Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard professor and cofounder of Creative Commons, announced Tuesday that he is exploring a run for the US presidency as a Democrat. He's crowdsourcing the campaign, too. "Please give whatever you can," he said. He wants to raise $1 million by Labor Day.

He has one agenda: the passage of his so-called Citizen Equality Act—designed to increase voting access, end partisan gerrymandering, and reform campaign finance. If elected, he said, he'll quit once the agenda is passed through Congress, and the vice president would take over.

"I want to run. But I want to run to be a different kind of president. 'Different' not in the traditional political puffery sense of that term. 'Different,' quite literally. I want to run to build a mandate for the fundamental change that our democracy desperately needs. Once that is passed, I would resign, and the elected Vice President would become President," he said.

Lessig added:

I recognize, of course, how implausible this idea seems—even though every step in the argument is almost certain. The system is rigged. Sensible change cannot happen until it is unrigged. Any campaign that makes un-rigging just one issue among many cannot achieve the mandate fundamental reform will require. Yes, the idea may seem implausible. Yet the idea is right. And as I have come to recognize this simple fact, I have struggled with whether I could act on what I honestly believe.

Lessig at one time said he was running for Congress in California, too, but he changed his mind in 2008 after he said a pollster convinced him he couldn't win.

Other Democrats who have said they are running for president include Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor.

Lessig created a super PAC in 2014 in a bid to help fund candidates that backed reforming campaign finance. The Mayday PAC lost almost every race it was involved in.