This is an opinion piece co-authored with Sam Issacharoff,  appearing yesterday in Politico:

The money hunt for the 2016 election cycle is in full swing, and there is no surer sign of it than the first complaints recently filed by reform organizations. While, as in the past, there is intense interest in the likelihood of record-breaking sums and innovative spending strategies, this year, perhaps more than in the past, attention has turned to transparency. “Dark money” is dominating the campaign finance lexicon.

Current conversations on this topic have a Groundhog Day quality, and it seems that they are stuck between the dreary and the dreadful. Part of the problem is that nearly 40 years ago, the Supreme Court limited the objective of campaign finance regulation to the prevention of corruption or its appearance, and decades of debate ensued about what is and what is not corruption. And all this in the service of identifying when candidates and political parties come under the “undue influence” of money.

It’s time to retire the tired discourse of corruption and return to the core objective of giving voters access to relevant information. Disclosure today is best understood as a service to voters. Voters care about the “big money,” large contributions and expenditures in support of candidates. Those are the funds that most shape the issues raised and emphasized in campaigns and compel our attention.

The goal should be to avoid going about this task like the drunk looking for car keys under the streetlight — because it is the only illuminated stretch of road. The scale of undisclosed political spending is like the rest of the unlit parking lot, where the lion’s share of the action is increasingly to be found. With the 2016 elections just over the horizon, the Koch brothers alone have announced a billion-dollar network, and there is every indication that this massive spending without transparency will occur on both sides of the partisan divide, and among varying ideological camps as well. As a result, a steeply declining fraction of the total money devoted to winning the White House and the Congress will come from parties and candidates who must report the source of their funds.

Reformed reporting requirements can be carefully drawn to bring into public view this spending while also addressing concerns about donor privacy and harassment. This would make possible a constructive bipartisan conversation that has to date been unattainable.

As a starting point in any reform initiative, the small donor should get a pass. The present federal threshold for donor reporting could be raised from $200 to $2,700, the current contribution limit. No one is “buying” a candidate for public office for that figure, and the privacy interests of donors at that level or below should be protected. The same should hold for donors to various tax-exempt organizations that increasingly populate the campaign environment. Moreover, information from those who do disclose must also be protected from misuse. For example, federal law already prohibits the use of reports to pitch products to donors or ask them for money. More could be done, such as making it illegal to use the reported information to contact contributors directly with unwanted political messages.

Reporting should also be time-limited. If the purpose of disclosure is to capture spending to influence elections, then the active election season should shape the requirement to disclose. Extended periods of compelled disclosure months before voters go to the polls stir apprehension that rules will be used to try to silence debate. The law already defines an election period for various purposes as 30 to 120 days before a federal election, and discussion of new rules might begin there.

At the same time, reporting should be meaningful. Our current laws target the disclosure of broadcast ads, but whether spent on TV, mail or phones, big money is big money and should be reported. The one exception should be the Internet: This democratizing medium should be generally exempted so that its creative development is not stymied by application of a regulatory model that predates the fax machine.

Finally, there is the question of enforcement. IRS involvement in the formulation and enforcement of rules governing political activity will always be controversial. Focusing on voter information rather than arcane IRS regulations properly gets us back to why we have elections. The Federal Election Commission is one choice to oversee the process, and one of the features for which it is most criticized — that no one political party can control it — may in this context help ease the fears of partisan abuses of regulatory authority.

For all the intense conflicts over campaign finance law, there should be bipartisan agreement that voters are entitled to some useful information about the hundreds of millions in political spending that, as matters stand, will go unreported. Action to rework the model of regulation we inherited from our grandparents’ concern over misbehavior in the 1972 presidential election is long overdue.