S6E6: The Race to Gather Signatures

This is Larry Lessig in the middle of October, 2023. October 19th, I was on a train coming back from a conference at Rutgers in New Jersey, and I had to get onto a zoom call while on the Amtrak train. And it was one of the most important zoom calls I have ever scheduled because it was a conversation with a donor who would ultimately give us the money that committed us to the idea of raising the money necessary to fund the initiative signature gathering process in Maine. And of course, Amtrak trains are loud and noisy even in the phone booth area, and coverage is spotty even though it's the eastern corridor between New York and Boston. So the connection was bad and the noise was bad. And I was holding this cell phone up against the wall, speaking to a group of potential funders about the idea we had. Now, these funders had funded democracy reform aggressively over the past decade. Really, they've become one of the most important and understated supporters of democracy reform. They are not interested in trying to put their name out there. Indeed, having their name out there is not anything they're interested in having at all. All they want is a world where democracy reform happens, and especially reform around money and politics. Because as many people in the business community recognize, the corruption of money in politics is both a corruption of our government and also corruption of business. It's a corruption of our government because money flows to candidates in exchange for candidates doing what the funders want, which means the government can't do what's in the interest of the public. It has to do what's in the interest of the funders. But more interestingly, it's a corruption of business, because business has got to constantly be fearful that the government's going to regulate them in some way that will undercut their business because some competitor convince them that shutting down the competition is the most important thing for the good of the society. So they need to defend themselves. They need to spend money, they need to contribute to campaigns. They need to be inside those meetings in Washington. They need to have their own army of lobbyists if they're just going to keep the opportunity that the American dream promised, the opportunity to create and to profit from their creativity. So these funders were deeply motivated to find a strategy that might end the most corrupting influence of money in Washington, which was super PACs. And as well as I could, I laid out the strategy that we could gather signatures on an initiative in Maine. We could be on the ballot in November in Maine. That Maine was a perfect state to raise this question, because Mainers of Both parties were deeply opposed to money in politics. And we could then get the question addressed by a very open court that would get us to the Supreme Court. And in the Supreme Court we would be asking that court nothing more than for them to apply their existing doctrine to a question they have never addressed. I was anxious going into that call, but the call went well and at the end they said they wanted to fund the campaign and so they gave us a part of the money we needed and it was enough to convince me that it was worth it to, to pull the trigger. Because the best offer we had for gathering signatures in Maine, we had looked to a number of signature gathering firms and the best offer said they would do it for a million dollars if we could commit within the next week so that they could pull their team together and get it in the field to begin to gather signatures. The next lowest bid was $1.7 million. So on that train after that call, I thought to myself, should we take the gamble that we'll be able to raise all the money we need and pull the trigger now and save $700,000 or should we wait and raise not just a million, but a million point seven in order to be able to be on confident that we have the money in order to move forward. And in one of the most anxiety producing decisions in my life, I decided we would jump. I was convinced because I had spent 10 years in this field raising money and raising money from super wealthy people to support the work of fighting super PACs, I was convinced I would be able to reach out to them too and to raise the balance of the money we needed to be able to be on the ballot. So I said yes and I sent to the team that would gather signatures an email that said, we're in, we're committed, please get to work. And then I had to get to work. And to get to work here meant to talk to the people who could raise the money or give us the money to make it so that we could get this initiative to the ballot. Now again, you know this is a gamble. And when it's a gamble or when it's uncertain, most people are not eager to jump. And I guess if I had an email list of 50 million people, I could have just sent an email to the 50 million people and probably found in those 50 million people at least enough support to get to a million. But I don't have an email list of 50 million people and I don't have a bunch of people who are saying this is an obvious strategy. Let's do it to win. What I had was a belief this is an obvious strategy. We need to do it to win. And some contacts with people who, a decade before, when we set up a super PAC to end all super PACs, had been willing to step up and give at that point, what. What turned out to be about $16 million. To support that campaign, I needed just a million. And so I began to make a call. I called, I emailed, I pestered, and I eventually connected with many of the most generous contributors who a decade before, had supported the fight to end Super PACs. But as I spoke to them, I was increasingly terrified because many of those people had become lovers of super PACs. One explicitly defended it, said, Super PACs are the way that I make my voice heard. Which meant that's the way that he exercised his power inside the political system. And whereas a decade before, he saw why this was a corrupt, corrupt influence, he thought it was a good influence because, of course, he thought what he was doing was good. Okay, I don't doubt what he's doing to his good, but I was astonished that here we were. The people who had cemented the fight against Super PACs were increasingly people who wanted to defend Super PACs. They had fallen in love with Super PACs. And so my original optimism that we would find a way to raise the million dollars in a week or so became increasingly terror because I saw it was not going to be easy to raise that money. I found some friends who had supported us in the past. They gave a significant amount commitment to make it possible. But I remember one conversation in particular with one of the most important billionaires who had supported this fight before, actually, not with him, but with his donor advisor. And his donor advisor started the conversation by saying, yeah, of course we support the idea of ending big money in politics. And I said, well, so what are you doing? How are you doing it? And the donor advisor said, well, we've got all these programs that they are supporting, you know, transparency programs and the like, and. But they were not going to support this idea. And I began to engage. Why? And there were a lot of obvious mistakes that she made in defending her position, like Citizens United has decided this, and we don't think the court's going to overturn Citizens United. To which I said, I don't think the court's going to overturn Citizens United either, but it's not the point. But anyway, by the middle part of that conversation, I began to recognize that I was. I was arguing with Exxon about climate change because the one group of people who would be most affected if we ended super PACs is donor advisors. These people who stand between the billionaires and the nonprofits whose billionaires money goes to are the people who are most dependent on the existing system. And so they've become, in a certain sense, the system's biggest defenders, even if on the surface they say, no, no, no, we think this is a terribly corrupt system. And so I realized I was going to hit a wall every time I spoke to one of these billionaires who had the infrastructure of nonprofit organizations set up, which included these donor advisors, who themselves saw their role as dependent on the system remaining as it is. I had often thought in 18 years that I've been in this business of reform, that the business model of reform organizations is inconsistent with the business model of reform. Here it was slapping me right in the face. This fight was hard. Then, even more interesting was how hard it was to get many of the even progressive organizations to see why this fight was important and willing to take up. And part of the reason for this is I realized as I talked to these progressive organizations and to the young people running these progressive organizations, that none of them had ever lived in a political environment without super PACs. None of them had ever tried to run a nonprofit without being able to turn over, to turn to a few billionaires to help them fund their nonprofit. None of them could imagine how you do politics, how you organize people or turn them out, how you build movements without there being three or four super wealthy people who make it easy to rent your offices and to hire the buses necessary to send people to rallies. None of them had lived in the world before this corruption, and it was very hard for them to imagine how they would live in a world after this corruption. Now, those organizations, I love all of them, especially in Maine, I think they're doing extremely important work, not just around the question of money and politics, but about everything that they're doing. But the experience of talking to them and talking through this issue with them increasingly convinced me this was going to be a hard fight to win. Not the vote, but the fight to raise the money to get the signatures that the secretary of state would require to be on the ballot to give Mainers the chance to vote. So as we got closer to the deadline when we had to turn over the money, we'd raised about a half of it, and I didn't see where we're going to raise the other half. But one of the big supporters of ending the corrupting influence of money in politics said to me that he would loan me the money, loan me personally the money, or more precisely, loan the organization the money if I would personally guarantee it. And guarantee it meaning that by November 2024, we would have to have the money back to him, or I personally would have to have the money back to him. Wasn't quite sure how I would personally do that, but I was committed to the idea that jumping off this bridge was worth it if it gave us a chance to give Mainers the chance to tee up the most important campaign finance question that the supreme court has addressed in 50 years. So I said yes, and I signed the papers and the money was transferred, and we gave it to the signature gathering team. And they began the process of gathering the signatures. And an army of people, many, most of them from Maine, some from outside Maine, gathered to begin to turn to mainers and ask them to join the campaign to end super PACs. Diane Russell, who I'd known way back from the fight around public funding, who'd been one of the first members of the Maine legislature elected because of public funding. She had been a waitress and then could run for office because there was public funding to allow her to become legislator. And she was an extremely prominent state legislator. She had begun to set up an infrastructure for gathering signatures on initiatives because it's one of the great things in Maine that they have a healthy initiative process. She was extremely eager to join the fight and had an army of her team join the fight to gather signatures on election day. And that team was complemented by other people that had been brought in by the ballot signature team. And on election day, what her team found, as everyone else found gathering signatures on this campaign was that people were as eager to sign this as they'd been to sign anything before. This signature gathering process gathered signatures more quickly than any other initiative in anybody's memory. And we could see in the way people were reacting that we were touching a nerve inside of Maine. I described in the first episode how I thought the most eager to sign this initiative were the people I thought were the most conservative. They were almost seething in their anger at this current corrupt system where billionaires could buy elections and steer people to one side or the other. And so they were eager for hope and this initiative, even if you doubted what the supreme court would do, this initiative was a reason for hope. And so they signed. Tens of thousands signed. And so by Thanksgiving, we had 67,592 signatures, and there was still another 10,000 raw signatures that had to be verified. But the 67,000 put us over the number we needed by about 8,000 votes. And so we were on our way to being ready to certify. Then the secretary of state's office heard and they reached out to us to say, we understand you have gathered the signatures and you're going to turn them in, but can you please wait until January, because if you turn them in, then we have to cancel the holiday vacations for the office as they begin the process of validating the signatures that you're turning in. So that was easy. Of course, we delayed turning these signatures in until January, and we turned in signatures that eventually were found to have 76,081 certified signatures. And on February 22, 2024, the Secretary of state announced that we had succeeded and that our initiative would be on the ballot unless the legislature decided to pass it first. This was an extraordinary accomplishment. It's not like the pressure was off because, of course, in Maine, we still had to win the election for this question. And outside of Maine, I still had to worry about how we were going to raise the support to cover the full cost of gathering those signatures. All of those were still questions in the air, but we could focus on the victory. The victory was Mainers would now have a choice. Now, at this stage, I decided that we were going to make a very important commitment, Equal Citizens, which is an organization with members all across the country and many members in Maine. But Equal Citizens had decided to take the burden to stand up the resources to make it possible for Maine to have a choice about whether they would fight super PACs or not. We had succeeded at that, but I didn't believe it was appropriate for Equal Citizens, as a non Maine organization, to be running a campaign to persuade people one way or not. That's the campaign that's got to be run inside of Maine and is being run by the ballot question committee, citizens to end. Superpacts.org so we made a commitment that we had helped stand this up, but we were not going to be giving any more money to Maine. We were not going to be running ads in Maine. We were not going to bring our support, however big or small, through Equal Citizens to fund the efforts in Maine. Those efforts would be funded in Maine by Maine organizations that were standing up an argument for why it was right for Maine to support this initiative. Now, I think this is an important principle. It's a little hard in a federalist system to understand exactly where the line should be between people as United States citizens participating in what's happening in a particular state and people in a state being able to make a decision for their state alone. This is exactly that mixed question, the question of super PACs that makes that hard because the federal rule about super PACs affects all of us. It blocks all of us from having a democratically responsive political system. But the decision about whether to challenge that rule is a decision that will ultimately be made by Mainers. And so I was okay with us trying to tee up the opportunity for Maine to make that decision, but I'm not okay with us trying to run the campaign that lets Maine decide one way or the other. That's for Mainers to do. And so as we succeeded and crossed this line where we had gathered the signatures or worked with organizations to gather the signatures in Maine, our role shifted and we would play, I would play the role of cheerleader, as you hear me doing in these episodes right here, and as a supporter, helping to channel support into Maine so that main organizations, including those that will help turn out the vote, have the resources they need to make sure that this initiative prevails. But we won't be running a campaign in Maine. That's for Mainers. We want you to help them as you can. And if they're successful, they will be helping us, as in the United States, enormously. This is Larry Lessig still. This is the end of episode six. Stay tuned for episode seven, where I'll describe how we got through the legislature to the ballot. Not a long episode, but kind of an important one for going to begin to understand how people will resist this initiative. And then a final episode that tees up where the fight is now and what will happen the day after we win this fight in November. Thanks for listening. So, as you've heard at the end of every one of these episodes, this podcast is produced by Equal Citizens, but we're asking you to channel any support you have for the ideas or the movement or the cause in this series to the main ballot question committee, Citizens to end Super PACs, which is run by Carol McCormack, the woman who helped pass Ranked Choice voting in Maine twice, and her campaign manager, Kyle Bailey, who also worked on Ranked Choice voting and many other issues in Maine. You can find their website@citizenstoendsuperpacs.org and if you're new in Maine, please go to that website to volunteer to help turn out the vote or to get people to support the initiative or to contribute to make sure that they have the resources they need to win this initiative. And if you're not from Maine, then please feel free to reach out to the main committee to support the main committee however you can to guarantee that they have the resources they need to win in November. When they win, we then will step in however we can to make sure that the lawyers get it right and that we get to the court with the strongest case we can, and that in the Supreme Court we have the best chance we could possibly have to win this fight and end super PACs. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for the next episode. Sam.