SNEK POLICY
Political Money Should Come From Actual People
Individuals should be able to support candidates with their own money. Organizations should not be able to funnel money directly into candidates.
Individual contributions
SNEK does not currently support an artificial contribution ceiling for individuals using their own personal money. The tradeoff is complete transparency.
Every contribution should be easily searchable by donor, amount, date, recipient, and aggregate contribution. The public can then judge what a candidate’s funding base means.
No organizational or foreign candidate money
Corporations, unions, PACs, nonprofits, trade groups, and similar organizations should not donate directly to candidates. Money reimbursed, passed through, or disguised as an individual’s contribution should be prohibited.
Foreign governments, foreign companies, foreign organizations, and foreign individuals should not finance American candidates or campaigns.
Independent advocacy remains protected
Organizations may spend their own money advocating for ideas, supporting or criticizing candidates, and publishing political speech as long as the activity is actually independent of the campaign.
Political advertising should disclose who paid for it and make the underlying funding reasonably traceable. SNEK does not support taxpayer-funded campaigns.
FULL POLICY DETAILS
The longer version
Why SNEK thinks this
SNEK’s campaign-finance principle is that candidates should be supported by actual people, in the open. The problem is not that citizens care about politics or spend their own money. The problem is money routed through organizations, committees, nonprofits, or opaque structures that make it difficult to tell who is actually financing political power.
How it would work
Candidates should not accept money from corporations, unions, PACs, Super PACs, nonprofits, or foreign sources. Individuals can support candidates with their own money, but donations should be publicly attributable rather than hidden behind layers of entities. Taxpayer-funded campaigning is not the solution. Political advertising should identify the original source of the money rather than only the committee name printed at the end of the ad.
Where SNEK leaves room
Genuinely independent political speech remains protected. A person or group that is truly uncoordinated with a campaign can still spend money expressing a political view. The enforcement focus should be coordination disguised as independence, pass-through funding, and structures designed to conceal the real funder.
Related SNEK policies
End the Paid Lobbying Industry • Political Competition and Representation