> Nobody should be giving any money to politicians, or their campaigns, for any reason what-so-ever.

I don't disagree on the fundamentals, but I think there's a lot of side effects of something like this.

How should election campaigns be funded?

I've heard suggestions of having the state pay for campaigns, everyone gets a fixed budget (or some variation of this). But this leads to issues then around who should be eligible to have campaign funding from the state and regulation around that. If Anna is standing as a candidate, what's to stop Anna's friends Barry, Celeste, and Dina standing, but spending all their campaign funds on promotion that makes it clear that Anna is actually a much better candidate.

Should candidates be able to contribute to campaign expenses themselves? For instance, in situations where there's a lot of travel involved - having better accommodation, more comfortable transport options, more assistants to help them out/etc can make a difference on even a short campaign.

What constitutes a donation? Just money? Time? Resources?

Can I hand out flyers, run a phone tree/social media account for the local council/town/city elections?

What if I own hall, can I let a candidate use that for free?

Maybe I own a restaurant, and want donate the use of that to a candidate for a big campaign speech where they're going to invite all the press. The press wouldn't ordinarily be interested in this no-name candidate, but the event is at that restaurant that you can't get a reservation to without waiting for months. I also happen to have a bunch of celebrity friends that might just attend. You can be sure that all the journos will be wanting to come along, and that it'll be making the news, even if it's just for the celebrity thing.

Maybe I'm best mates with a candidate - I love flying my private jet, can I fly them around and let them use my Uber Lux account?

If I'm on an hourly contract working for the campaign, can I work overtime without charging the campaign?

These are all good questions, and details would of course have to be worked out, but in Sweden where we do have a system of state funding for political campaigns, I've never heard of these issues arising in practice.

I'm not sure what the details of our rules actually are, except that your party gets funding if you got more than 4% (edit – correction: 2,5%) of the votes in the last election and that people are free to volunteer their time.

You're making the classic mistake of not trying to improve anything because it's difficult and there are tons of edge cases.

Clearly the system as it stands now is terrible and needs to be fixed. Start fixing it now, and worry about the edge cases later. A 10% improvement is better than no improvement.

It's not done by giving money to politicians or their campaigns. This is extremely regulated and the dollar amounts permitted are trivial.

It's done by independently advocating for the candidate. And it's pretty hard to tell people they can't do that. Should you need to fill out a financial disclosure form to be allowed to write a positive comment about Bernie Sanders on Reddit?