If this weren't from the NY Times, I'd blow it off in a
minute. Given the source and NYT's history of criticism for not
vetting their stories, this does make for interesting reading. What's
your opinion of the Times?
Certainly the most interesting and potentially devastating phone
call I have received during this election cycle came this week from
one of the Obama's campaign Internet geeks. These are the staffers
who devised Obama's Internet
fund raising campaign which raised in the neighborhood of $200
million so far. That is more then twice the total funds raised by any
candidate in history and this was all from the
Internet campaign. What I learned from this insider was shocking but
I guess we shouldn't be surprised that when it comes to fund raising there
simply are no rules that can't be broken and no ethics that prevail.
Obama's Internet campaign started out innocently enough with basic
e-mail networking , lists saved from previous party campaigns and from
supporters who visited any of the Obama campaign web sites. Small
contributions came in from these sources and the Internet campaign staff
were more than pleased by the results.Then, about two months into the
campaign the daily contribution intake
multiplied. Where was it coming from?
One of the web site security monitors began to notice the bulk of the
contributions were clearly coming in from overseas Internet service
providers and at the rate and frequency of transmission it was clear these
donations were programmed by a very sophisticated user. While
the security people were not able to track most of the sources due to
firewalls and other blocking devices put on these contributions they were
able to collate the number of contributions that were coming in seemingly
from individuals but the funds were from only a few credit card accounts
and bank electronic funds transfers.
One of the banks used for fund transfers was located in Saudi
Arabia. Another concentrated group of donations was traced to a Chinese
ISP with a similar pattern of limited credit card charges. It became
clear that these donations were very likely coming from sources other than
American voters. This was discussed at length within the campaign and the
decision was made that none of these donations violated campaign financing
laws. It was also decided that it was not the responsibility of the
campaign to audit these millions of contributions as to the actual source
(specific credit card number or bank transfer account numbers) to insure
that none of these Internet contributors exceeded the legal maximum
donation on a cumulative basis of many small donations. They also found
the record keeping was not complete enough to do it anyway.
This is a shocking revelation. We have been concerned about the
legality of "bundling" contributions after the recent exposure of illegal
bundlers but now it appears we may have an even greater problem. I guess
we should have been somewhat suspicious when the numbers started to come
out. We were told (no proof offered) that the Obama Internet contributions
were from $10.00 to $25.00 or so. If the
$200,000,000 is right, and the average contribution was $15.00, that
would mean over 13 million individuals made contributions? That
would also be 13 million contributions would need to be processed.
How did all that happen? I believe the Obama campaign's Internet fund
raising needs a serious, in depth investigation and audit. It also
appears the whole question of Internet fund raising needs investigation by
the legislature and perhaps new laws to insure it complies not only with
the letter of these laws but the spirit as well.
Making the world a better place one message at a time.
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