JWK: Regardless of whether the 2020 election was on the up and up or not, a lot of people suspect it wasn’t. You suggest that that very fact is unhealthy for democracy and warrants an impartial 9/11 Commission-like investigation. Can you elaborate on that?

Dan McMillan: Unless all Americans are confident that our elections are free and fair, how can we possibly govern ourselves? If a people believes that their government is illegitimate, that office holders don’t have the right to enact and enforce laws, why should anyone obey laws they don’t like? And everyone in politics – whether voters, activists, candidates, or the media – may decide that they must achieve victory at any price, by any means, fair or foul. That so many Americans doubt the fairness of our elections is itself a constitutional crisis. Our situation is dangerous in the extreme.

One point I need to make clear: I lead a non-partisan effort to get big money out of politics, so I don’t take sides on any partisan issue. I am not saying that the election was stolen. I’m saying that if this many voters fear that it was, politicians need to address the voters’ concerns.

It baffles me that on January 7 of last year, McConnell, Schumer, Pelosi and McCarthy did not immediately work together to reassure the voters that the 2020 election was fair. One easy step would have been a 9/11 Commission-like investigation headed by leaders whom all Americans trust, to resolve all allegations of election fraud or tampering. Both Republicans and Democrats have alleged illegalities, so why didn’t both parties put their money where their mouth is, and show the voters they’re serious about making our elections fair?

JWK:  Why don’t you think such an investigation has happened?

DM: Like most of the problems in our politics, this failure comes from the obscene cost of election campaigns, which forces the typical member of Congress to spend 30 hours a week on the phone raising money for the next campaign. For decades now, we have not been politicians’ real constituents. Their donors are their constituents. Politicians regard us as a necessary evil, a nuisance. They still need our votes, but they don’t respect us.

If you believe in government by the people – and both parties stopped believing in that long ago – you show respect for the voters by addressing any concern that matters to them, even if you think it’s groundless.

One reason many Americans believe the election was stolen may be that they see through our politicians: they see the lack of respect, they see that office holders don’t listen to us or care what we think and need. Politicians can’t afford to care about us, because they’re too busy taking care of their donors. This is how big money destroyed the mutual trust and respect that we used to have between politicians and the people.

A possible reason why neither party in Congress has tried to address this fear of election fraud could be that both parties want to use the issue to keep their voters in line by fostering hostility toward the other party. Why has partisan antagonism, partisan anger gone off the charts in the last 6 or 8 years? I argue that it is because the cost of elections has skyrocketed. Individuals and special interests spent $14.4 billion to support their preferred candidates in the 2020 federal elections (White House and Congress) – more than twice the price tag in 2016. Politicians of both parties are hogtied by all the favors they owe their many donors and can’t offer real solutions to the country’s problems. Having nothing for us, they default to encouraging anger toward the other party, to messaging that is overwhelmingly negative. The GOP didn’t even bother writing a platform in 2020, and the top line message of both major parties was identical: “if the other side wins, the world will end.”

Though my criticisms sound harsh, most of the donors who give the money, and the politicians who take it, are not bad people. They are doing what they have to do, playing by the perverted rules of our money-driven political system. Our fellow Americans are not the enemy. The money, and only the money, is our enemy. And it hurts all of us, including the big donors, who no longer get what they need, because our government is paralyzed and our politics are dangerously unstable. There’s no reason why we can’t set aside our differences and join forces to defeat our shared enemy.

JWK:  What, specifically, can be done to reverse the dwindling trust in the political process and in our institutions?

DM: Take power away from high-dollar campaign donors and give it back to us, the American people. The only Americans who still have any influence in Washington are the billionaires and special interests who pay the shockingly high cost of election campaigns. We can fix this by making ourselves the donors, by making the voters the donors who really count. This is called Democracy Dollars.

It’s as simple as can be: for every federal election the government would give every registered voter an online account of campaign cash – $100 per voter in a presidential year and $50 for the cheaper midterms. You can’t take this money out and spend it, but you can go online and assign your Democracy Dollars to the party and candidates which you want to support.

Any serious, competent candidate will be able to raise enough money from the voters to fund a very strong campaign, and their opponent will have no excuse for taking big dollars from special interests. When they get to Washington, politicians will continue to serve their donors, but since we’ll be the donors, we the people will be back in the driver’s seat where we belong.

I lead Save Democracy in America, a non-partisan crusade with one goal: to make Democracy Dollars so popular among Americans of all political persuasions that the Congress and the President will have to make it the law of the land. This is a golden opportunity to bring Americans together across the party lines to take our country back. To get a government which serves us again, and which lives up to one of the noble ideals which make us Americans: government by the people. If we can win this great victory together, we can start sanding down the sharper edges of our partisan conflicts.

JWK: Would Democracy Dollars do anything to affect corporate, so-called nonprofit and labor union donations to political campaigns? Doesn’t the Supreme Court say they have the same free speech rights as individuals?

DM: You are correct. Because the Court has decided that money spent to influence elections is itself a form of free speech, protected by the 1st Amendment, we can’t outlaw hardly any political spending. Democracy Dollars is probably the only way to fix the money problem which the Court won’t strike down: because Democracy Dollars doesn’t limit anyone’s “speech” (campaign spending), so it wouldn’t violate the 1st Amendment. Even better, Democracy Dollars gives the power of political speech to 200 million registered voters who didn’t have it before, because they didn’t have enough cash lying around to give to candidates.

Some people fear that special interests and billionaires would just increase their spending and swamp the Democracy Dollars system. We can’t guarantee that this won’t happen, but we remain optimistic. By the time our victory is won, every American will understand that money equals power in American politics, and that their Democracy Dollars mean having a voice in Washington. Once the voters understand this, they can punish at the polls candidates who insist on taking private money when so much money is available from the voters.

Even if Democracy Dollars doesn’t chase all the private money out of our politics, it can level the playing field and give candidates who want to serve the people a fighting chance, which right now they don’t have.

JWK: How much would this Democracy Dollars system cost? And who will pay for it?

DM: With 200 million registered voters the cost will average out to a little under $8 billion a year in the taxpayers’ money. Some Americans object that “we’re running a deficit of $1 trillion a year and you want to add to it by giving food stamps to politicians?” For three reasons, we think this will be money well spent.

First, Democracy Dollars will pay for itself dozens of times over by letting us cut wasteful government spending, estimated by Citizens Against Government Waste as being up to $800 billion a year. Most wasteful spending consists of goodies (subsidies, tax breaks, government contracts) which lobbyists have extracted from Congress. For example, government gives at least $20 billion a year of our money in direct subsidies to fossil fuel companies which are already highly profitable. Eliminating this one subsidy would pay for Democracy Dollars two and a half times over. Once politicians get their campaign cash from us via the Democracy Dollars system, they can tell the lobbyists to take a hike and we can start cutting the fat out of the federal budget.

Second, candidates will get this money from somewhere. Right now they get it from deep-pocketed special interests, so these are the people our politicians serve. If we want office holders to serve us, this campaign cash has to come from us.

Finally, $8 billion a year strikes us as a small price for taking our country back, for restoring government by the people. Our grandparents spent over $4 trillion in today’s money, and gave over 400,000 American lives, to save everyone’s freedom – not just ours – in the Second World War. Should we even hesitate to spend $8 billion a year to regain our own freedom here at home?

JWK: Some fear that the voters might be too poorly informed or two apathetic to use their Democracy Dollars or to use them wisely.

DM: Surveys do show that many Americans don’t follow politics. But this has always been the case, even when (e.g., early 1930s-early 1960s) when our democracy functioned well. It’s not a problem because we don’t need every voter to be well-informed. It’s enough for maybe one voter in ten to follow politics. This is because most people make their political decisions after consulting “opinion leaders,” people in their communities whose judgment they respect and who do follow politics.

Besides, why should we inform ourselves when our votes count for so little? If we empower every voter with Democracy Dollars, Americans will be plenty informed. The problem is not the voters. Our problem is that we have little to vote for, because big money has crippled both major parties.

As for whether voters will take the time to use their Democracy Dollars, this is a non-issue: spending your Democracy Dollars will be so much easier than actually voting. To vote you have to go to one location on one day and sometimes you must wait in line for hours to cast your ballot. But you can give candidates your Democracy Dollars from the comfort of your home at any time and on any day. Unless you check a box that keeps candidates from emailing you, until you’ve spent your Democracy Dollars you’ll get emails from the candidates begging you for this money. Seattle introduced a Democracy Dollars-type system in 2017 but they made the mistake of mailing every resident a set of paper “democracy vouchers” that people had to mail in. Most of the vouchers weren’t used. A centralized website should fix that problem.

JWK: Do you have any concerns that political manipulators will figure out a way to game the Democracy Dollars system?

DM: None at all. Neither malicious individuals nor the government would have any chance to monkey with the system. All the government does is build the Democracy Dollars website and give 200 million registered voters their individual accounts. The voters take it from there. A centralized system can be rigged, but Democracy Dollars is as decentralized as it gets – the individual decisions of 200 million Americans determine which candidates get funding and which don’t. It’s as close to foolproof as anything in this life can get.

JWK: Do you think that the media’s “Big Lie” narrative, the dismissal and shaming of skeptics and repeated labeling of their concerns as “false” – rather than say “unproven” – has impacted Americans’ overall belief in the fairness of both the political system and the media?

DM: We at Save Democracy in America are non-partisan, so I have to duck this question and not appear to be taking sides. That said, Americans of both parties have excellent reasons for not trusting politicians and their media allies. Because big money has captured both parties, neither party offers us anything of real substance, any practical solutions to our many challenges. This leaves journalists with nothing to talk about, so the whole public face of American politics is phony. Meanwhile, all important decisions get made behind closed doors in conversations between politicians, donors and the lobbyists the donors have hired.

JWK: What impact do you think the program would have on the two-party system?

DM: It should greatly improve both parties by making them far more responsive to the needs and wishes of the American people. It should also help dial down the temperature of partisan conflict because, as I see it, both parties stoke anger against the other party among their base voters. Since our politicians offer us little of value, they hope to keep us in line by demonizing the other side. Also, moneyed interests have always stayed on top in our country by a mechanism of divide and conquer, for example setting black working families against white (working class families) – and both parties do this. Once the money is no longer in the saddle, the incentive and the opportunity for this division-mongering should fade.

Democracy Dollars will likely not increase the number of parties, though many Americans have expressed interest in this. I think having more parties would be a terrible mistake, because the country is so big and so diverse. If we open the door to additional parties, we could end up with 15 or even 20 parties – religious parties, regional parties, ethnic parties, parties of immigrants and anti-immigrant parties, and so on. This would paralyze the political system while not solving the problems which have make Americans want a new party. Our problem is not how many parties we have. Our problem is that all candidates of every party have to raise tons of money from high-dollar donors and therefore end up serving their donors instead of serving us. That’s why we need to become the donors and put ourselves back in the driver’s seat.

JWK: How can people who support the concept of Democracy Dollars help make the idea happen?

DM: If you would like to help, thank you and bless you! You can start by sharing this interview with friends and on social media, and by telling people in your conversations about Save Democracy in America. No political message is as powerful as one that comes from someone you trust.

Please also visit our website: savedemocracyinamerica.org. There’ll you’ll find other ways to help. On the website are some of my interviews on radio shows and podcasts, two short videos which explain our mission, and an FAQs page where you can learn more. Please share our website, interviews and videos with your friends and on social media.

Most of us feel helpless about the mess in Washington. But we’re not helpless. Politicians still need our votes to get into office. Once enough of us tell them that we want Democracy Dollars we’ll win this fight. Then we can this country moving again. Democracy Dollars is a simple, common-sense way to get big money out of politics. It’s something Americans of both parties can support. As I see it, it’s just a question of getting the word out, helping our fellow Americans see that it was big money which destroyed our democracy, and that we can work together to break the power of the money.