 My name is Mark Lloyd. I am the director of the Media Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation, very closely affiliated with the Open Technology Institute. And that's probably all the introduction I think I am worth at this point in time. What an odd thing to get a doctorate in history and then end up being the leader of the Federal Communications Commission helping the country move from analog to digital broadcasting as the chairman of the FCC. For a very short bit, but very productive bit of time. Commissioner Michael Kops has been a hero of mine for many years and he knows that. He has allowed me into his office to argue about a wide variety of things and provide advice, some of which he decided that he was going to push against on a regular basis when I was in the General Counsel's office because he actually knew how I felt about things. He could push me on some of these things. To say that he has been a public servant is, I think, an honor to public service. There have been a few commissioners in the history of the Federal Communications Commission, which is one of the things that I've written about, which have really focused on what might seem to be a fairly simple concept, but is an important one nonetheless, and that's the public interest. The public interest, while it may change with the new technologies and different gadgets that we might use at home, always involves at least one thing, and that's the public, which may or may not be the same as businesses. Michael Kops has always known that, and there's always reminded the Federal Communications Commission, whether he was in charge or whether he was in the majority or the minority, that commissioners were public servants and that their obligation was to look for and try to promote the public interest. I think we are honored by his presence today and the fact that he continues to push for that and for all of the students of history who are wondering what to do with their careers. I don't think there's a better role model than Dr. Michael Kops. So with that, let me actually formally begin the program and bring Michael Kops up to the podium and sit back in his chair and listen to his good words. Thank you again for coming. Please. Now is the time. Good morning. And thank you, Mark Lloyd. You can see why Mark is one of my very favorite people. We did work very, very closely together at the Federal Communications Commission where he was our Chief Diversity Officer. And it was really a very happy day for me when you arrived there because you brought with you years of experience as a journalist and an advocate, a really an abiding dedication to the public interest and a truly passionate commitment to expanding civil rights in our country and in our communications. The New America Foundation is very fortunate to have you aboard and all of us in the public interest community welcome you back with open arms and with great enthusiasm. Thanks to the New America Foundation and Common Cause for putting this event together and to our panel that will shortly generate which I am sure will be a very lively discussion. Thank you everyone for taking the time to come here this morning. As many of you know, after I stepped down from the Federal Communications Commission at the end of last year, I joined forces with Common Cause to lead a new media and democracy reform initiative. Bob Edgar Common Cause's visionary and so very effective president was anxious to have his grassroots group weigh in on the declining state of America's news and information infrastructure and he provided me with a place I could call home to pursue the issues that mattered most to me. Bob is here this morning and I want to thank him publicly for that and also for the tremendous work he has led this year to bring accountability and transparency and citizen involvement in the 2012 elections and I want to give him and encourage you to give him a round of applause for that. Our new media and democracy reform initiative fits perfectly within the Common Cause crusade to get big money out of politics to bring more citizens into the political process and to ensure a civic dialogue where we can get the news and information we need to make intelligent decisions for our troubled nation's future. This morning I want to just briefly outline what I see as the four primary and interlocking problems that have already done so much to diminish our political system. They are the role of money in our elections to which I will devote most of my comments but I will also briefly talk about the undemocratic distortions caused by congressional redistricting, the action blocking Senate filibuster rule and of course the failure of so much of our media to live up to its responsibility to sustain the critical, small d democratic dialogue upon which self-government always rests. We won't fix all of these problems right away. I know that, but our democracy will be tainted until such time as we do. First, the outrageous role of money in our political bloodstream. November 6th brought us good news and bad. Voter participation was better than most experts predicted. Not what a really thriving democracy should have but better than many expected. The success of progressive causes in many states demonstrated that the strong currents of reform still swirl. Beautiful voices of diversity were heard loudly and clearly and citizen action was able to limit somewhat the power of dark money. And by the way, when I use that term dark money, I want to use it broadly. Super PAC dollars that fail to tell us who is really bankrolling all of those brain-deadening negative political ads that we were subjected to this year. Are every bit as dark as undisclosed corporate ads? Telling me that an ad is sponsored by a committee for a sunshiny future doesn't tell me substantially more than not telling me anything at all. It's all dark money. Maybe there are 50 shades of dark, but dark is still dark, night is still night, and in this case political nightmares are still political nightmares. So the bad news is that money ran rampant in the 2012 campaigns, perhaps as much as $6 billion when it all gets added up. Money continues to run rampant, paying off 2012 campaign debts and positioning itself to collect legislatively for past favors. And money is on track to twist and distort the 2014 and 2016 campaigns just as surely and probably more so than it did this year. As common cause in many other groups have documented, the mechanics of the electoral process were challenged far and wide in 2012. Restrictive voter ID laws were designed by Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and others to minimize participation by minorities. Residents in many low-income precincts had to line up for hours to vote. Intimidating threats about the consequences of voter fraud found their way even on to highway billboards. Ballots were designed so that even a PhD couldn't read through them and the time allowed it to vote, which was sometimes as short as five minutes, the list goes on. The president was absolutely right last week when he said, quote, we have to fix that, end quote. I say let's get on with it right now while memories are still fresh. Back to the money. The McCain-Feingold law was a good start at much-needed reform and disclosure by reining in soft money. Still, dollars found their way in through independent expenditure loopholes. So the situation was bad enough, and then along came the Supreme Court's tortured 2010 Citizens United Decision, which made matters dramatically worse by opening the floodgates to unlimited spending by individuals and by corporations. The High Court told us that corporations are people, money is speech, and don't worry, there's not even the appearance of corruption to worry about. So groups with nebulous names like Restore Our Future flooded the airways with one ridiculous claim after another. So the floodgates were open. The elections came and went. We all know how they turned out. But from a surprising number of quarters now, we hear musings that Citizens United didn't count so much after all. And that the super PACs and dark money had little impact. That is just plain wrong. Sure, President Obama was re-elected. Yes, the balance of power remained relatively the same in Congress and some good things happened in state and local elections. But do we really think that all those hundreds of millions of special interest dollars didn't matter? Or that suddenly the billionaires have learned their lessons and will cease and desist from trying to buy elections? Come on. Let's take a quick poll. Will everybody in this audience who believes that Carl Rove and the Koch brothers are going away as a result of November 6th, please stand up? I thought so. So let's dispense with that nonsense before it takes further hold. Declaring victory against dark money may be inviting dark disaster next time around. A few facts should suffice. A closer look on coverage numbers that are deeply troublesome to anyone who cares about the influence of special interest in our democracy. OpenSecrets.org reports that in 93% of house races, the campaign and affiliated independent groups that spent the most money won. That's not any statistical outlier. It's hard data indicating that the next Congress will be just as beholden to special interest money as the last. If that is, we, the people, don't act. On top of that, we know those dark money interests aren't looking for a one night stand between big business and the politicians that they support. Winning the election is just the price of admission to a much longer running affair. Not an affair of the heart, but an affair aimed at influencing policy, legislation, and the extent of government oversight. The most pernicious influence of campaign spending, as we all know, comes not on election day, but after election day. That's when the real scandals start. Special interest owners who contributed six or seven figures are looking for a return on their investment. And they're looking real hard when that special interest amendment comes before a congressional or state house or local committee or subcommittee or council or whatever it is. Their access is taken for granted. Soldom are questions asked when there's a knock on the door in that congressman's office for an audience with those to whom they have given so much because they want so much. So let's be clear, some may be worried about the appearance of influence peddling, but what we need to be a lot more worried about is the reality of influence peddling. At no time in this country's political history has big money played a more important role than it did in 2012. And left untouched, the role of big money isn't going to get smaller. It's only going to get smarter. Dark money donors may have made some dumb investments this year, but the political market remains as critical to them as the stock market. And you may be sure that there's a lot of strategizing going on right now, probably right this minute as we're gathered here about how they can reap a higher return on their investment next time around. I believe this is an issue that goes beyond whether you are Democratic or Republican. And if that's not clear, we need to fix it and make clear right away because I believe citizens of all political persuasions are appalled at how much influence is wielded by so few. Republicans and Democrats alike turned to dark money to raise unlimited dollars and to blast opponents mercilessly. President Obama was attending fundraisers. One report said, at a rate of one every 60 hours, Citizens United is a bipartisan problem that compels a bipartisan solution. My advice here is to strike early, and that means now, with a reform program that has the consensus support of all the public interest groups in this town and others who have expressed their frustration with what our campaigns have become. Lots of groups have identified the problem. Now's the time to do something about it. Before Congress convenes in January, there ought to be a specific proposal ready for presentation to the Congress endorsed by an impossible to ignore breadth of organizations and individuals. And it should cover what I've talked about this morning and more. Limits on money, full disclosure of contributions, getting a constitutional amendment rolling, simplifying the voting process, ensuring that casting a ballot is quick, easy, and totally non-intimidating. I saw an interesting survey the other day with regard to having national standards for elections wherein the bottom line was 88% of Americans would support that. Meanwhile, while this process unfolds, I renew my call, and I hope a lot of you will join in in demanding that the Federal Communications Commission use the authority it already has in Section 317 of the Telecommunications Act to drill much farther down to disclose the true sponsors of political advertisements. The law clearly states that political ads, quote, must fully and fairly disclose the true identity of the person, or persons, or corporation, committee, association, or other unincorporated group, or other entity, end quote, paying for them. Why? Again quoting the statute, quote, because listeners are entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded, end quote. So listing that committee for a sun-shiny future that I mentioned as a sponsor of an ad doesn't get us anywhere close to the kind of disclosure that Section 317 envisions. And you know what? There's a chance that the Supreme Court might just bless the FCC doing its job here because the Citizens United decision made quite a deal about disclosure as an antidote to all the money the decision allowed in to the campaign bloodstream. Make it call their bluff. As I said at the outset, money in politics is one of four great challenges that tarnish our electoral process, and I promise to be much briefer about the other three challenges. The second challenge is the distortion caused by politics-driven congressional redistricting. It's interesting that Democrats won the congressional vote nationwide, but will still have some 39-fee receipts than the Republicans come January. The current system is brazenly undemocratic and nakedly partisan because it packs voters into gerrymandered districts that are designed exclusively to keep one party or the other in control. It's a Democratic sin as well as a Republican sin. These politically motivated maps mean far fewer genuine swing districts. Very often, members in seats considered safe in a general election are much more afraid of a primary challenge, and they have a perverse incentive to engage in hyperpartisanship to ward off that primary challenge. So at a time when we need bipartisan cooperation more than ever, gerrymandering actually encourages partisanship and deadlock, and it makes a mockery of the idea of one person, one vote. California made real progress in addressing this issue this year. I hope our public interest groups will give this issue the priority it deserves because our democracy is seriously eroded by the failure to do something about the redistricting mess. Challenge number three is the Senate filibuster. There is neither rationale nor excuse for a tiny minority's ability to bring the entire edifice of government to a screeching halt, especially over matters that were never intended by the founding fathers to require a supermajority. The Constitution was very clear on matters that required more than a majority for passage, but the overwhelming bulk of what is held up nowadays has absolutely no relationship to what the Constitution demarcated. During my years working for the great senator Fritz Hollings and for many generations before that, the filibuster was rarely deployed. Legislators worked hard to whip votes fair and square, and when they were behind in the count they didn't end run the Constitution to keep the other side from winning. But right now issues with broad public support like campaign finance reform are snarled by this blatantly anti-democratic parlor trick. My colleagues at Common Cause are working hard to reform the filibuster, and I hope they succeed. And I'm also pleased to hear that Senator Reid is at least talking about addressing this issue in the new Congress. I hope he succeeds. Our country confronts a magnitude of problems, the severity of which has seldom been matched in our history. And with one of our legislative bodies always at the mercy of a little band of willful blockers tackling these problems and achieving what are bound to be very difficult compromises is simply going to be beyond our reach. The fourth great challenge to restoring our democracy is media itself. Media, that's where most of these campaign dollars end up, isn't it? Campaign 2012 was a bonanza for media. They were huge winners. But more than broadcaster profits, a functioning democracy demands an informed electorate. That is its very prerequisite. For a long time we had a press that held power accountable that dug for facts that called out distortions that pressed for truth. That was then. Right now much of our media is failing the most basic task at hand, and that is to provide voters with a high quality news, information and deep accountability journalism that we must have in order to decide the country's future course. But too often balance has replaced the contest of considered thought, antagonistic questions. Glitz has replaced substance, opinion has replaced fact, spin replaces truth. And sadly our consolidated media monoliths have little incentive or encouragement to produce real news. Investigative journalism is expensive, cause money, it's hard work. Talking heads are much cheaper and closing newsrooms, well that proves to Wall Street that you're really serious about achieving those efficiencies and economies that pump up the bottom line. And we've seen that played out dozens and hundreds of times over the last 30 years. So I'll spare you the speech which all of you know I would really like to launch into right now and try to distill it into a couple of sentences of what I think is essential here. One is to put the brakes on more media consolidation and telecommunications consolidation. And the other is to assert some honest to God public interest oversight of our news and information ecosystem. The fact that the FCC may be on the brink of further loosening our media ownership limits right now, and shutting down still more local voices is more than distressing. And even worse has been the strange reluctance of the commission to do something about the lack of diversity in our broadcast media. And this is also teed up in the item pending before the commission right now. And I don't mean just diversity of opinion, but diversity of ownership in a country that is more than one-third minority. The fact that only 2.2%, and this new figure was just released by the FCC the other day, 2.2% of full power commercial TV stations are owned by minorities is nothing short of a national disgrace. Every public interest group in this room, every civil rights group in this room and around this town ought to be weighing in on what is shaping up in the days and weeks just ahead in the FCC's Quadrennial Review of Media Ownership Rules as a tragic lost opportunity to repair the damage caused by so many years of public policy failure. And we shouldn't have to say, well, the Third Circuit Court will take care of it again, so let's not worry about it right now. We shouldn't be letting it get that far. No agency of government or room filled with concerned advocates can solve these four great challenges that be double our nation. They're fundamental challenges, steep hills to climb. We know the power of those who oppose us. We understand the corrupting influence of big money, but we've also learned that even amidst all the special interest power, the grassroots can still prevail. And they'd prevail a lot more if we can make progress on this new citizens agenda that I've just outlined today. I believe that when our people come to see the interrelatedness of these challenges and that understands how directly they get in the way of the common good, they will come to demand that they be fixed. Different issues, demand, different strategies, perhaps different time tables. But they are, in truth, one agenda. An agenda for democratic reform. I don't delude myself that change will be easy or that a series of speeches or even a new media and democracy reform initiative will get it done. But Citizens United, lower case C, lower case U, a real Citizens United can get it done. All of it done. So our job here is to present an agenda that speaks to these shortfalls, that has priorities and time tables to achieve our goals, and that takes the battle not just to the halls of Congress, but first and foremost to citizens across the land. Reform from the top down is not going to deliver on any of these four great challenges, let alone on an agenda that encompasses them all. Success may not come all at once. It may have to come incrementally, but our agenda should transcend the incremental. Our vision should go beyond the incremental. It's got to hold out the vision and the promise of self-government of our belief that the strength of diversity is growing now, that new voices are being added to the chorus of the people, and that we may be seeing at long, long last a gathering opportunity for democratic renewal and democratic reform. I don't know about you, but that's why I'm back at it, and that's why I am convinced that now is the time for coordinated action against dark money, rigged redistricting, filibustering deadlocks, and media too often failing its basic responsibility to nourish informed citizenship. Is that an ambitious agenda? Yes, it is. You bet. I think it's worth a try, don't you? Thank you very much. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. It's 10.25. We're going to wrap up here at, as I said, at noon, which means we're going to have a panel discussion for roughly 30, 45 minutes or so, and I'm going to ask the panelists to come up, and we can begin very shortly. While they're doing that, let me be sure to thank Todd O'Boyle and Doug, and Tim Keidem. Tim is here, Liz, and other folks who've really sort of helped pull this together. Again, the New America Foundation is honored to host this event, but it really has been a free press and common cause and the Sunlight Foundation that have made this possible. Our topic, as Commissioner Cops said, is dark money, media, and the 2012 campaign. This is the first presidential election since Citizens United, a decision that a Republican-appointed associate justice said was a democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold. That was Justice Stevens' dissent. So part of the conversation about what's happened with Citizens United I think can be divided perhaps into two separate strands. One strand is has dark money, has the influence of super PACs and other people contributing to, I would guess, the candidate of their choice, whether it's at the national level or the local level. They so overwhelm the process that they have distorted our political discussion. Has dark money had an impact on how we talk about our issues and our candidates? The other issue is related but separate, which is does dark money represent a corrupting influence down the line, which may be different than the conversation that we have, but is more about what happens after the election. And we have a panelist today who I think are more than able to address both strands of those particular issues. Why don't I introduce them in the order in which they're going to speak, so I'll trust that you'll remember this. Matea Gold, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, is a Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. She left the media beat at the LA Times and joined the D.C. Bureau of the Tribune in 2010. In addition to covering media, Gold is a veteran political reporter having covered the campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman and others. Jason Reifler, who's not sitting next to Matea, will be speaking next after Matea. Jason is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia State University. He studies political behavior with a great chunk of his time devoted to political opinion, voting behavior, and the misperceptions of the electorate, if I have that correctly. This includes research he's engaged in with his colleague, Brenda Nine, who for the New America Foundation, funded by Omidyar, is looking at misrepresentation and how to correct it. In his spare time, he teaches political psychology, war, and public opinion, and helps his wife raise his daughter. Craig Aaron needs a little introduction, I think, before this crowd. He's the president and CEO of Free Press, and the Free Press Action Fund. Is that right? That's right. Wow. The National Non-Pars and Non-Profit Organization, Media Reform Group Par Excellence, before joining Free Press, he was, believe it or not, an investigative reporter. This is what's happened in investigative reporting these days. For public citizens, Congress watch and the managing editor of In These Times magazine. Editor of two books, Appeal to Reason, 25 years of In These Times, and Changing Media Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age, a graduate of Northwestern's highly noted Medeal School of Journalism. Ellen Miller, former board member of, we served on one of my favorite boards, OMB Watch for a little time. She is now the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Sunlight Foundation. We could use a little more of that. Non-Pars and Non-Profit Institution dedicated to using power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. Ellen is also the founder of two other prominent organizations, Tolling in the Fields of Money and Politics, the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign. Ellen was the publisher of TomPain.com and was a senior fellow at the American Prospect. She also writes every now and then, I think, for the Huffington Post and a wide variety of other places, so you are able to see her work. She's also spent a good deal of time working on Capitol Hill. Again, we have, I think, an excellent panel able to address these questions. I'm not sure they all agree. But why don't we start with a political reporter, Matea. So I'll leave that to you. Well, thank you very much. It's such a pleasure to be here. I come from a slightly different perspective. For the most of the folks on this board, I am obviously an independent reporter and not an advocate in this fight, but I've had an opportunity to watch this play out over the last two election cycles up close since my beat is money and politics. So it's been pretty fascinating. I wanted to step back briefly just to talk about how we got here because I think both those of us in the media and the reform community too often use the shorthand of a post-Citizens United world. It actually is a little more complicated, as these things often are. There were two major federal court cases in 2010 that basically created this landscape that we're now in. One, obviously, is the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, which decreed that corporations could actually spend their corporate dollars on direct political advocacy. They couldn't give money to candidates, but they could spend money independently. And that was a huge change after a century ban on that kind of spending that came out of the gilded age. But there was another court decision that I actually think might have been even more influential in leading to what we've seen happen with outside money. That is, a court of appeals decision called Speech Now, in which the federal court decided that people could pool together unlimited sums of money and spend it on independent political activity. Essentially, instead of having be limited at $5,000 contributions for a traditional PAC, you could create what has now become known as a super PAC, which was coined by a colleague of mine at Roll Call. So super PACs, obviously, I think have been one of the biggest drivers of this outside spending. And Citizens United, I think, led to what we've seen as a lot of politically active tax exempt groups take a bigger role in campaigns. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that and how I think those of us in the media have tried to watch this phenomena. As a commissioner said, spending is on track for the 2012 campaign to reach a record $6 billion. That's according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which provides us with so much amazing information that Ellen started. That is up from $5.3 billion in 2008. And the big driver of that spending are outside groups. So outside groups reported spending more than a billion dollars. That's three times as much they spent in the last presidential campaign. And that includes $307 million spent by 150 tax exempt advocacy groups, which purportedly do not have politics as their primary purpose. So this has really been the area in which we've seen this dark money flow into the system. These groups do not have to disclose their donors, unlike super PACs. And we really know very little about them and even who set them up. Most of them don't have to file their initial paperwork reporting kind of their board or even who their founder is until a year, a year and a half after the election. Organizations like this, such as Americans for Prosperity, which we know has gotten backing from the Koch brothers, Crossroads GPS, which is an arm of American Crossroads, which was co-founded by Carl Rove on the left, a group called Patriot Majority. These groups have also spent money that they did not have to report. So we talk a lot about this is a big iceberg that we only see kind of probably a fraction of it out of the water. We don't really know how much of it is under the water, but it's safe to say there were probably hundreds of millions of dollars spent by tax exempt groups that were not reported to the FEC this cycle. So what we really saw in this campaign was the center of gravity shift from traditional campaigns and parties to these outside groups. That had a huge impact on those of us in the press that try to make the connection between candidates and campaigns and the interests that are supporting them, made it so much more difficult for us to actually try to draw the connection between those forces, those funding forces, and the candidates themselves. And it made for a fun hunt, I have to say. Every time there were the campaign filings on the 20th of the month, the super PACs, I disagree slightly with Commissioner Cops. I don't think they're really dark, maybe slightly gray, but they do have to report their donors. So it's up to us in the media to tell the public who those are, and I like to think we were pretty aggressive about that. Some of them, of course, got money from corporate shells, and we had to play a little detective game to find that out. One of my favorite stories was actually a tip we got from CRP. They discovered that a new nonprofit had sprung up in the 2010 cycle. It was called the Center to Protect Patient Rights, and it was basically a post office box outside of Phoenix. They had transferred $55 million to 26 conservative nonprofits in the 2010 cycle, which of course we found out, you know, a year and a half after that election. So we spent a long time digging into that, and we're able to piece together connection between the center and the Koch brothers, several of their operatives had actually set up the group and on its board. Of course, no one would talk to us. And they kind of disappeared from site until we found out they were part of kind of a daisy chain of money transferred into two California referendum fights this year. They helped funnel $11 million into California to fight some initiatives there. So that's the kind of detective work that we've been trying to do, but, granted, we can't track all these groups down. And I would say that there is an incredible challenge because there are so many fewer media outlets devoted to investigative reporting, and I think that the risk is especially at the congressional level because many groups, many news organizations just don't have the resources to track down these groups. Briefly, I just want to address this idea of whether the Super PAC money was a big fail in this election. We wrote about how there was this surprise that all of these hundreds of millions of dollars that supported Governor Romney didn't work. I think that in some ways we probably all shouldn't be that surprised that money on its own doesn't work. We've seen many a self-funded candidate pour hundreds of million or tens of millions of dollars into a campaign Linda McMahon in this election for one and not succeed. And I think there's several reasons that the Super PACs and the tax-exempt groups at back Governor Romney had some challenges. One is obviously that a campaign comes down to a candidate and whether they can connect with voters. So I think that's a big part of the equation, but I think there's a real argument to be made that there actually were too many groups advocating for him on his behalf and there was kind of a cacophony of messages. We saw at some points in the summer there were groups running ads attacking Obama on the debt and Selindra and his purported gutting of wealth over form and I think you could really, as a television viewer, just kind of start tuning them all out at a certain point. But I think it is important to note that even while money on one side of the aisle did not seem to have an effect in this election, it had a huge impact overall on the campaign. It created a financial arms race that I think set us on a trajectory that is not going to stop unless we see a real change in the law. President Obama's campaign and his affiliated committees raised more than a billion dollars and that was largely in response to these outside groups. They went up early on the air in the summer. They spent $300 million on television ads because they wanted to get ahead of the onslaught. Governor Romney spent almost all his time scrambling to fundraise to keep up. He was even fundraising after Labor Day when most of the candidates really wanted to just be focused on public events. So I think money took over this election in a way that we haven't seen before. And I do agree that these folks are here to stay now. Even the groups who are on the losing end of the equation this time have talked about getting engaged in the fiscal cliff fight. They are really promising to become effectively shadow political parties. And we're not going to know really who's behind most of them ever unless there is some forced disclosure. And many of them I think that we're kind of, even more in the shadows will probably just fade away and there's little chance that we're going to be able to track them down. Some things to look for on the horizon. There's already a lot of chatter about the need to roll back contribution limits to parties in order to have a, quote, more even playing field. The RNC is really pushing this. There's a case before the Supreme Court right now in which they want to get rid of the aggregate contribution limit on how much people can give to federal campaigns. And really they're making the case that, hey, parties should be able to raise unlimited sums too if super PACs can. And on the other side of the equation, we're actually seeing some real fight for disclosure on the state level. This money that the Center to Protect Patient Rights helped funnel into California has now triggered a major investigation there. There are several attorneys general in various states that are pushing for politically active nonprofits to have to disclose more. So I think that could be a front in which we actually see some disclosure possibly in the coming years. And there's actually now, I think, a good case to be made that there's some real backlash among voters against this money. One of the reasons that some of these two referendums failed in California was because there was this really strong argument made by Governor Brown that these shadowy outside groups are coming in and trying to manipulate you. And I think that really resonates with voters now. We have devoted so much time to trying to cover this issue. And I do think that even if there's not as many media outlets being able to do the digging, people are very aware of this phenomena. I wouldn't be surprised to see Super PAC in the dictionary next year. And so I think that this is starting to penetrate and that some strategists are now saying that it's actually probably not a benefit to have this kind of money on their side because it can be used against them. So that's all I want to say. Thanks. Jason. Okay, so I think I've been invited to talk some about misperception. So along with my co-author, Brendan Nyhan, we've spent a lot of time trying to focus on the extent to which it's possible to correct the misperceptions that citizens hold. So when people believe things about the world that are in fact not true, is it possible for us to correct them? And the way that this may relate back to money spent in politics is that if that money is spent primarily on campaign commercials and campaign commercials communicate messages to the public, that this may be a vehicle in which misperceptions are spread or in which people get information that is well, too slightly paraphrased, one of my all-time favorite movies, Blood Simple, not strictly accurate. And there are reasons that we might want to be concerned about Super PACs and other less regulated sources of campaign money. One thing that we know from social psychology research is that misperceptions, once you have them, are quite durable. So in perhaps the canonical experiment, some social psychologists at Stanford University in the 70s gave students a stack of 25 suicide notes and then predetermined, through random assignment, that half of the students were going to be told that they were really good at distinguishing real from fake suicide notes and half of them were going to be told that they were really bad at distinguishing real from fake suicide notes. They were told that these were a mix of real and fake and that they had to identify which ones were real, which ones were fake. And what happened is they got this feedback. Then the social psychologist said, you know that feedback we gave you? We totally made it up. Some of you were just told, predetermined, you were going to get told that you were good. Some of you were going to be told that you were bad. And then they asked them, how do you think you will do in the future if you were given this task? And the people who were told that they were really good, even though it was not related to performance at all, thought that they would be really, really good at being able to distinguish real from fake suicide notes. And the people who were told that they were bad in the future thought that they wouldn't be as good at distinguishing real from fake suicide notes. And that there are analogs to politics. So in research that I did with Brendan Nyhan and another co-author, Michael Cobb, we've shown that this same problem also relates to politics. If you learn that somebody has done something in particular, learn something that you don't like and then later take away and say, oh, it turns out that was a mistake. That information that we gave you, that this member of a state legislature in our experiment didn't block a bill that you really would have liked. We did our experiment with college students that was related to college aid. That while their opinions of that state legislator went up compared to when they were told that they had done something bad, it didn't go all the way back up to an initial evaluation. So there was still this belief perseverance. They evaluate a state legislator. They're told something bad. That bad information is taken away and the perceptions of that state legislator don't go all the way back up to the initial evaluation. Now, there isn't asymmetry. We also tested the other way around. What happens if you say that a politician did something really good and then take that away? In that case, people are able to correct. In fact, they over-correct. So there's not an incentive for politicians to go out and be excessively boastful thinking that, oh, once it's taken away, everything's going to be great. There actually seems to be some degree of punishment for that. Additional research that Brendan and I have done has focused on directly trying to correct misperception. So if you believe something that's wrong, can we give you information that will have you update so that you now believe things that are correct? And so in one of our experiments, we gave everybody information about a speech that George Bush had made when he was president saying that his tax cuts had, in fact, increased government revenue. Half of the respondents were given an additional piece of information. That is, showing that, in fact, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 did not increase government revenue. The government revenue was lower after those tax cuts. And an interesting thing happened. Giving that information to liberals made them less accepting of the claim that the tax cuts increased government revenue. So compared to people who didn't get the correction, liberals told that, in fact, the Bush tax cuts did not increase revenue, changed their beliefs. Among conservatives, being told that the Bush tax cuts did not increase government revenue and actually cut government revenue, actually led them to believe more strongly that the Bush tax cuts had increased government revenue. So that when people are given information that runs counter to their political beliefs, counter to their predispositions, that people bring mental effort to bear on this and that they actually try and counter-argue the information that they're getting, which may paradoxically lead them to believe that which is wrong more strongly because you've tried to correct them in the first place. So corrections are difficult. People engage in motivated reasoning. Now, as horrible as this sounds, and it does sound pretty horrible, that ironically this may actually also serve us well in some ways. Because people engage in motivated reasoning, because when they're given persuasive arguments, that they're not just blank slates in which they easily accept anything that they're told, that getting lots of extra campaign commercials from the other side probably isn't going to move you around all that much. So while there's lots of money being spent, it's not clear that that money is being spent all that well. And it's not just choices about are we spending money on the right candidates, are we putting it in the correct races, are we spending it in the correct ways. It may just be that any persuasive message, there's lots of people that it's not going to reach. And if it reaches them, it may actually be counterproductive. So corrections can be really difficult in some odd way that actually might be a boon as well. Now, there are other ways that dark money might matter and matter in really negative ways, apart from directly trying to buy influence or buy policy, one is that we could think of if we have this process where more and more money is being spent, more and more money being spent on persuasive messages, largely spent attacking the other side, even if it's not persuading that it may be poisoning a political environment to such a degree that the opportunities for political compromise just don't exist, that the political environment becomes so poisoned and the sides become so hardened in their views. It's not that persuasion would work and would get people to necessarily change their minds. It just, you get so hardened into your position that any movement away from that is such a loss that compromise becomes impossible. And I also agree that even to the extent that money may not be effective, money is probably not going to go away. Because the one situation where it might be effective is if one side has a huge spending advantage over the other side. So I'm not sure who here has ever heard of the dollar auction before. I'll briefly explain what a dollar auction is. It's a tool that economists like to use. So pretend that I take a, I work at a state university so I'm not actually going to do this, but pretend that I take a dollar out of my wallet and I say you can bid whatever you want for it and whoever has the top bid gets that dollar. But there's a catch. Whoever has the second highest bid also has to pay whatever their highest bid was. So once people start bidding you may think, you know what, one dollar, I bid one penny, no big deal. The next person says, I'll bid two cents. I still, that's a huge return on investment. I would bid two cents, I'd have to pay two cents and I could get back a dollar. And as long as you are still beneath a dollar it makes sense to go ahead and keep bidding. But then the amazing thing is once you get to a dollar people keep bidding. So you go back and forth, ninety-seven cents, ninety-eight, ninety-nine a dollar. And the person who was left at ninety-nine realizes, wait a second, if I don't bid a dollar one I'm going to have to pay ninety-nine cents and get nothing. And when more and more money gets being spent and yet what initially looked like it might be a large return on investment because you're spending a lot and if you're able to spend a lot when the other side isn't then you are able to collect a lot from it. But once both sides start doing it it's this arms race that accumulates more and more and more and then maybe that gets back to some of the other problems. Like all this money being spent poisoning political communication or political discourse in a way that makes compromise or deal making extremely difficult or possibly even impossible. So, I will stop. Craig. All right. Wow, so we go from suicide notes. I think I see why they use those in that experiment. So I'm going to try to be here also on behalf of Citizens for a Sunshiny Future. And talk a little bit, you know, if we're going to talk about money in the election we have to talk about the media. We know something like sixty cents on every dollar being spent in the election is going into buying media. Pretty clear that media are part of the problem. And I don't think it's really an overstatement to say that increasingly the media are complicit in the damage being done to our democracy. Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot of good journalism out there being done on the 2012 election. I'm sure we could list dozens of excellent pieces from the Los Angeles Times, from the New York Times, NPR, you name it. You know, Mother Jones magazine had a scoop that we could argue maybe turned the election when they got their hands on that 47% video. Fact-checking was in vogue this election cycle. We had Pinocchios and pants on fire and sort of that ultimate seal of approval which was presidential candidates calling out fact-checkers and saying they were ignoring them, which, you know, pro-tip means they actually weren't. But the dominant media experience for most people when it came to the election was that advertising. I mean, God help you if you lived in a swing state or one of its neighbors. On the other hand, if you were a TV station owner, 2012 was like winning the lottery. That's actually a direct quote from a former NBC news executive. And, you know, we expect that once we've counted all up, these broadcasters will have taken in $3 billion from the election. And I think it's safe to say that that is not a story that you heard a lot about when you were watching local television. My colleague Tim Carr, who's in the back, Tim, maybe wave your hand so people can find you. He did a series of reports this year looking at the ads and what was actually on the news. This built on the work of a project that we did with the Sunlight Foundation to actually send people out to find out what were stations actually putting on the air, what were in the advertising records. Some of those became available as the cycle went on. For a long time, you had to actually go down to a station and ask them to open up those dusty filing cabinets and dig in, and we had people doing it. And when we got that information back, when we were able to use these other resources, we found that in places like Milwaukee, in the hundreds of hours of coverage that led up to that June 5th gubernatorial recall, there were zero stories, zero, on the 17 groups most actively buying time on the major affiliates. At the same time, during that same time period we studied, there were 53 stories about Justin Bieber. So they were hard at work. Charlotte, Cleveland, Las Vegas, we found no fact-checking of any of the claims of the super PACs and independent groups that were spending the most. In Tampa, an exception, one story. Denver has been held up rightfully as a market where fact-checking was happening on television. But when we went in to look at the two months that led up to the presidential debate in Denver, we found that for every minute of news coverage about those groups and spending, there were 162 minutes of advertising. And worse still, the stations, even those stations doing fact-checking, they continued to air the ads that their own reporters found were false or misleading. And that's a big problem because a lot more people were seeing those ads than were seeing those reports. And look, stations, they can reject inaccurate ads from independent and third-party groups, not candidates, but the independent and third-party groups, in the same way that they could be rejecting consumer products that make false claims, but they don't do it. And I think they won't do it until they're feeling more pressure from viewers, until they're feeling more pressure from their peers, and until they're feeling some real pressure from the supposed watchdogs down at places like the Federal Communications Commission. These stations are friends, the broadcasters, the number one source of news in every survey when it comes to where people find out about their elections. They love to wrap themselves in the flag and the First Amendment anytime their motives are questioned. They will talk your ear off about all the toys for TOTS drives that they do and the Amber Alerts and the round-the-clock storm and hurricane coverage and good for them for doing it. But I think increasingly we need to be demanding a storm team to contend with the deluge of lies, with the hurricane of misinformation that we're all staring at in every single election. It's about accountability, and I think we should be raising our expectations that stations need to be accountable and putting those record profits, that $3 billion, back into cutting through the spin and actually reporting on the issues. We also need, in addition to that accountability, more transparency. I do want to give some credit to the Federal Communications Commission for finally forcing after a long fight the network stations in the biggest markets to put their public and political files online. That was a major accomplishment. Those were invaluable records to researchers and reporters, and now there are things we could do to make them better. The FCC should be listening to my friends at the Sunlight Foundation about how to make these things actually searchable, machine-readable, more user-friendly so that by 2014 when not just the top 50 markets but every station, including the Spanish language station, small markets, should be online with these records, they could be more useful. Now, perhaps the biggest obstacle we need to remove there is the fact that even after we saw there was no real burden to putting these records online, even after we saw how useful they were to journalists, including television journalists, the National Association of Broadcasters is still suing the FCC, still fighting basic common-sense transparency. The fact that this lawsuit continues, I think it's really shameful, it's preposterous. They should drop it. I think they're going to lose. I'm confident they will lose in court, but it would be better for all of us if they just gave up these ridiculous arguments about this burden and started acting like the news organizations that they're supposed to be. That would be a great first step. That would even maybe get us halfway there. I think the next step, as Commissioner Copp suggested in his opening remarks, is that we need to look at updating our policies. The Communications Act makes very clear that viewers and listeners are, quote, entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded. And, you know, if all we're telling people is that this ad was brought to them by, I don't know, puppies in kittens against Barack Obama or rodeo clowns for Romney, the Committee for Truth in Politics, that one's actually real, viewers have no idea. And it was, we heard about these studies that show that, you know, people, you know, people are more likely to properly discredit information if they are aware of a source's lack of credibility when they first receive that information. Once you start telling them later on the side after the ad's been on the air for three weeks, it just doesn't stick. So I think, from a policy perspective, what we need to look at is a pretty simple and obvious answer. People need to, at least for a start, see who is actually sponsoring these messages. Again, I think there's been a fair bit of work done on what this should look like. How about a standalone disclaimer in the body of ads that names at least the top four contributors to the organization or entity sponsoring the advertisement? That would give us some information when Crossroad GPS or Restore Our Future puts an ad on the air. You can limit this, you should limit this to, say, the names of those who contributed more than 25% of the organization's budget in the previous year, or perhaps instead the top four donors if they gave the groups at least $10,000 in the previous year. You need to make sure that those disclosures are legible, that they're on the air long enough that you can actually see and hear them. And you need to make it clear that that rule is not just for federal races, that the FCC's jurisdiction does not stop there, but the state contests, the ballot initiatives, and those issue ads that, as Mateo suggested, a lot of these groups are moving in straight into this kind of issue advocacy where even more misleading tactics are at play because the political consultants aren't necessarily looking to take credit in the moment, like they might be in a presidential race. The great part of this plan, of this idea is that we could do it right now. It just requires really an exceedingly modest change to existing sponsorship identification rules at the FCC. In fact, there's already a petition sitting at the FCC to do this. Andy Schwarzman, formerly of Media Access Project, has filed that petition. It's there, it's stuck in a drawer. So we've freed the files in some ways. I think it's time that we demand that we open that drawer. I think we could start there. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not tomorrow, Monday. We could get started. That's fine. I'll give you a week. I think that would be the simplest and perhaps best reform we could do. There are elements of this in the Disclose Act and larger pieces of legislation, but this is very doable and could be carried out by the Federal Communications Commission and would be cheered by so many of those viewers who are sick and tired of watching those ads. That's not the only thing we should do. There are larger issues to wrestle with. Commissioner Cops talked about it. There's a much bigger conversation about how to contend with Citizens United and these other court cases. There's a much longer conversation about a set of policies we should actually pursue to support more local journalism. Maybe we'll get into some of that. The one thing I do want to flag, because it's very relevant right now to what the Federal Communications Commission is doing, is that the very worst thing we can do, the one thing we shouldn't do is encourage more media consolidation. I just can't see having just lived through this election how we're going to be better served, how our democracy is going to be better served. If somebody like Rupert Murdoch, fresh off his phone hacking scandal, is allowed to buy the Los Angeles Times, along with two television stations, along with eight radio stations in the same market, but that's essentially what the Federal Communications Commission has been reported in the trades in the last couple of days, that's essentially what they're proposing, to open the door where that kind of deal is possible. I don't know how political coverage is going to improve if we're allowing a company like Sinclair Broadcasting to put on the air this thinly veiled partisan propaganda right before the election in multiple markets, dozens of markets, on multiple stations because they're operating more than one station. And yet the FCC, after all these years, after hearing time and again that 99% of the public opposes further media consolidation, they seem strangely unconcerned. Unlike some of my fellow panelists here, I am not a doctor. But it seems that the last thing we need is more of the same bad medicine that has gotten us so sick in the first place. We need a new prescription and we need it stat. I'll leave it there. Thanks. I was told yesterday that I get to back clean up so this is not such an easy task. I'll put a little more, a few more details and maybe make a few additional points from my colleagues. First of all, the Sunlight Foundation is a relative newcomer in the world of nonprofit organizations. We are just approaching our seventh birthday. We're committed to improving government access to government information using technology. And we do this work, I want to add, in the context of how technology is driving a dramatic transformation between the power of individuals, the role of government, and the relationship between citizens and the state. Before our eyes, there are new ways of identifying problems, of gathering information, and Craig mentioned some of how we gathered information during the election. New ways of organizing stakeholders and what's happening out there in the technology, using technology and the internet is a little bit like science fiction. In fact, we can make it up every day and experiment. We are driven, the Sunlight Foundation is driven by the commitment that we want democracy to work for all of us, not just the best connected or well healed. We're non-partisan, but we are not neutral in this belief of what makes a democracy work and the power of technology. So what do we think about the role of money in the election? So a bit of a summary here. Despite the meme, the day after the election meme, that money didn't matter, and I woke up in the morning, I heard that meme and I said, didn't matter much to the Democrats? Really? We spent the most ever in a presidential election year. Mateo, I had that number, six billion. President Obama raised one billion dollars in his committee and his associated committees. That's a lot of money, and in doing that, I'll put a number on yours. It's been calculated he attended 200 fundraisers, and that is almost three times what the last sitting president raised, who was the largest spender, and that was George Bush, and he attended 74 fundraisers, and Obama went to 200 fundraisers. That goes into the what kind of time are we spending raising this kind of money argument. Just for example, in terms of did money really matter in the Senate, the Democratic committee outraised the Republican committee by 12 million dollars? Interesting results, tell me money didn't matter. In the House, the Republican committee outraised the Democrats by 14 million dollars. Tell me again, money didn't matter. There was 500 million dollars spent by outside committees in October alone. 500 million in October alone, 37 million spent in the last weekend. I don't know about you, but my TV was off. Super PACs raised 650 million dollars in the last two weeks, and 49 of them didn't start spending their money until after the reporting date before the election passed. That's 32 million dollars, which ultimately will be reported, but after it's too late to know who spent the money. The races with the most outside spending, the presidential 600 million, Virginia 50 million dollars. Got a lot of that on radio here, didn't we, in television. Wisconsin, outside money, 44 million, Ohio 36 million, Indiana 31 million. Those numbers are all somewhat subject to change. There were seven Senate races that cost 40 million each. Not all together. Virginia, Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Nevada and Montana. 40 million dollars in Montana. Someone has lost their minds. Who gave this money? Sunlight did an analysis in the early days of Occupy Wall Street when the meme became the 1% of the 1%. We discovered then, or actually we confirmed some earlier numbers, that less than one-tenth of 1% of Americans give political money in amounts over 200 dollars. And it is safe to say that even though, in particular, the Obama campaign raised 33% of their money in contributions under 200 dollars, that that same figure will hold. So less than one-tenth of 1% of Americans basically gave the money that mattered in this election. Okay, the more secret money, 300 million in dark money, that is money that is not reported at any point, anytime. And I agree with Michael Copse that the delayed reporting of super PACs is really a serious problem. I think, you know, delayed disclosure is like denied disclosure. But we actually do separate out the money that is not reported. That's 300 million. So I mentioned 32 million of the super PAC money not reported until after the election. And there still are some mysteries out there unless you guys have solved them. The Freedom Works, the contribution from Freedom Works from something called the Specialty Corp. Corporation founded in September was funneling $5.3 million into the Freedom Works PAC. We have no idea who, what, when, or where that is. What was the return on investment? This is an analysis we did immediately after the election. Not so good for the Republicans in the presidential race. Pretty good in the House races. Not so bad for the Democrats. And the Senate race is not bad at all for the presidential race for the Democrats. But we really will not know the answer to that until we see how this plays out, how the special interest money that funded all the campaigns, winners and losers pay off in this legislative agenda. A couple more takeaways. As long as candidates act as if money matters, it will. And it fuels the arms race mentality. Even the threat of future super PAC and dark money spending gets the attention of candidates and it will make them more timid to propose solutions that these outside funders may not appreciate. Big donors will always have great influence and leverage as the cost of election increases. And we've seen no indication that the cost of elections is going to go down. And along those same lines, those who give get. So let's take a second because sunlight is very focused in looking at all kinds of data to not only tell who financed and who lobbied for certain candidates, but what do they get in return? So let's look at the legislation that's pending in Congress right now, the fiscal cliff. The fiscal cliff provides cover for extending tax cuts and spending. The contractors, defense contractors, are looking to restore Pentagon purchasing power. Hedge funds are looking to preserve a lower tax rate. The health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, which made up pretty well under the budget deal, are looking to preserve all of that. The unions, AARP and groups that are fighting to Medicare and Social Security, it is a vast sort of almost money palooza focused on this fiscal cliff issue. And we wonder why it's so difficult to make decisions. It's not just because we're divided in partisan ways, but we have the money in there as acting as that as well. Big issues coming up in the 113th Congress, fundamental tax reform. It's obviously an issue that real estate, financial, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and array of interests are going to be aligning with each other in odd combinations. Sunlight builds ways for you to follow all of this. So if you're interested in fundamental tax reform, you might look at our influence explorer that will reveal how these companies have dug in deep, how much they've given, how much they spend lobbying, and what they've already gotten from government. Or you might look at our lobbyist registration tracker, which tracks in real time who is registering for these companies and how much is being spent. We have that registration information in real time. Another issue coming up, energy. Production of natural gas is booming in the U.S., oil production also booming, and the way this plays out is very much affected by the regulations that are constantly being written and adjusted. If you want to follow that, we have a new project. I don't know if I'm supposed to announce it, but I will anyway. It's not up yet. It's called Docket Wrench. And this takes the entire regulatory structure at regulations.gov and makes it easily accessible for you to be able to see who's commenting on what and what they're asking for and to be able to follow that thread. Another big issue, it's going to be a perennial, is healthcare. The Affordable Healthcare Act is incredibly complex. Regulations are still being written. And everyone will be, you know, on board there. We have several tools that you could use actually to look at this. One is called Scout, which gives you an alert every time a piece of legislation involving an issue that you're concerned about is moving not only in Congress, but in every state legislature as well. So we scrape all of that information and you can get daily alerts. It's actually rather frightening. Or you could look at our Open States Project, which takes all the legislation from all 50 states. There are about 40 up now. The rest are coming early in the new year. Or our flagship site called Open Congress. These are ways for you not only to get the information, but to engage in, with your member of Congress, with your peers, with your friends that you make who are concerned about the same issues. A fourth issue that's coming up is financial regulation. Not to a surprising extent, really. The financial industry actually moved out of the top tier of the president's donors and became the top tier of Mitt Romney's donors. The financial, Wall Street was the fourth largest donor to the first Obama campaign. It's now the 10th largest donor to the Obama campaign. Maybe that'll give him a little bit of wiggle room there. But not clear. What are they doing? What do they want in terms of the regulations? How is that going to happen? We have a tracker called the Dodd-Frank Tracker. Because the legislation requires every lobbyist who meets with any agency to register, we take that information from all four of those agencies, scrape it, put it together. You should be following it if you're concerned about that process. To paraphrase Huey Long, those who give get. And that is the dominant power of money and politics. A few other takeaways. Candidates spent more time fundraising and less time doing the business of government, whether they were legislating or in the executive. Endless, misleading campaign ads fueled by big money, breeds distrust, disillusionment, and distraction, a point that Craig and others have made, and a point that I think all of us agree on super PACs and dark money and big money in politics is not going away. They will change tactics and they will still be players. And it will get smarter, as Commissioner Cobb said. Enhanced disclosure is clearly the next step, and not just for campaign contributions, but for lobbyist reporting as well. Because their work is enhanced, even more so by the threat of bigger and more spending. Something I think everyone, the panelists will agree is that it is simply an anathema to American democracy, to have so much hidden or delayed reporting on spending of what fuels our politics. And it has to change. Sunlight is very active in trying to rejuvenate some of this legislation that would require online real-time reporting of the super PAC money, of the get better enforcement of the dark money reporting and to move all of the political influence money online to online real-time reporting for all of us to access and have information about. Thank you. So we're going to spend maybe 15 minutes or so speaking among ourselves, but I hope you listen in. And I have, I'm going to ask two sort of perhaps unrelated questions. One is whether social media made any difference at all in this election, and whether dark money had any impact on the use of social media. The other question is, is there a role or what was the role for public media? Public television and public radio. And why don't I start with you, Craig, because you're right next to me. Well, I may defer to some of my colleagues for hard facts on social media. I think that there's no question social media played a role in the election and how a lot of people got their information, talked about the election, but I think by and large still that was in reaction to things that were happening in the mainstream, that the narrative really wasn't being driven in that space. So the internet spending broadly pales in comparison. It grows each cycle, but compared to what folks are putting on TV. Now some in a post-election context, I noticed the big Democratic Super PAC for the folks who used to be in the White House were saying, oh, well, of course, it was our innovative social media spending that made the difference. I didn't see necessarily the facts there. So I think social media is incredibly important, a free and open internet where you can get to all of the great tools that Ellen makes key, but it's not a substitute. And the fact is that most people, most voters were still getting their information. More of them are getting it from the internet, but the majority of their number one source was still television, and I think a lot of it was in reaction to that. Public media, you know, differences in if we're talking about television and radio, I think, you know, in many ways, it could be the missing link here. Fortunately, at least thus far, the public media stations are not taking Super PAC underwriting. Hopefully the courts will come to their senses and close that door. You know, I think it's sort of an incomplete report card. You know, I think NPR continues to invest in reporting. I think that's great to see. But when it comes to local journalism, when it comes to local races, there are huge gaps. So when you look at the real falling apart of a lot of the commercial media, especially at the local level, smaller and mid-sized newspapers, local TV and radio reporting almost disappearing, public media potentially could fill that gap, but of course they're, you know, fighting for table scraps in Congress. And the story for them in this election was that Mitt Romney took shots at Big Bird. Now, if you ask me, that was, you know, maybe the one memorable thing in that debate in public media has this incredible opportunity that, wow, millions of people love us. We should go get some more money. We were actually winning these fights. That's what I think. When you hear from public media, they say, like, please don't use our branded products, you know, in your activism. So I think there's a way to go. I do think an investment in public media could be a very powerful force in the other direction, but we have to make that investment and folks like PBS have to be willing to really fall through with a commitment to local journalism. Well, I can speak just briefly to the role social media plays in our reporting, which is, it's incredibly helpful. I think one of the things that Twitter has done is kind of sped up, if possible, the competitive metabolism among those of us, covering money in politics. So on FEC night, we're constantly, you know, one eye on the Twitter stream and we're like digging through the FEC files. And when we see, you know, some folks alight on different names, you know, we're chasing down those rabbit holes as well. So it definitely helps, I think, kind of the small cadre of us focused on this to really see what's out there in a more rapid way. And obviously some of the online tools that Sunlight has and some of the other organizations have been incredibly helpful to try to burrow down. I do think that this is, the reporting on this is incredibly complicated and it requires a lot of time and it requires a lot of news hole, which is something we're always arguing for. So while Twitter definitely helps us get our stories out, they really, really can't tell even a fraction of it in 140 characters. Yeah, I would just add on social media, for me, while it is sort of an early warning system about what's happening, it's a tool to engage citizens who would not be engaged before. It's easy, even if they just read what's happening. It's fascinating to me that, you know, my cousin might actually be following politics in this way and if they didn't have easy access to social media, they would not be doing it this way. So now I also have a confession to make. I really don't watch television. But on election night, I tried to turn on the television and it wouldn't turn on. And I thought, oh my God, I am really in deep trouble. So all that I did on election night was online. It was the most peaceful, almost blissful experience. I had my Twitter stream. I had three or four screens open to, you know, the Times and CNN and maybe the Washington Post. And I was just watching and I was filtering myself. And it was actually a wonderful experience. So I doubt that anybody else probably did it that way. But the brilliance of social media is that it allows people that have never heard of common cause or sunlight or free press to engage with their neighbors and their friends and other people they trust and respect. And so we reach a much broader audience that we never had access to before. So I'll speak just real briefly on social media. Not that I know that much about it myself, but my very first doctoral student just defended her dissertation this past spring. And her dissertation was on social media and how it may affect politics because I'm an academic. I've been trained for a really long time not to believe anything until people have been able to show it conclusively, not just in one, but in a series of studies. So just because lots of people use social media doesn't automatically mean that social media matters or that people are responsive to it in any way. My graduate student was convinced that it mattered. I was less convinced because I'm an academic so I'm not convinced until I see all the studies. And so her dissertation was actually doing a series of experiments trying to show the extent to which people are able to learn about politics via social media. So one experiment she asked people to friend a fake profile and people were randomly signed to different fake profiles. This is before Facebook had tools that allowed for a lot more ability to sort of choose who receives various messages. And one of these fake profiles they mostly had the same content but one of them had a couple of extra posts information related to a mayoral election that was going on in Atlanta at the time. And it turns out that people actually do learn something about politics from their friends on Facebook even if it's a friend that is a fake friend that you have signed up for just because you will in advance know one of the questions on the final exam. That's your incentive for signing up for the experiment. She did another follow-up experiment which is a much more extensive thing in recruiting people to friend a profile in Facebook and then asking people and then people got messages encouraging to vote in the 2010 election and she actually went and looked at the voter file and saw that there was a tremendous effect in via social media for getting people to vote. So again, it's a random assignment so only some people are getting the pro-voting message and the boost in turnout for people who study turnout was dramatic. It was an 8% boost in turnout. Now there are reasons why that number I think is so large and seems implausibly large for people who study turnout because these are mostly college students and so I think you have probably less voting history and less habituation about voting but still a rather large effect. So social media can, you can now feel confident that there are some academics who are actually looking at this and show that it does have an effect. There's been some other studies by some folks at UCSD as well. She's still looking for work so if you are hiring, Holly Tereseed, she's awesome. I will give her a very strong recommendation. So let me just do a check to see if there are any questions about dark money media, the 2012 campaign and the audience. Okay, we've got a few. Before we get to those, I'm going to put my cops on the spot and ask him to come up to the podium and if you have any comments about what any of the other presenters had to say or if you have any questions, I'm going to give you and then we'll have someone with a microphone come out to the audience and we'll make sure we get your questions. Patrick, yes, please. I think we should hear from the folks out there. I think this was an extremely illuminating panel. It went to a lot of different dimensions of the subjects at hand so I was privileged to be a part of it. I do have one question if I can just ask one question. Do we have any preliminary information on how the $6 billion that we're talking about breaks down as between the federal and the state race? You know, I mentioned in my remarks the importance of what goes on at the state level. We all know about the American Legislative Exchange Council and its impact in drafting model bills and voter suppression and telecommunications and everything else. That's a huge interest. Alec flew under the radar for the better part of 40 years until common cause and other groups brought it to light and the more years show in particular also. Do we have a feel for whether an increasing percentage of that money went to state races this year? Actually, that $6 billion is just for federal elections. So we actually don't have as good of a handle on the money spent in states for various reported races. Is there any kind of estimate what goes in the state level in past elections compared to federal? I don't know off the top of my head personally. It might be a very illuminating figure to hang out. Right. So I understand there's a floating microphone around here somewhere. Thank you. Why don't you come up front and let's start up front and then go back. Thank you very much. My question concerns the role of the IRS in this and this hasn't been mentioned. My understanding which could be wrong is that these groups that have a nonprofit status are supposed to be legitimate social welfare type groups pursuing various public social welfare causes and that's the basis for them getting tax-free status. My impression is that the IRS has fallen down totally in that regard and just seems to get this status to these groups willy-nilly or after the fact. I mean I'm wondering how many of these groups are now going to be active allegedly in social welfare causes now that the election is over. So my question to you all is can the IRS be a tool or a vehicle for stricter enforcement to restrict some of these groups from their wild spending? I think you might have been reading my email chain with some of our staff yesterday as we sort of figure out what to do, what can be done with these C4s, mostly C4 organizations and you've hit the nail on the head. The IRS has to be pressured to do a serious enforcement and the rules also have to be changed. So I don't know them precisely but it's something like if, and you probably do, if 40% of your activity is non-political then you can get away with it. Maybe that should be reduced to 10%, 5%, something like that. But there is a new focus that has to be taken on the IRS with respect to enforcement of these C4 organizations. I'll just jump in on that. One of the issues with IRS enforcement is there is a conflict between the law and the regs and the regs actually say that if you're a social welfare organization then your primary purpose cannot be politics and the law actually says something a little strict about you're supposed to be solely focused on social welfare. So the primary purpose is really vague and so attorneys have come to interpret that as meaning you can spend 49% of your budget or less on politics and you'll be able to meet that standard. So what we see is a lot of groups spending all this money in the campaign on electioneering or overtly political ads and then spending a lot on what Craig mentioned, these issue ads which actually have a very strong political sheen to them but count towards their social welfare component. So we'll see a lot of spending I think around the physical cliff because these groups are going to try to drive up the spending on the non-political side of their budget in order to meet that primary purpose test. I just want to follow up on Michael Cops's comment about the American Legislative Exchange Council. We filed a whistleblower complaint with the IRS because for 40 years they're not a C4, they're a C3 and they claim on their 990s that they do zero lobbying when in fact they do about 60 or 70% of their work as lobbying. And my question really relates to the fact and there's probably not a big answer to it but we've talked about dark money and we've talked about the money spent in this election. We haven't really I think addressed some of the hidden actions. I served in Congress for 12 years, I know what lobbying looks like. A group like Alec sits around in fancy resorts with a lot of corporate money getting to know state legislators and they then turn around in that state legislation not only restrictive laws on voting but also support for the private sector prison industry, the private sector educational industry. I think money is corroding our political system in a deeper way, not just in campaigns and we've got to make the flow of commentary that goes from the contributions made on political ads, the contributions made directly to the candidates, the contributions made in fancy resorts to a whole group of state legislators and federal legislators who sneak in into those events. What are some of the solutions? How do we get at this? Is public financing a possibility? Should in fact we have the White House have a White House conference on reform January, February, March where the President puts his arm around John McCain and says let's fix the presidential finance questions. Ever since Watergate, up until the 08 election, we had limits on all of this time and I'm not sure any of us want, regardless of our political affiliation, our President spending all of those days raising money for their reelection in the first term with a complication of issues. So the question is, what do we do about it? How do we begin to get real reform? Well, you're looking at me, Bob, so I know my colleague to my right and my immediate left are not going to comment on this. I yield to the gentle woman from Sunlight. It's a really nutty, difficult, complicated problem but what drives a lot of the Sunlight Foundation's work is getting to the data points that illustrate precisely what you are describing. So it's one site that I mentioned Influence Explorer. If you put in General Electric, you will see whatever data we have been able to collect to date that literally is mashed together and within seconds you will see General Electric's federal contributions and their state contributions. So money doesn't stop, as you indicated, at the federal border or at a state border. These big players are everywhere because the issues that the state legislatures are is important for them as is greening candidates at the state level to move up as federal issues are. We add in issues like, has General Electric ever been cited by the EPA for violations of environmental laws? Are they on a contractor misconduct list? Oh, do they receive government grants or contracts? How much do they receive? All of this is information that unfolds within seconds on the website and the idea is to provide a kind of data commons, if you will, so that you really, through data, can tell the story of the power of the political money and the lobbying spent. We would love to have lobbying expenditures from all 50 states. I mean, the last time we calculated what it would take to do that is about a million dollars. We don't have the money to do that yet. But these tools, we want to put in the hands of, you know, citizens as well as the media to begin to tell the story that's based on data. And if you had this information in real time, you as an active advocate could actually stop bad stuff from happening. You wouldn't have to wait until the C legislation, you know, passed and say, oh my God, what was section 22A? Look what they did there. So the idea is to put this information online in real time. It is not a solution to the problem, but without it, we are completely, you talk about being in the dark, we are completely in the dark. And today, it is true. When we get reports of just campaign contributions, you know, every quarter, it's the last quarter. It's like looking over your shoulder or it's like looking at a video of a bank robbery. Literally. Like, oh, that's who stole the money out of the bank. Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I agree with all that. And I've been doing this, can I say this not long enough? I mean, I remember as recently as 2004, if you even wanted to get like lobbying records, you'd actually have to go down to the Senate and ask them to print them out for you and you could take it back. I remember a public citizen, we were building our own databases and then hand coding that stuff in there. So we've come a long way. Those are good steps. I think we should encourage it. But we also have a political problem. And, you know, we hinted at it here a little bit, which is, you know, we sort of perceive that the Democrats are more in line with the reform agenda. But it's a little harder to motivate them when they win. And they're happy to go. I've been to a couple of events this week with members of Congress saying like, and yeah, we should also fix that system. But thank you for keeping those checks coming. And we're gonna have to confront that head on in some ways, I think. And there's going to have to, it's an organizing problem because there's going to have to be a belief that you could actually lose votes. Because every four years, at least, if not every two, they can say like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am so for fixing this system. Isn't it terrible? But really right now we need the cash. And until we can sort of interrupt that, and I think actually part of that is confronting this narrative that's come out of this election, both Ellen and Mattay had hinted at it, which is kind of like money didn't matter. But no, I mean, it really did matter to the victors as well. And I hold them accountable there. So I know that's something common cause is well, but it's going to be champion building. You know, Bob Edgar is not on the Hill anymore, unfortunately. But there may be others there who we can start to build for a longer term thing and then combine it with being able to put that information that Ellen and her colleagues are digging up, you know, right in their face and make that case. So that'd be my argument. If I may, can I actually just respond to that? So this is somebody who's, you know, obviously a couple of steps further removed. Is it one way to think about it? I think that Ellen is right. The focusing on disclosure is really important because as long as there are people that want government to do what they want, whether that be citizens or whether that be extremely wealthy interests who want a very particularized benefit, they're going to try and spend money in pursuit of that. So it's not just thinking about specifically how to remove money from the process entirely because I don't think that's possible. If you take away all current avenues for spending money, then people will find another way to spend money to try and get what they want. So the idea is try to sort of focus it in the ways that are probably least destructive. There's the old statement in Pogo, we've met the enemy and the enemy is us but I think I would change that for here. We met the friend and the friend of us and I think more of the same, much more of the same as part of the answer. I mean you guys and the groups in this room made a difference at the grassroots. You did finally get word out on Alec and as a result 40, 50 companies have withdrawn their memberships. Those billboards that Clear Channel put up did go down before the election. Instances of voter suppression were actually tackled and resolved. That might not otherwise have been resolved. So it's ultimately grassroots. We know there's not going to be that kind of White House conference probably where it's a kumbaya moment on political reform and getting rid of dark money. It would be nice if we could. We ought to try to generate that. But ultimately it's striking while the issue is hot and that's right now. Well memories of those ads are re-in and it's pressure from the grassroots so when that senator or congressman goes home and has a town hall meeting next month, even though it's after the election, somebody says, would you all do about fixing that problem with campaign financing? And the more we get these facts out and there are dramatic facts and people can understand those facts. It's right between the eyes. Do it while it's still burning in their memories and there's a chance to do something. So as I said before, let's get an agenda of reform and this is right at the top of that and take it to the grassroots which I think is disposed to understand it and I think that's step number one and maybe two and three and four or two. This has been very interesting and very informative but it also is perhaps an indicator of continuation of the idea of American exceptionalism. During the discussion about the health bill, what was being done in other countries was often held up as a sign of what was possible or impossible in America and also as a measuring stick for what was being done in America. I have heard nothing in this meeting today and no reference to other countries and the experience of other countries. A country that I have some familiarity with is Australia and Australia has I think a very democratic system. It's not perfect but one thing, one way they get rid of and spend a lot of money is to require everyone to cast a ballot. You don't have to vote, you can write an obscenity on it but you've got to cast a ballot. That means that there's no money spent on getting people to the polls or convincing other people their votes aren't going to count. You have a very small fee, I think about $15, $20 if you don't cast a ballot but that's a part of it. Another is that the major costs of television and radio advertising are paid for by the taxpayer. The amount of time that the candidates get is apportioned and candidates who don't get more than a certain percentage vote, I think it's about 5% or so, have to pay a certain fee. In other words, this is a discouragement of people who are just coming in for the fun of it. Actually, when we were living in Australia, we lived for 23 years, one of the brother of a man who did some work for us who happened to be a French immigrant, the other ran as a candidate on the sun-dried tomato party. He didn't get the 5% of the votes so he had to pay the cost of the advertising. But the point is that there are things you can do. Also, there isn't this usual rearrangement of districts for the members of parliament by, say, the local legislature in whichever party is in control can decide where to gerrymander it. That isn't possible. It's done by a government body that appoints certain experts in demography, geography, economics, what have you to determine the character of these districts. This isn't rocket science. This is pretty simple stuff. I would think it would make for a real progress in the United States, too. I think a country that fails to learn from the experience of others really does so at its own great peril when I was at the FCC. I was constantly encouraging myself to find out what others were doing and on every subject just about that came before us there were lessons to be learned. How do you get broadband ubiquitously deployed and adopted so many interesting experiments going on in other countries who were far outpacing us in their success in increasing broadband penetration? It took us a long time. I don't know if we have yet to learn from all of those lessons, looking at how do you restore competitiveness in telecommunications and get away from monopolies and duopolies and open the field with lots of other experiments in other countries, structural separation, all kinds of things. I'm not saying we just should go and take those and apply them to a situation and almost like the term exceptionalism, but we are a unique country. It doesn't mean we have to buy in exclusively to what others are saying, but there are lessons to be learned. We're talking about public broadcasting. Here was Craig and the folks at Free Press who told us that everyone in this room each year is paying $1.35 in support of public media compared to Bretton where it's $50 or $60 or some of the Scandinavian countries where it's $3 and $400 supporting media. And again, those media systems are different. I'm not saying send everybody a bill for 400 bucks, but maybe that $1.35 doesn't quite cut it in trying to determine what the role of public media should be in our country. So I think you raise a good and valid point and I thank you for it. Thank you for this panel. My name is Lorela Kelly. I'm here at the Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation. I had the good fortune or the interesting experience of being at a political scientist conference the day after the election and the panels were like academics unplugged. Jason, you can imagine, but the most interesting comment I heard about the money and politics problem was that it should only be looked at at the presidential level because the down ballot races are a completely different set of concerns for money in the system, but also that Romney didn't, because he had so much money outside the system, that he wasn't held accountable in the same way and that he didn't have to go through a sort of emotionally intelligent natural selection process of sort of raising money from so many different people from a much broader domain and also do the in-person social etiquette of getting elected and that made him more and more out of touch and in comparison to Obama he just couldn't compete. I just thought this was a really interesting, more subtle analysis of the destruction that money and politics plays and that perhaps it might leverage a conversation among conservatives in the GOP that want to do something about this problem and combined with things like the real bitterness that ensued after Senator Luger was beat in the primary have you heard anything about a reform movement specifically on this issue coming from the GOP especially the sort of traditional stalwarts of the party and can we look forward to helping that? Well I can speak to there is definitely some talk on the Hill among Republicans who have been targeted by this spending that we might want to do something about this now but I don't think it's going to take the form in which Democrats have been advocating for which is some kind of reform the system that would actually do away with super PACs or would push for extensive disclosure as I said there's a real push from the Republican point of view to just roll back contribution limits on candidates and parties so I think that would probably lead to even more increased spending and as to the point about Governor Romney he did actually raise almost as much money as President Obama and I think he's going to be on track to raise about $900 million a lot of that was for the primary system his fundraising was more disproportionately relied on by large donors they were giving checks of about five figures and so he spent a lot of time courting those folks a lot of time in rooms with wealthy donors and I think the Obama campaign talked about yesterday how they had this kind of historic reliance on online fundraising they raised more I think more than half a million dollars just from contributions online and so definitely while the President did a lot of fundraising as Ellen pointed out I think Governor Romney had to do probably a lot more glad handing in those rooms so I don't necessarily know that fundraising is a way that puts you in touch with the average person but I think that both candidates had to do their fair share of meeting with wealthy donors and getting bundlers for their campaigns I would agree with that as I said earlier it's less than one-tenth of 1% of people who are giving the political money that matters to these candidates contributions over $200 they are not people like those of us in the room in terms of if I could guess what our incomes look like or what our interests are or what our agenda is one of my observations which might fit into something that you learned is I think the super PACS role in the Republican race was significant I mean every time there was a challenge to Romney his super PACS would beat down that challenger and he would emerge unscathed he could not focus on a general election message because the campaign was prolonged with candidates who might be considered French and you know some will say it enhanced the debate in the Republican primary and kept candidates in longer and so they had a more healthy debate but I really think super PACS picked Mitt Romney and then it was his natural proclivity that was his class that's who gives political money to keep him isolated to keep him fundraising the president has the same problem you know he raised a lot of money from a lot of very wealthy people who have a lot of interest before the federal government I disagree with your comment about the down ballot the impact of money in down ballot races I think it's every bit as important and maybe more so because there's less money and maybe you know really a $5,000 contribution can make a significant difference to a candidate in a state house Thanks I'm Andre and I'm a chief representative in Vietnam for the interstate travel company based in Detroit, Michigan and another water filtration equipment in Malaysia called but anyway my question is this would it be and it's addressed to your comments about the distortion of our politics by these congressional redistricting and the gentleman that asked about the Australian compulsory voting was part of what I was going to ask but you addressed that very well the other part of it was you think it would be helpful if we got rid of the Electoral College and just had direct voting so that every you know one person one vote and that's actually my question the comment that it's not a question and it's just about the other gentleman's point on learning from other countries I just don't think we can do it but anyway the country I work in and used to represent General Electric in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has 25% women in parliament women would never be subjected to the indignities there that for example women in my state Virginia are with you know compulsory ultrasound exams and things like that and also because they've achieved true separation of church and state they've next year the parliament will take up the issue of same-sex marriage in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam I thought I probably teed up enough controversial issues with getting into the Electoral College I think there was a piece in the paper about it this morning it's a debate that's been going on for a long time the Electoral College exists for totally historically anachronistic reasons going back to the founding of the Republic on its face it is undemocratic but I think certainly we need to have a calm and a reason and a dispassionate discussion in this country about it again I think the time is probably right to do that if pushed really hard on it I think you'd have to say at this point it's not reflecting our democracy but I wouldn't want to make a final decision until we have that kind of a debate so we've got about five minutes left we've got more questions than we can handle let me try to do this let me take two questions at once see if we can get some answers and get some other two questions you have this young lady here with the scar and there's a young lady in the far back who's been very patient and then we'll get to Tim and I think there was another my question is whether there is enough of a common broad understanding of and belief in a common good a public interest or has that been eroded by 30, 40 plus years of privatization and similar forces hello I have a fairly technical question I also want to commend Ellen in particular because if you look at the two groups that she started the Center for Responsive Politics Sunlight Foundation there's probably been no other organizations that have done more to reveal what's going on in American politics and it's been incredibly important I have a fairly technical question but I think it comes out of this question about how the money was used in this election we keep hearing these reports that the outside groups were charged a fair amount of money the television stations made a lot of money and that the money that was given directly to the candidates was used more efficiently because they got lowest rate however I think many people in this room understand that lowest unit rate is rate is itself broken that the candidates in fact were charged way much more than they should have been because they've had the threat of having their time preempted is anyone looking particularly Mr. Cops if you have any thoughts about how you would go about looking at fixing lowest unit rate at a time when it has been declared has been useful for the candidates well it's an interesting question you know we're talking about a system where candidates come out and ask us for money so they can pay broadcasters to carry messages on the airwaves that we own in the first place is the essential issue that you're dealing with I don't know if the FCC has an interest in looking at that right now I'm more interested in bringing some discipline to the system of contributions really if I had to set a priority then necessarily getting into who's benefiting more of the candidates or the super packs it's a gentlemen question but I think probably secondary to some of the issues we talked about today some of my panelists friends here might disagree I would just say I mean clearly the lowest unit rate was driven up by the inflation that was triggered by all the outside spending so it definitely was another byproduct of the big money we saw any comment on the question have we lost the sense of public yes just eroded but not lost completely just very briefly but it hasn't just been eroded because of the privatization you talked about it's been eroded by the disincanation of government and the refusal of government to take one of its fundamental responsibility seriously in the telecommunications that's the public interest convenience and necessity which was mentioned like 112 times in the telecommunications act and sometimes you get the impression that just hasn't taken hold for the last 30 years at the FCC I think we're doing a little better job now but to really take it seriously is going to demand a lot more so if government is not sticking up for the public interest and nobody's talking to get a little more distant from the whole concept and it withers away and that withering away has been deadly destructive to civic dialogue in our system of government and our whole society we can keep going I'll come back to it so let's do Tim in the front hi thanks this is I'm just relaying a question that came to us over email from someone who's watching the panel via the stream and it was it's a question for Ellen and it's regarding was had been mentioned by others this issue of of down ballot candidates and issues and it was bolstered from my experience in Wisconsin a lot of the super PACs and C4 groups that were active at the state level were very local and the question is is there anything that group like sunlight can do to track any local non-for-profits that are advertising in that way but may not be in the the federal database one last question I think I'm John Boyer I'm with the media stewards project which is advocating for public media stronger public meeting the United States the I have a question for everybody here about have you considered in my other hat as a citizen since July been very involved in Northern Virginia where I live on getting out the vote and it struck me that in the nine battleground states an incredible machine was built you know I you all know that I suppose these people came together and bonded and they've been talking for months about continuing this work after the election like maybe taking a day or two off and then we're going to get right back at it right and I think for everybody on the panel here academically this needs to be studied but I'm just saying this these groups exist at least in these nine battleground states these people have bonded they're ready to go right and they put together the very things that have been talked about on this panel data on the one hand the tremendous amount of data you probably all know what I'm talking about right and then the grassroots drawing in people bonding with them day after day we have to week this is a potent force and this is something that I think common cause should be thinking about and everyone academics should be studying free press should be involved in this have you thought about that that's my question we'd love to get our hands on that list I mean sure I think there's tons of organizing lessons that come out of the campaign if you're an organizer if you're using certainly if you're using some kind of hybrid online and offline model as we are a lot of the groups are you have to look at what was done politically you know maybe the big question is you know are those who do have that list the political campaign or campaigns you know willing to sort of encourage or turn those folks loose on anything except for elections and that remains to be seen certainly in the first term if we're talking about Obama for America you know not really thank you amazing we're getting you ready for next time you know but we've kind of got this over here in this agenda and oh hey there's the people who were at those 200 fundraisers get them some jobs and that's going to be the fight here in the next few weeks and months about whether that energy can translate into the kind of accountability I think there's reasons to be optimistic I think people are feeling energized you know whose candidate did well in this election I think there's a lot of people a weight lifted maybe they didn't know that was there so you know it's an exciting time but it's going to be those folks and maybe those personal connections being brought into these actual issues that will determine whether I think we can accomplish these things just to quickly answer the question that came in online about the down ballot candidates and issues Sunlight gets its state campaign finance information from the institute on money in state politics followthemoney.org they do an amazing job of collecting the campaign finance information from all 50 states but we have yet to find any single source for anything less than those house and senate state house races and so we're looking into trying to figure out how to gather that information ourselves looking at major cities finding out who has won online so we're sort of in a reconnaissance period of doing that now we believe that's really important in terms of scaling this issue both up and down because I'm just convinced from my many years of experience that the money has that kind of information and the same thing about lobbying not only at the local municipal level but also in a global context I mean Australia is well known to be ahead of most of the rest of the country I was talking with colleagues in Chile last week and they said you know we need to follow the money in politics but nothing is reported and I said you really have to start from the grassroots to even get that information so for us we need to find that information we need to do transparency to them if the governments at the local level or the federal level are not yet providing us that information we have to create the demand for it then we have to database it and we have to get it out to people can I say one thing very quickly it has nothing to do with any of this but Todd O'Boyle told me that I absolutely cannot step down from the stage here without reporting that he has successfully dragged me into the technology of the 21st century and you can now follow us on Twitter at COPSAM so COPSAM Mateo Gold, Ellen Miller Jason Reifler, Craig Garen thank you all very much excellent presentations a wonderful panel and thank you audience for participating and I think that does thank you