Mr. Lessig has already opened his own campaign website, where he describes his proposed Citizen Equality Act, a package of three reforms aimed at fixing a “corrupt political system”.
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The reform Lessig is pushing includes: provisions to make voting easier, including by making Election Day a national holiday, allowing online voter registration, and putting in place new safeguards to prevent voter discrimination; provisions to eliminate gerrymandering, including by creating ranked choice voting; and the creation of publicly funded elections, where all voters are given vouchers to use to support candidates. He said he would pick a vice president “who is really, clearly, strongly identified with the ideals of the Democratic Party right now”, offering Warren as one possibility.
Lessig, 54, announced his candidacy Tuesday with a video on his website, declaring his goal to publicly crowdsource enough money to “mount a credible” Democratic primary campaign, meaning raising $1 million by Labor Day. If not, he will return the money to donors and go home.
A presidential run is Lessig’s latest political experiment.
Because Lessig is pledging to step down after his Citizens Equality Act gets passed, the professor has given a lot of thought to who he would want as a running mate.
Once Lessig signs the act into law, he said he would resign as president and hand over the reigns to his vice president.
Lessig said during Tuesday’s press call that he has spoken to Sanders in the past about the importance of campaign-finance reform. Jim Webb. Lessig said his candidacy was not in reaction to any one Democrat. Without it, he said, it is hard to frame the issues the other candidates will be talking about. At the time he called it the “super-PAC to end all super-PACs”. Following law school, Lessig clerked for two conservative judges, despite his left leaning, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
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If he moves forward, Lessig said, he would “run a full campaign”. “Obviously, even if I don’t get to be the nominee, to have the opportunity to show, for every single issue that there is, how it needs to be brought around to this citizen-equality point would be incredibly important”. “This is actually the year that individuals are far less close than ever before to think without politicians coming to the middle about just how to tackle the problem of politics”. “This is what led me to recognize that we have to find a different way of doing this”. He argues that citizens’ unequal ability to give to campaigns effectively leads to inequality in political influence.
