(Untitled)

[tulzscha]

Oh, and illegal, unethical, unscrupulous, and intentional donations.

As the Powerline reader has noted, if "John Galt" of "Ayn Rand Lane" attempts a contribution at the McCain campaign, it gets rejected. Which is just as well. If the Republican candidate's website were intentionally set up to facilitate fraudulent donations, it would be on the

Comments

[theswede]

I'm curious; how is it fraudulent to donate anonymously?

[tulzscha]

It's not fraudulent to donate anonymously. But it is deliberately inviting fraud to intentionally make your system accessible to certain categories of donation. (i.e. foreign contributors, or people who want to donate more than allowed)

They turned off every kind of merchant credit card verification in existence -- AVS, CVM, etc. Interestingly, they're not even verifying the country of origin of the credit card.

I have a credit card issued by a bank in Hong Kong.... I’ve just made 5 donations of $5 each using the card...

Which is a setup for things that are clearly illegal:

The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) prohibits any foreign national from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any federal, state, or local election in the United States, either directly or indirectly. It is also unlawful to help foreign nationals violate that ban or to solicit, receive or accept contributions or donations from them. Persons who knowingly and willfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or

[theswede]

Interesting. I knew that bribery was legalized in the US, but not that there were actually such checks on it. Wonder what the purpose of splitting such hairs in the law is; bribery is bribery no matter where the money comes from in the rest of the world.

But sure, seems like they're not fully implementing all the checks and balances. Don't know if that's anything that would make me decide in a vote for or against them, after all, every political candidate in the US accepts what in the rest of the world is bribes. After that it's just a matter of degrees.

[tulzscha]

Well, no. If you looked link, you'll see that the restrictions on foreign donations have been in place for a lot longer -- since the '60s.

The ban on political contributions and expenditures by foreign nationals was first enacted in 1966 as part of the amendments to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), an "internal security" statute. The goal of the FARA was to minimize foreign intervention in U.S. elections by establishing a series of limitations on foreign nationals. These included registration requirements for the agents of foreign principals and a general prohibition on political contributions by foreign nationals. In 1974, the prohibition was incorporated into the Federal Election Campaign Act (the FECA), [HTML] [PDF] giving the Federal Election Commission (FEC) jurisdiction over its enforcement and interpretation.In other words, the part of FECA concerning foreign nationals is much older than BCRA. (BCRA = McCain-Feingold = an amendment to FECA