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The author of this article argues that the value of a political funding system depends on how much it contributes to strengthening democracy. Democracy, Carlos Peña points out, can be seen as a mechanism for aggregating individual preferences, or a mechanism for debating collective preferences. A funding system that seeks to provide full information on donors and recipients in political campaigns, in the author’s opinion, undermines both of these concepts of democracy. Absolute transparency, he argues, favors the trading of decisions in exchange for money and stimulates a not always well-founded search for corruption. The result is harmful to the deliberative ideal of democracy and the system of aggregation of preferences. A superior design, Peña suggests, would seek information symmetry between the candidate and the electorate, and would envisage political subsidies aimed at making democratic debate more robust.