Tech mogul tackles 'dark money' in political campaigns

Jim Greer is the latest tech entrepreneur to put his money into a plan to fix politics. The advantage he has over other reformers: He's a game designer.

Politics, Greer says, "is to some degree a game - the most important game there is." The co-founder of the social gaming site Kongregate believes that mind-set will help him find a way to stop money from gaming politics.

"When you're designing online games, in many cases you have platforms where multiple competing parties are trying to gain an advantage," Greer said. "So you have to design some kind of algorithm so that a lot of people's competitive behavior can lead to something that ends up being usable and good for everyone."

This summer, the Noe Valley resident tried to do just that by co-founding CounterPAC, a super political action committee that urges candidates against taking money from unidentified donors, known in the trade as "dark money." It is the latest in a series of super PACs that aims to clean up the way super PACs operate.

With less than $5 million to spend in this fall's midterm races, CounterPAC - in fail-fast tech fashion - is testing out its ideas on Senate races in Alaska and Georgia and a congressional race in West Virginia, with more to follow.

Greer, 43, modeled his approach after the 2012 Massachusetts Senate race between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Elizabeth Warren, in which both candidates promised to donate to a charity of the other's choosing if ads on their behalf were funded by dark money. The result was that less than 10 percent of the spending in the race, which Warren won, came from dark money - far less than the national average of 60 percent in that cycle.

Going after candidates

CounterPAC will monitor any dark money spent in the races it monitors, and use its own funds to lambast recipients in advertising. Greer will consider the campaign a success if his group receives signed pledges from candidates in two or three of the eight to 10 races he plans to monitor.

Jim Greer, founder and chief technology officer of gaming developer Kongregate, has started a committee called CounterPAC to get "dark money" out of political campaigns. Jim Greer, founder and chief technology officer of gaming developer Kongregate, has started a committee called CounterPAC to get "dark money" out of political campaigns. Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close Tech mogul tackles 'dark money' in political campaigns 1 / 10 Back to Gallery

In nine U.S. Senate races that are considered to be toss-ups this fall, independent organizations outside of the campaigns have spent $72 million - and half came from organizations "that do not fully disclose the sources of their funds," according to a report out this week from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

In 13 House races considered up for grabs, 86 percent of the money spent by independent organizations came from groups that do not disclose all or some of their original donors, Brennan found.

Greer is among a growing number of tech executives, venture capitalists and engineers trying to disrupt the way money impacts politics.

"I'm an enthusiastic capitalist," Greer said, who has donated to both President Obama and GOP Sen. John McCain's presidential campaigns. "But there are few ways that feel like the game is basically fundamentally rigged and ultimately destructive in the long term."

While several of the six major donors he recruited for CounterPAC have their own pet issues like climate change or education, Greer said "they realize that the big problem with their issue is the system that underlies it. They're tech people who tend to think in systematic ways."

That "resonates a lot with tech people - we're always looking to hack the system," said Ethan Beard, a fellow San Franciscan who is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock Partners and former director of the Facebook Developer Network. He is one of CounterPAC's early recruits along with Matt Cutts, a Los Altos resident and head of the spam team at Google, and Ted Wang, a Silicon Valley lawyer.

Some other tech-inspired reform ideas are catching fire, like one led by longtime Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, who is now teaching at Harvard. This year Lessig started the Mayday PAC, which he described as a "citizen-funded, kick-started super PAC to end all super PACs."

Reforming money's role

Lessig has talked about reforming the role of money in Congress for nearly a decade - even exploring a Silicon Valley run for the House in 2008. He's finally got traction with Mayday, raising $7.8 million from more than 55,000 individuals since launching - including an endorsement from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. It is funding "pro-reform" candidates in the 2014 midterm races.

So far, Greer said his group has had "positive conversations" with the campaigns, but nobody has taken the pledge yet. The group's ads have been rather gentle, at least compared with the bludgeoning style of most super PACs. A 30-second TV ad released Thursday in Georgia and Alaska featured a person jumping out of plane saying, "Sometimes taking the first step can be scary." Then it encouraged viewers to call both candidates and ask them "to reject all secret money spent on their behalf."

Greer said "we don't want to start with shame and threats, so this was our entree into these races."

But if the candidates don't respond, or "we're being ignored or toyed with, we will change the tone," he said. Much like a game designer would issue a patch to fix a bug.

In online games, "you have this great advantage that if you need to make a rule change you just code it up and release a new version of the game and you're done.

"In the world of politics," Greer said with a laugh, "it doesn't work that easily."