Comments on: Obama’s Fraud

By: Obama Fraud? | Political Byline

Obama Fraud? | Political Byline — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 05:01:58 +0000

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By: marc

marc — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:19:36 +0000

As a software developer I can say that credit card charges are almost always made with the help of a 3rd party vendor. Part of the setup to accept credit cards is to decide whether the name and address on the card will be verified against the address. This is something that could be changed at any time, perhaps in response to a legit donation being rejected, and perhaps by a software flunky like myself, on his/her own initiative.

At any rate, Obama obviously reneged on his promise to limit his spending to federally-provided funds and is now playing fast and loose with campaign financing laws. Not that he needs the money.

By: Polimom

Polimom — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:12:04 +0000

It’s not clear to me exactly what’s going on here — though clearly something’s very wrong. But one of the commenters over at HotAir says that in September (he thinks), he tried to make a donation but used the wrong address. The donation was rejected. Today, though, it went right through?

That would seem to imply that something changed between then and now, would it not?

By: C Stanley

C Stanley — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:13:47 +0000

Even if one gives his campaign the benefit of the doubt, the ‘enabling fraud’ charge still holds true. IOW, as you mentioned, Michael, *perhaps* it was honest mistakes that allowed these fraudulent or illegal donations to be made (of course, even that is a bit of a stretch to believe, since those who run campaigns are professionals with experience, and they would know better), then there should at least be an admission that they screwed up in not putting in the proper safeguards on the online donations.

It’s a lot like ACORN, actually…I’ve heard the following two defenses for their supposed lack of culpability in fraud:
1. They are required by law to turn in all voter registration forms, but they do check for fraud and flag the ones that are obviously to be discarded.
2. It’s not their fault that their employees have committed these acts, in fact it’s really a case of ACORN being a victim of these unscrupulous employees who get paid without doing honest canvassing for real registrations.

These two excuses don’t hold water- because if the organization knows #1 to be true, then they would know that it would not be good practice to pay people for turning in fraudulent registrations. Thus at the minimum, if their work was really being done in good faith, they’d put in a simple safeguard by checking each employees stacks at the end of the day and not paying for the fraudulent ones. That would nip the practice in the bud immediately, when the employees realized they’d only be paid for real voter registrations done properly.

Same with the Obama campaign- if this came to their attention after the initial online donor form was launched, it wouldn’t take them weeks or months to fix the problem IF THEIR INTENT WAS REALLY TO CURTAIL ILLEGITIMATE DONATIONS.
In fact according to those who were looking into it today, as soon as this began circulating on right wing blogs, the problem was suddenly fixed! Amazing, huh?