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Former US president Jimmy Carter has told the BBC's Today program that the way politics is funded today in the United States is considered as “legal bribery”.

Almost all candidates now rely on "massive infusions of money", Carter told Today’s John Humphrys, adding that an ““erroneous” Supreme Court ruling gives legal bribery a chance to prevail, allowing billionaires to put in unlimited amounts of money directly into the campaign.”

Carter also said he would not have become US president if he were competing under the current conditions, since he was “a relatively unknown farmer” and he could not have emerged as a serious candidate and run for presidency.

“Some candidates like [Donald] Trump can put in his own money but others have to be able to raise, I’d say, a hundred to two hundred million dollars just to get the Democratic or Republican nomination. That’s the biggest change in America,” he told BBC’s Humphrys.

Whether the candidates are honest or not and whether they are Democratic or Republican, their success depends on the massive sums of money from very rich people who fund their campaigns, the former President reiterated in his comments on the current political landscape in the US.

Carter compared elections now-a-days to those when he was running for office, saying, “In those days when I ran against Gerald Ford, who was incumbent president or later Ronald Reagan, who challenged me, we didn’t raise a single penny to finance our campaign to run against each other. We just used the $1 per person checkoff that every taxpayer indicates at the end of his or her income tax return. But nowadays, you have to have many hundreds of millions of dollars to prevail.”

Carter’s comments to BBC are similar to ones he made in September 2015, when he talked to Oprah Winfrey about the influence of money on elections, saying, “We’ve become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy.”

"I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life,” he said back then.

A number of US politicians acknowledging the glaringly obvious reality admitted that money controls politics in the US electoral race. For instance, Senator Bernie Sanders has stated “The millionaire class and the billionaire class increasingly own the political process, and they own the politicians that go to them for money. … we are moving very, very quickly from a democratic society, one person, one vote, to an oligarchic form of society, where billionaires would be determining who the elected officials of this country are.”

Also, in a poll published by the New York Times in June 2015, 85 percent of Americans say we need to either “completely rebuild” or make “fundamental changes” to the campaign finance system. Just 13 percent think “only minor changes are necessary,” less than the 18 percent of Americans who believe they’ve been in the presence of a ghost.