RNCDonors.com
October 21, 2008 02:52 p.m. by aaronsw
As you probably know, the Federal Elections Commission requires political committees to disclose information about all donors who contribute over $200, including their name, address, occupation, and employer. (There are some great sites, like OpenSecrets.org and FundRace.org, that help make sense of this data.) But this is just a minimum -- campaigns can do more. John McCain has been disclosing his sub-$200 donors and he recently criticized Barack Obama for not dong the same.
By looking at the disclosed records, the RNC and other Obama critics have found donations that Obama isn't legally permitted to accept -- contributions from overseas, contributions over the legal limit, contributions under apparently-fictitious names. Presumably, McCain thinks that if Obama opens up the rest of the data, they'll find even more. Obama has received contributions from literally millions of people, so it's a lot of data to look thru.
To put the pressure on, the RNC has released RNCDonors.com, which provides a near-real time search interface to all sub-$200 contributions to the RNC. (Why only sub-$200?) Very little data is disclosed about each contribution, but it's still fun to type in the names of Republican friends and see if they donated. So far Obama and the DNC haven't responded to these tactics.
By looking at the disclosed records, the RNC and other Obama critics have found donations that Obama isn't legally permitted to accept -- contributions from overseas, contributions over the legal limit, contributions under apparently-fictitious names. Presumably, McCain thinks that if Obama opens up the rest of the data, they'll find even more. Obama has received contributions from literally millions of people, so it's a lot of data to look thru.
To put the pressure on, the RNC has released RNCDonors.com, which provides a near-real time search interface to all sub-$200 contributions to the RNC. (Why only sub-$200?) Very little data is disclosed about each contribution, but it's still fun to type in the names of Republican friends and see if they donated. So far Obama and the DNC haven't responded to these tactics.
