Credit Cards and Fundraising
National Journal’s Neil Munro finally finished the article he was working on for quite some time, and about which he had contacted me. He started out researching allegations that Barack Obama’s campaign had received many millions in foreign donations (from foreigners, meaning they were illegal), but the article ended up being about the loopholes in Obama’s online fundraising techniques in general.
Munro decided to test the website of Obama and McCain by buying two pre-paid American Express gift cards worth $25 and trying to donate that $25 online to both campaigns. The results:
As required by law, the campaigns’ Web sites asked for, and National Journal provided, the donor’s correct name, location and employment. The cards were purchased with cash at a Washington, D.C., drugstore, and the campaigns’ Web sites were accessed through a public computer at a library in Fairfax County, Virginia.
The Obama campaign’s Web site accepted the $25 donation, but the McCain campaign’s Web site rejected it.
Although Munro’s article is quite interesting because it then develops into a general article on technical difficulties with online fundraising, pretty much, he seems to have missed the point that the only reason Obama’s campaign accepts such questionable donations – and others from people like “Good Will” and from individuals living in, say, Gaza – is because they consciously decided to abolish certain safety measures which would eliminate the chances of fraud and deception significantly.
It’s a shame that Munro neglected to point that out, for it casts the ‘weaknesses’ of the system in an entirely different light; there is a reason that McCain’s website did not approve his donation while Obama’s did, and that reason is that the latter made a conscious decision to do away with certain safety measures companies and campaigns normally use.
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They’re Democrats. No big surprise here. They only trash Republicans who even hint at something awry.