I want to give money to a political party but I don’t want to identify myself. This appears to be illegal. My motivation is that the last time I donated, they started calling frequently at inconvenient times asking for more, and I don’t want to encourage or increase that. Political organizations are, of course, exempt from the no-call laws.
I found the following on their web site:
“Federal Election law requires political committees to report the name, mailing address, occupation and name of employer for each individual whose contributions aggregate in excess of $200 in a calendar year. Your contribution will be used in connection with Federal elections and is subject to the limits and prohibitions of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”
I can live with limiting donations to under $200 per year, though. Even so, there didn’t seem to be a mechanism explained on the site to make donations smaller than $200 without identifying myself.
Obviously, I can’t ask them how to do this while remaining anonymous.
go to a fundraising event held by that party. There will be a basket by the door where people put checks. Instead of a check, put $199 in cash. If they have a guest book, don’t sign it.
or
mail an envelope with $199 in cash to the party office, with no return address. Put opaque paper around the cash, so it isn’t visible thru the envelope, lest it get stolen in the mail.
or
walk into the party headquarters, say I want to donate to the party, and hand them $199 in cash. Then walk out. They will ask for your name, address, etc. so they can send you a Thank-you note. Just say that’s not necessary, and decline to give them that info. They will still be polite (& grateful), since you did just donate to them.
P.S. This really isn’t necessary.
I help maintain the database for a political party. We have specific flags on it for ‘Do Not Phone’, ‘Do Not Mail’, and ‘Do Not Email’. And we do mark those flags when requested, and definately pay attention to them when sending stuff. (I just marked a couple dozen as Do-Not-Email this afternoon, based on peoples’ requests.) We pay attention because we don’t want to upset our supporters, obviously. But also, just like you dislike getting unwanted stuff from us, we dislike wasting our money sending it to you if you’re not going to respond.
So you really don’t have to go to this extent to donate ‘anonymously’; just give a donation and clearly state that you want to be kept off their phone call / letter / email lists. They should pay attention to that.
And it always takes less energy for you to hang up the phone or throw away the letter than it took them to make the phone call or mail you the letter.
Political parties are notorious for that behaviour, sending out mass mailings to prior contributors. If you wanted to cost a party money, you should send them a single small donation, then watch them spend 50 times that amount over the next decade trying to get you to repeat it.
Yeah, I can’t imagine a politician would want to subject themselves to that potential difficulty. In my state, we’ve recently switched to monitoring campaign finances electronically - before, campaign committees got away with all sorts of shenanigans, but now that monitoring donations doesn’t involve trying to read campaign treasurers’ bad handwriting, campaigns have started becoming much more serious about keeping their fundraising above-board. I’m guessing a candidate’s fundraisers wouldn’t even be willing to take money that they thought was suspicious. And the state party committees are of course more scrutinized than the individual candidates. Very likely, if you donate money, and they can’t trace who it’s from, it will end up in some government account or donated to a charity (I know this happens sometimes when contributions can’t be returned.)
I would just find out if they’re willing to respect do-not-call and do-not-email requests. The Democrats in my state do their best to do so (for instance, addresses are tracked separately so that candidates don’t have easy lists of folks who’ve donated to other Democratic candidates) though I’m not certain they always succeed (this being due to confusion stemming from a somewhat inadequate record-keeping system, not to deliberate malice.) On the other hand, in our state at least, this information is publicly available, so your address actually is out there for anyone who cares to search the Secretary of State website.
You can probably avoid the worst of it by just telling them you don’t want any phone calls; on the other hand, if you’re searching for absolute secrecy from unwanted eyes, you’re best not donating to any state politician or political group here. I’m guessing it’s mostly the same everywhere, though likely the federal parties have the resources to do a better job of making sure your address and phone number aren’t disseminated.