independently and posted it as a shortform, or had read this post years ago while occasionally lurking on the forum and misattributed its recall as my own idea. Anyway, to keep the discussion of the idea in a centralized location, I am pasting an explanation of why I tentatively think the litigation risks would be manageable if the community felt this idea had a reasonable upside and probability of success.]
Caveat: I am a lawyer but am not speaking with any real assessment of the merits beyond a skim of the FEC letter back in 2015. The viewpoint below is based on general principles of civil litigation strategy and is not something anyone should actually rely on without talking to a campaign-finance expert.
My initial reaction to the threat of legal challenges, if someone thinks there is enough potential value here, is to commit to funding this appropriately and just let them sue. If you were particularly worried about litigation, set it up the first time so that the only candidate pair is from the general-election presidential race. That should sharply limit the number of entities that have Article III standing to file a lawsuit, maybe just to the candidates and their campaign committees themselves. Make one of them risk the negative publicity of filing a lawsuit to shut down a non-profit website that was benefitting impoverished people in Africa. In any event, do not set up a pair in a House or Senate race where one of the candidates is a sure loser (who makes a good sacrificial lamb for a political party that wants the website shut down) or a clear winner (who can probably risk a reputational hit).
In a sense, this creates a bifurcation of risk -- there's a risk the website just doesn't catch on, and a risk of litigation, but probably a low risk of both at the same time. What rational candidate is going to commit money to litigation to secure an a small amount of additional funds for themselves when: (1) the amount isn't that much; (2) they alone bear optics/PR risk; (3) their opponent gets the exact same benefit they get without incurring any of the costs? For litigation to make sense, you'd either need to believe the amount of money coming through this site was going to be pretty significant, or would need to believe that the marginal benefit of an extra dollar to your campaign was much greater than for your opponent.
Next, any litigation would likely be -- like many election-related challenges -- only practically winnable in accelerated proceedings. With a favorable FEC opinion letter, few district judges would grant emergency relief to a litigant like a temporary restraining order. In ordinary litigation, the federal courts can take a while to get around to deciding whether to grant a preliminary injunction. Would a judge be inclined to put this high on their priority list? Depends on the judge, but I think it would only get priority if pretty successful. The ship may well have sailed by then -- and note that a decision by a district court is often not a particularly effective weapon for other litigants who want to sue you in future elections. (For the lawyers, if there is a concern about offensive collateral estoppel, I think the solution is for the next attempt to be with a different, unrelated non-profit with whom the first non-profit is not in privity.)
If the court did grant a preliminary injunction, I would ask the court to (1) require the organization to pass through 100% of funds to both sides, but (2) require the opposing party to post an injunction bond in the amount lost to charity [at least to its own candidate]. Injunction bonds aren't required as often as I think they should be, but it would be worth a shot. Alternatively, you could ask that the organization be allowed to continue but required to lock up the money pending final judgment.
I'd also consider whether to stick a nice "poison pill" in the user agreement. Suppose that there were an adverse litigation outcome -- what should happen to the money? You could try adding a provision that it has to be returned to the donors, attempting to deprive the plaintiff of any concrete benefit from winning the suit in the first place. They would be no better off, unless and until their would-be donors chose to give them the money. And, if I were a candidate, I would be worried that some percentage of my donors would be annoyed at my litigation antics and that my opponent's donor re-gift rate would be higher.
I suspect Professor Zolt didn't move forward in part because (if I understand correctly) his for-profit entity was going to be funded by a tiny sliver of the funds flowing through the entity. That's probably not enough revenue to justify defending this in litigation. On the other hand, if the monies were going to something like GiveDirectly (more legible) or AMF, the EA community "captures" the vast majority of the value of the offset funds. So the community should more willing to accept a quarter-million in expected litigation costs if the idea has upside to drive at least several times that to effective charities.
Finally, a less effective but potentially "safer" way to do something along the same lines would be to form a SuperPAC. I am reminded of the one Stephen Colbert did back in his Colbert Report days as a parody of the campaign-finance system. That's a much harder attack surface, as the main attraction of SuperPACs is that they are . . . mostly unregulated.
I would have to check whether a SuperPAC can donate to another SuperPAC, which would be an easy way of getting rid of the non-netted funds. Simply returning the non-netted funds might be another option. Actually running ads would be awkward. Colbert donated most of the proceeds of his super-PAC to non-political charities when he dissolved it, so shipping the netted funds to the chosen charit(ies) at the end of the election shouldn't be a problem.
The biggest potential downside of this approach, in addition to probably being less legible to would-be donors, is that donations to a superPAC definitely are not tax-deductible (vs. I don't know if netted donations to something like I originally suggested would be). However, it might be possible to hold the money in a for-profit company temporarily, and then transfer only monies not netted to a SuperPAC with the rest to charity. This may be a step toward greater litigation risk, but sending money to candidates and standard PACs is more regulated than sending it to superPACs. So the risk would probably be lower than the original candidate-centered model.