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Posted in Link Roundup.

2 comments

By Mark – October 28, 2008

2 Responses

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  1. Boonton says

    The credit card fraud matter and Mr Obama.

    The author conducted an experiment where he donated $25 to Obama and McCain via a prepaid credit card. The McCain site rejected the card because a prepaid credit card doesn’t have an address that can be verified. The Obama site accepted it but required the donar to fill out their name and address. What would have happened if the author had just purchased a $25 money order and sent it in to the campaign? I imagine they would have been able to use it provided it included name and address information. Since prepaid debit cards often have a ‘activation fee’ as high as $12 with them it would seem the easier method would be to buy a bunch of money orders and donate that way….

    Some of the other examples have seen been resolved or turned out to have innocent explanations (for example, the odd cents of some donations might be due to an old affiliate style system were web sites encouraged donations to tack on an odd number of cents to indicate which site the donation came from).

    Looking at this, though, I see a few interesting ideas:

    1. Obviously the new paradign is online political action which means people will want to make small donations via web sites.

    2. Clearly it takes some bookkeeping and software skill to track illegal donations, this isn’t just the nefarious type trying to corrupt an election but honest people who go overboard (or perhaps want to be anonymous or just get a kick ‘hacking the system’).

    3. There’s a clear conflict of interest here between the campaign soliciting the donations and having to police them.

    So why not simply put the FEC in charge of campaign donations. Just like with an affiliate link, people who want to donate to a campaign can do so from a link on the candidates page or by going directly to the FEC. The FEC will vet the donar and collect all the necessary reporting information and track whether or not the person has meet the cap. It will then turn around and disburse the funds to the campaigns.

    You raise the bar to corruption because a candidate willing to tolerate corrupt donations would still have to see the money make it through the FEC. Candidates that are doing poorly and who cannot afford the software to check incoming credit card transactions (or might be tempted to scrimp in that department) wouldn’t have to worry. You could also do some innovative things, for example if I wanted to donate $50 to be spread evenly over every Democratic Senate candidate I could do so in one stop. I wouldn’t need to do lots of little donations and the software could keep track to make sure I don’t exceed any caps. Likewise reporting on donations could be done in real time and wouldn’t have to wait for campaigns to file anything.

    October 28, 2008, 12:02
  2. Mark says

    Boonton,
    You don’t address these two points

    1. All the information that I have gathered indicates that this couldn’t simply have happened by accident; you have to systematically uncheck all the security guards that prevent address verification.

    2. As this story from the National Journal makes clear, the candidate that Professor Kleiman and I both support seems to have systematically weaker protections against fraud than McCain.

    The crime is not really the individual transaction; it’s setting up the system to enable fraudulent transactions. And no one made the Obama campaign do that.

    October 28, 2008, 17:50



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