Earlier this week, we looked at the Obama campaign’s continued concealment of its small donors list. The manner in which many of the small donations are made is equally concerning, as it enables the very fraud and illegal contributions we are concerned about.
Well, thanks to Mark Steyn, whose intellectual curiosity apparently surpasses that of the entire staff at the New York Times, we see precisely why the Obama campaign dares not publish the list of small donors.
Because “”Della Ware” of “12345 No Way” had managed to make a campaign donation to the fraud-friendly Obama website but not to the McCain site.” How?
If they’d really wanted “to be fair”, the Times would have pointed out that, in order to accept donations from “Della Ware” and “Saddam Hussein” et al, the Obama website had, intentionally, to disable all the default security settings on their credit-card processing. I took a look at the inner sanctum of my (alas, far more modest) online retail operation this afternoon and, in order to permit fraud as easy as that which the Obama campaign is facilitating, you have to uncheck every single box on the AVS system, each one of which makes it very explicit just what you’re doing – ie, accepting transactions with no “billing address”, no “street address” match, no “zip code” match, with a bank “of non-US origin” (I’ve got nothing against those, but a US campaign fundraiser surely should be wary), etc. When you’ve disabled the whole lot one step at a time, then you’ve got a system tailor-made for fake names and bogus addresses.
The Obama campaign cannot and will not release its small donors list. For to do so would reveal “Della Ware” and “Saddam Hussein” and perhaps eve the entire Dallas Cowboys roster, as well as more names who have no bank-confirmed address matches (a red flag for any online transaction) or notation of foreign source (a red flag for any political campaign transaction).
The only way the campaign will ever release this list is after it is scrubbed, surely to emerge disavowing responsibility for facilitation and displaying their good citizenship by eventually refunding clearly fraudulent donations. But in the mean time, the Obama campaign is banking and earning interest on these illegal donations, as a reader commented astutely.
Would we not expect the character of a president to reflect a desire to prevent fraud, particularly by doing something as simple as address verification by banks in electronic transactions? Instead, the campaign is profiting from fraud and will display their good citizenship through refunds, after quietly scraping the interest.
Red flags that should scream out to Americans have been waving prominently. But nearly half of the electorate seems genuinely disinterested.
