So the big political story of the day is the discovery that a big democratic donor may have an outstanding felony conviction. Unsurprisingly Barack, Hillary and the major political figures who accepted his money have all expressed their shock at this revelation¹ and pledged to forfeit his donations to charity. Now in one sense it makes sense for politicians to give up these sort of ‘tainted’ donations. In any campaign these tainted donations are only a tiny percentage of donations and some voters would be turned off if they didn’t. What doesn’t make sense is why voters look more favorably on candidates who give up these sorts of donations. In fact if Barack had refused to give up the money (for the right reasons) I probably would have switched my support to him and I think it’s downright irrational to think worse of a candidate because they don’t return the money.

After all the candidates presumably believe that money is better spent facilitating their election than by being given to charity² and obviously they aren’t just using a donor’s sketchy past as an excuse to funnel campaign donations to charity. Now when the concern is improper influence this sort of response makes sense. If candidates have to return any money that might appear to be an attempt to influence them they will have less incentive to sell their influence. However, it seems implausible to me that the voter’s concern is that Hsu is trying to buy a pardon, no president pardons enough people to make this a worthwhile patronage system, and even if so you would expect the candidates to merely set the money aside and accept it if Hsu turns out not to get sent to jail.

The best that can be said is that the candidates are making it clear they don’t approve of the donors actions but it’s pretty silly to think that accepting someone’s money is an endorsement of their lifestyle. If we thought that the Hsu donation should hardly be at the top of the list. It gets even more weird when you consider the canidates who plan to return Hsu’s money only if he is found guilty. What do they think that this shows the country would be better off if Hsu had more moeny?

Since voters probably would dislike a candidate who didn’t give up these sorts of donations I can’t really hold it against any of the candidates for giving the money up. However, with Barack in particular I would have been a lot more inclined to believe his rhetoric about being less driven by these sorts of ‘cynical’ vote counting concerns as well as believing he could reason out the costs and benefits rather than just going with naively idealistic feelings³. I just hope all the candidates made this decision for cynical reasons since it would be really troubling to think that our next president would put some weird superstition about tainted money over the best interests of humanity.

Sigh, yet another proof that direct voting is a horrible way to choose national leaders.