In line with their own campaign staff illegal registrations and a coziness with ACORN and its decade spanning voter registration frauds under the rubric of ensuring no voter is disenfranchised, the official position of Barack Obama’s campaign appears to be that illegal campaign contributions are all in the eye of the beholder. For example, they may well argue, a person named Jgtj Jfggjjfgj probably views it that way.
Obama’s website has* all credit card verification procedures turned off for campaign contributions. The default is “On,” you have to turn it off deliberately. When you do, many wonderful things happen. You can accept contributions from Della Ware, John Galt, and Jgtj Jfggjjfgj. These fictitious people, though actual donors, may submit any address whatsoever, including foreign countries or Second Life.
Obama’s people claim they vet the legality of their donors after the contributions are made. The effectiveness of this technique is demonstrated by a pair of donors noted at the New York Times: “Derty West” and “Derty Poiiuy.” They both live at “rewq, ME” and are both employed by “Qwertyyy.” They even do the same job – “Qwerttyyu.”
This is a fine example of the ethical acuity of Chicago machine politics, because it shows how to facilitate anonymous, falsely sourced or foreign contributions while simultaneously evading contribution limits. All of that is illegal, of course. It’s why an honest person would not disable credit card verification. An honest person would not want to encourage illegal campaign contributions. An honest, prudent person would not turn off an effective verification system and assume the costs of vetting contributions themselves unless they were convinced they could do a superior job. As we’ve seen, this ideal is unrealized. Obama had good intentions, though: No one should be discontributionized.
The McCain campaign does not knowingly encourage such donations. They did not turn off the credit card verification system.
Commenter stevieray at thenextright.com sums it up:
“…Obama’s system doesn’t care what name is used, only that the credit card number is valid.
Obama’s system doesn’t care what address is used, only that the credit card number is valid.
Obama’s system doesn’t care if the security number is valid, it doesn’t even ask for it.
Federal law limits the amount anyone can give to the campaign, and requires the campaign to keep track of the donors and report the info to the feds.
Obama cannot report his donors accurately, because he can’t prove who gave ANY of the money to his campaign.
Every report he sent to the FEC is a fraud.
He can’t prove ANYBODY is below the limit, because he doesn’t know. His system made sure of that.”
A good summary of how this was discovered and has been documented may be found here.
Oh well, just another failure you can chalk up to the good intentions and false promise of McCain-Feingold. Strictly enforced donor disclosure requirements would have prevented it.
*Or had, there are reports credit card verification has been reinstated after this fraud-hole was discovered – proving they knew what they had done.