At 07:03 PM 12/17/95 -0500, you wrote:

On Sun, 17 Dec 1995, jim bell wrote:

...

It occurs to me that it would be a major advance if a system could be set up that would "blind" campaign donations as to their source: The donor could be satisfied that his donation gets to the candidate or cause, but the candidate couldn't know who actually paid the money (and the donor would be unable to prove that he made a donation, for example). Admittedly there are a lot of details that need to be worked out, but if this could be accomplished it would change politics as we know it.

Just a straight Chaumian style blinding won't work, as there are too many covert channels available via both timing and amounts; For example, Joe Random Capitalist-Oppressor could arrange to pay a series of relatively small amounts wth different values in the cents field which could be used to confirm their payment (e.g. they could be composed to form a digitally signed value of some kind ("pollution rools" or "lung cancer is kool") :)

Yes, as I suggested a number of details would be necessary to avoid this. Reporting only cumulative donations, occasionally over a long period of time (once every three months, for instance), and even then only approximating the total number would make doing such a correlation extremely difficult.

Sen. Dianne Running-Dog could then look for a matching set of donations and confirm that the bribe had in fact been paid.

There are much better ways of reforming the political system -the formation of proper political parties with real programmes (the one good thing about the newtoid surge); changing the rules for TV advertising, etc. Blinding just makes things worse.

The blinding needs only be temporary; long enough so the politician can't act improperly on the donation, but eventually revealed in enough time to expose political influence before the next election. Besides, I have already proposed what I consider to be a _better_ method of reforming government. It's called "Assassination Politics." Perhaps you've heard of it.