105 Iowa L. Rev. 341 (2019)

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Abstract

Navigating campaign finance law is crucial to successful political campaigns. Political candidates and donors have incentives to engage in quid pro quo corruption and will get as close to corruption as possible under the law. Therefore, it is important that the law discourages such corruption. Even where there is no actual corruption, the appearance of corruption alone can have devastating effects on the democratic system. Hybrid PACs have an arm that makes contributions and an arm that makes expenditures. The sharing of staff, resources, and information between the arms can make hybrid PACs suspect to the average person by potentially creating an appearance of corruption. There is a circuit split about how separate the arms of a hybrid PAC must be to prevent the application of limits to the expenditure arm of a hybrid PAC. This Note argues that judges should resolve the circuit split by requiring hybrid PACs to be separate under a totality of the circumstances test that focuses on the appearance of corruption to avoid the application of contribution limits to their expenditures. Under this standard, courts would analyze the appearance of corruption factor assessing how corrupt a hybrid PAC appears to an objective reasonable person. Courts should look to surveys, testimony, and their own intuition to apply the reasonable person test. The proposed test will reduce the appearance of corruption in American elections and preserve the democratic process by maintaining faith in democracy, maintaining democratic participation, slowing political fractionalization, and preventing authoritarian policies.