We insist on secret ballots for individual voters so they can't sell their votes, but for our legislators whose individual votes are far more consequential, we've given up on it.
In exchange, we get to see how they voted and "hold them accountable." But we can't do that nearly so effectively as corporate donors. Most of us don't look at voting records at all; our information mostly comes from attack ads taking votes out of context.
No, that’s not true. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have information like this, the breakdown of votes by members on the 1964 civil rights act.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/h182
It may be that prior to 1970 or so the number of bills (or the number of bills salient to major donors, or whatever) passed by voice vote rather than recorded vote was higher, that’s a harder claim to assess. But it is certainly not the case that Congressional votes either (1) were ubiversally nonrecorded prior to sometime around 1979, or (2) cannot be by voice vote today.
Recently, the House Republicans publicly voted to back Marjorie Taylor Greene (strong Trump supporter) but also had a secret ballot to back Liz Cheney (Trump critic, voted to impeach, #3 in House Republican hierarchy).
It seemed obvious that if the second vote was public that Liz Cheney probably would have been censured and lost her position.
The US Government acts like your US mail is a sacrosanct communication channel that if they send you something it doesn't get drowned out by junk mail.
Basically, our society says: any communication channel you will have to deal with a 10% to 90% ratio of useful communication vs forced against your consent advertising and fraud, even in _the_ constitutionally mandated/provisioned official government communication channel..
It's the Golden Liberty of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, except instead of the szlachta, we have corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty
It did not work out for the PLC's democracy, which entered a state of perpetual deadlock, and became a cautionary tale taken into account by the framers of the US Constitution.
Likewise they would redefine what spam is if there were a referendum.
If I had one policy wish it would be to completely eliminate corporate lobbying. Concerned citizens can lobby individually or in groups, but corporate donations, perks, etc to such people/groups would be tightly regulated with steep fines for trespassers.