To drastically reduce the real and perceived corrupting influences of money on political campaigns, governments should be the sole funding entities for all public election campaigns. No other sources of funding, including personal wealth or donations from family, friends, businesses, etc., should be used for election-related (or any other) expenditures or even given as personal gifts to any candidates or politicians.

Specifically, absolutely no contributions of any kind should be allowed from those lobbying the government, participating in government contracts or otherwise benefiting from public finds.

In addition, any person employed in a significant policy-making occupation (such as federal or state legislator, and even their staffers) should be barred for life from being employed by any business or entity lobbying the government.

Election Funding Formula

The maximum amount of government funding available to all registered candidates from parties that have received more than 10% of the vote in any of the past two election cycles should be based on the estimated total number of eligible voters living within the boundaries of the political jurisdiction where the political contest will be held. Eligible voters are defined as people meeting voting requirements (namely age and citizenship), whether or not they are registered. For example, an election commission may decide that candidates for a House Congressional district may be entitled to spend up to $10 per eligible voter. They would not be allowed to unilaterally spend more than this amount even if they run out of money before the election. Given this $10 limit, if a district has 500,000 eligible voters, each candidate may spend up to $5,000,000. Possibly the costs of living, or more appropriately, the costs of advertising could be taken into consideration when determining the per-eligible-voter limits since such costs often vary between political jurisdictions.

Minor and Micro Party Funding Formulas

Public funding of the minor parties (parties that received between 1%-10% of the vote in any of the last two election cycles) would follow the same principles as above, but the per-eligible-voter limits would be lowered to one-third as much as they would be for the major parties. Micro parties would be defined as parties that have received more than 0.1% but not more than 1% of the vote in any of the last two election cycles. These parties would be entitled to receive 5% as much public financing as would the major parties. Parties having received less than 0.1% of the vote would not be entitled to any public funds.

Additional money could be introduced into campaigns from any source if any one candidate agrees, but only if all the money from each additional source is divided evenly among all the candidates within the same party class (major, minor, micro) for that race and full disclosure is made within 72 hours as to the source of the funding.