Some members of the legislature get it:
Politics in South Dakota has "become serious business, with serious money for candidates and ballot issues," says Rep. Clayton Halverson, D-Veblen. "But I don't care how much money people give if we know about it, and I think that means pre-election filing.""I'm more interested in transparency," said Rep. Joel Dykstra, R-Canton. "If you report and disclose, people can see who gives what and make a judgment for themselves."
Campaign finance shenanigans often occur precisely because it is hard to raise money, so people do end runs around the law. The wise policy is to make it easy for candidates or issue advocates to raise the funds they desire to run their campaigns and then have total transparency so we the voters can judge for ourselves whether their sources of funding deserve attention, positive or (more likely) negative.
Update: The Eppster agrees.
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