SEX SLAVE, SEXOLOGIST, BEAN COUNTER, SLAVE, SLUMLORD, TROUBLE-MAKER, and WHIPPING BOY: Obama’s Contributors list their Occupations

(written with contributions from Bud White and Larry Johnson)

Barack Obama’s campaign massive fund raising effort appears to have achieved success in part because they ignored the law on campaign fundraising and refused to follow procedures designed to verify the name, address, and employer of their contributors. My research indicates that at least 26 million dollars of the 800 million raised by Obama is questionable or illegal. Others report significantly higher numbers, possibly more than $84 million. In other words, as much as 10% of the money he received came from sources that appear to violate the laws governing Federal campaign dollars.

Obama’s on-line contribution tool has been designed to by-pass much of the verification requirements. This is no accident.

Obama’s fundraising disregards campaign finance laws—in spirit, if not in fact.
A few of the problems:

• Obama accepts contributions from anyone without any verification of their identity, that they have provided required information, and that their contribution is legal
• There are 694 contributors listed with more than the $4,600 allowed, resulting in $805,190.90 excess contributions
• Numerous suspect names like “LAST NAME, FIRST NAME” that has made over $14,250 in contributions; others like A, A and KHV, KHV are equally suspect. There are many other examples scattered throughout the list
• Listed cities are often suspect. For example: Null, just street addresses, or with names like X, CA, XXX, OHW, NC, USA in CA, LA, MI, IL, and NC, and TX, TX
• There are 58 incorrectly listed states used over and over again: 1, 60, 75, AB, AC, AU, BA, BC, BE, BR, CH, CN, DF, DJ, EN, EU, FI, FR, GE, HO, IR, IS, IT, JA, JP, JT, KT, LN, LO, ML, MX, N, N., N/, NA, NL, NS, NT, NU, OC, ON, PE, PO, QB, QC, QU, RM, SA, SK, SO, SP, ST, SW, U., UK, YT, ZU, ZZ
• There are many foreign addresses. For example: Almeria, Spain, PA; Athens, Greece, IL; Barcelona, Spain, NJ; Berlin, Germany, MD; Toronto, ON M4C 1N, GA or Toronto, Ontario, MN; Tokyo, Japan, NJ
• There are 12,480 individual contributions using invalid states for $3,679,089.65
• There are 4,333 individual contributions that list ZIP Code simply as zeros for $1,891,108.53.
• Even with the media attention to “Will Good” and “Doodad Pro”, there are still $3,225 and $305, respectively that has not been refunded. Nor, if the contributions are being kept, has their names and other required information been corrected
• Numerous null or suspect employers are listed. In fact, 47,050 who contributed $17,452,233.88 left the field blank. Others entered clearly bogus information. For example: “(Red)”, ASDFASDFASDFASDF, all X’s, REFUSED, and “EMPLOYED IN SOUTH AFRICA FOR OBAMA”.
• Occupations include such entries as “Parent’s LA County DA”, “MOTHER OF 2 BOYS, PARENT’S ASS”, SEX SLAVE, SEXOLOGIST, BEAN COUNTER, SLAVE, SLUMLORD, TROUBLE-MAKER, and WHIPPING BOY
• Over $107 million in contributions come from people listing either no employer and that they are unemployed
• There are 237 individual contributions transactions over $2,300 reportedly received after the Democratic National Convention for $957,613.
• There are 94 individual contribution transactions over $4,600 for $706,524.54
• There are 23 individual contribution transactions over $4,600 received after the Democratic National Convention for $171,200
• Among transfers from “authorized committees” there are seven individual contributors with more than $4,600 contributions and 322 with more than $2,300 contributions since the Democratic National Convention for a total of $35,251.27 and $1,271.652.30, respectively.
• Among transfers from “authorized committees” there are 557 individual contributors with invalid addresses (e.g., bad state designations) for $757,508.33
• Among transfers from “authorized committees” there are 111 individual contributors with invalid ZIP Codes (e.g., zeros) for $121,656.01
• Among transfers from “authorized committees” there are 1,406 individual contributors with null employer fields for $1,453,123.81

Summary of Campaign Finance Rules
The basic rules are rather straightforward:

• Only U.S. citizens and non-citizens with legal permanent residency (green card) may make a contribution or expenditure
• Individuals must provide name, address, employer, and occupation when their aggregate donation exceeds $200 per year. Anonymous donations are permitted for aggregate contributions under $50 per election
• Individuals may contribute to a candidate $2,300 for the primary election and $2,300 for the general election
• Individuals may contribute $28,500 to the national party committee per year
• Individuals may contribute $5,000 to PACs per year
• Individuals may contribute a combined total of $10,000 to state, district, and local party committees per year
• Thus, unless I’m mistaken, you may make anonymous contributions if your aggregate total is below $50. Otherwise you must include your name, address, employer, and occupation. When your aggregate contribution exceeds $200, the campaign is then required to report it
• For the purposes of my analysis, I have used August 28, 2008, when Senator Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech, as the last day of the primary election.

Source for campaign finance rules is Federal Election Commission.

 

Typical Complaints About Obama’s Fundraising
Talking strictly of online fundraising, the Obama campaign:

• Accepts contributions without verifying that the entered name matches the name on the credit card
• Accepts anonymous gift credit cards
• Does not verify that the entered city, state, and ZIP Code match
• Does not verify that the entered address is valid
• Does not require a valid U.S. location
• Appears to accept foreign credit cards
• Does not request and validate the AVS number on the credit card.

There are many articles throughout the Internet discussing this. For example, I wrote Campaign contribution Limits? No Problem, Just Contribute Online (also at NoQuarterUSA.net).

Obama’s Explanation
Writing in the Washington Post, Matthew Mosk says,

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

….

The Obama organization said its extensive review has ensured that the campaign has refunded any improper contributions, and noted that Federal Election Commission rules do not require front-end screening of donations.

….

Lawyers for the Obama operation said yesterday that their “extensive back-end review” has carefully scrubbed contributions to prevent illegal money from entering the operation’s war chest. “I’m pretty sure if I took my error rate and matched it against any other campaign or comparable nonprofit, you’d find we’re doing very well,” said Robert Bauer, a lawyer for the campaign.

….

When asked whether the campaign takes steps to verify whether a donor’s name matches the name on the credit card used to make a payment, Obama’s campaign replied in an e-mail: “Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this.

“Instead, the campaign does a rigorous comprehensive analysis of online contributions on the back end of the transaction to determine whether a contribution is legitimate.”

Additional discussion:

• Michael Luo and Griff Palmer, Fictitious Donors Found in Obama Finance Records, New York Times, October 9, 2008.
• Michael Luo, Democrats and Republicans Feud Over Donor Data, New York Times, October 25, 2008.

Analyzing Obama’s Reported Fundraising
I have accessed the latest fundraising contribution database released this week that covers contributions through October 15, 2008. As noted above, if the aggregate total contribution per election is above $50 you must include your name, address, employer, and occupation and when your aggregate contribution exceeds $200, then the campaign is required to report it. The latest fundraising report lists this information, plus refunds or reassignment of contributions when they’ve occurred.

Getting past this bland introduction, the data itself is stunning and substantiates Senator John McCain’s statement that this is a scandal in the making (See my article referenced above).

Here are some big picture numbers:

Individual Contributor’s Name (By State and City)

The only meaningful way to analyze individual contributors by name is to also consider their state and city. Otherwise, the same named person in two different places is treated as the same person. A downside to this is that if the person moved or is using two or more addresses, they are then treated as different people.

City
City is an inexact field insofar as it is not validated against a city-state-ZIP Code list. In its present state, it is great for anecdotal examples of examples of suspect individual contributions.

State

As if Obama’s not knowing the correct number of states in the United States isn’t bad enough—recall him once giving the count of 57 and insinuating there were more—within the contribution report his campaign offers up 123 states.

ZIP Code
ZIP Code by itself is not illustrative except unless used to do further demographic analysis. It is, when matched with city and state, an excellent component to identify suspect transactions by using comparing lists of valid city, state, and ZIP codes.

 
City-State-ZIP Code
City-State-ZIP Code is not yet tested for lack of time. There are numerous city, state, and ZIP Code databases that can be used to validate that the reported city, state, and ZIP Code are valid combinations. As a test, this will highlight those transactions that should be further scrutinized. I may address this in a future article, especially if interest is expressed.

Employer
Employer is very inexact as people list the same apparent company with many spellings, misspellings, and variations of the company name.

Date of Contribution
Contributions are reported from January 16, 2007 through October 15, 2008 with the highest count and amount on September 30, 2008, with 47,083 contributions totaling $7,330,579.23 for an average amount of $155.69.

Amount
The most obvious problem in amounts are those individual contributions that in a single instance are over $4,600. These represent contributions that the campaign have accepted that by no interpretation of the $4,600 limit should have been accepted, much less reported.

An additional problem is transactions made using gift cards, possibly with the full amount of the card—such as $25 cards. How many of these transactions come from untraceable gift cards?

Contributions from Authorized Committees

There are 101,696 transactions totaling $54,523,770.55 from “authorized committees”. These transactions are listed with six variations of Obama Victory Fund. Each involves an individual contribution transaction, just as the individual contributions discussed above. These contain the same type of problems found above.

Conclusion
Senator Barack Obama’s contribution list is poorly reviewed by his campaign staff or not reviewed at all. It contains an incredible number of errors and instances of apparent violation of common laws regarding political contributions to federal office candidates. The cynical side of me says that this has occurred is either blissful ignorance or by specific design.

Key points:

• Obama’s online fundraising discards reasonable and customary security measures to verify the identity and confirm appropriateness of individual contributions
• The campaign’s lawyers, yes, Obama’s lawyers, say this is intentional and that they do “rigorous comprehensive analysis of online contributions on the back end of the transaction to determine whether a contribution is legitimate”
• The limited review reported in this article makes abundantly clear that a “rigorous comprehensive analysis” is not performed. Records include phony names, employers, occupations, and addresses. Further, many clearly involve money in excess of campaign finance limits.

As Senator John McCain notes, this is a scandal. It is, though, a simple scandal to resolve, even if after the election. Obama’s attorneys already indicate and the records confirm that refunds are already made when necessary. Thus, each contribution is linked to a credit card. Credit card records include or can include name and billing address. To reestablish the integrity of the campaign’s financing, Obama needs to match the credit card information with the reported name and address to root out illegal contributions. If Obama won’t do this, I am hopeful that a prosecutor eventually will.

Finally, my analysis of the 2,069,069 transactions in Senator Barack Obama’s campaign contribution report is cursory. Some basic database queries retrieve good counts on the number of bad state identification, number of null employers, and zeroed ZIP Codes. Identifying suspect names and other reported information requires a record-by-record review. While I have skimmed small portions of the two million records, it is incomplete and requires an in-depth investigation. The Obama campaign has not done the required due diligence to ensure that they are only accepting and reporting authorized, correctly documented, and accurate individual contributions. That they have configured their contribution form on the campaign Web site to accept any user input, that they process this without scrutiny, and report the results without correction or regards to the laws makes abundantly clear this is by specific design.