on balance does the supremes court decision in citezens united harm the election process

ok so i would like to start by by thanking master riddle for accepting this topic and would like to encourage everyone to comment on what i could improve on. With that said here is my case: Contention 1: The Citizens united ruling increase voter turnout. According to "the Center for Responsive Politics, in the 2012 presidential race over $380,000,000 have been raised by super PACs and $330,000,000 have been spent".This money according to the wall street journal is so super PACs can run advertisements for or against political candidates.. This is important because these advertisements are essential for maintaining voter turnout according to Paul freedman of the University of Virginia "respondents were as much as 10 percentages Points more likely to vote if they watched television in media Markets that were bombarded with presidential ads". Furthermore according to Dr. Hillygus of Duke University "Among those who early in the campaign did not intend to vote, exposure to ads increased intentions to vote by 18 percentage points". The impact of this is that by increasing voter turnout we get a more accurate representation of the publics will which is the purpose of the election process. Contention 2: citizens united allows voters to make informed decisions According to political scientist David Downing "without freedom of media and wider freedom of speech people cannot make informed decisions on how they should vote". This is important because according to Hans von Spakovsky, former member of the Federal Election Commission "many associations we have in this country (no matter which side of the political aisle they are on), from the NAACP to the Sierra Club to the National Rifle Association, are also corporations. Yet those corporate associations were prohibited under penalty of criminal and civil sanctions from expressing the views of their members. This means that before this landmark decisions many important organizations where barred from expressing their opinions and thus the public lacked vital information that may have significantly affected the outcome of previous elections. Lastly this increase in corporate spending does not favor either political party since according to matt bia a correspondent for the new York times campaign spending tends to be cyclical since when one party increases its spending the other party tends to mobilize and increase its spending. Thus not only does citizens united create more informed voters but it also prevents any one party from gaining an advantage. Contention 3: Citizens united increases transparency Transparency is one of the most important aspects of the election process according to political watchdog the electoral knowledge "Transparency makes institutional systems and the actions/decisions they take widely accessible and understood [and] It is difficult to maintain or publicly justify a system that permits abuse and corruption". This is important because before this landmark decisions political donors would use social-welfare groups or 527"s to make political contributions. These social welfare groups according to New York correspondent mat bia are unlike super PAC"s generally not required to disclose their donors. This means that by allowing the creation of super PAC"s the Supreme Court has given the public better access to political finance and thus increased the transparency of the electoral process. Sources: http://blog.heritage.org... http://www.slate.com... https://docs.google.com... http://www.nytimes.com... http://www.bowdoin.edu... http://jurist.org... http://aceproject.org...