I’m thinking of making a contribution to one of the presidential candidates (since this is GQ, I’ll refrain from mentioning which one, to avoid needless distractions), but I’d like to do so anonymously. I made a contribution to my incumbent senator a while ago, and instantly was put on the party’s mailing list and started receiving more junk mail. I’d like to avoid that.
Is it possible/legal to send an anonymous contribution to a political candidate? I assume it’s not, since there are legal limits as to how much one person can contribute. So what would happen if I just sent my candidate a small ($50-$100) money order without my name or return address? Would he have to donate it to charity or something?
I suppose I can simply ask, when sending in the check, not to be put on any other mailing lists, but (call me cynical) I just doubt that that would be terribly effective.
Dunno about legality, but maybe a money order with a fake name and address? Or the name of that annoying person you know who supports the other party? Works well for web site registration.
There are limits on how much you can donate to a political candidate. Therefore, I don’t see how you could give anonymously, then there would be nothing to bar the rich from buying elections – or at least, more openly than they do now
He should. If it’s for a small amount, he might not, but he should. By federal law, campaigns are required to gather and maintain information about not only the names and addresses, but also the employer and occupation, of every one of their contributors. In practice they’ll take your money without the employer and occupation, but they certainly shouldn’t without the name and address.
You’re batting 1.000 in terms of correct assumptions!
As a person who has done this (I’m managing 3 political databases for this current election), I can assure you that we do not want to send additional mailings to people who do not want to receive them – those mailing are quite expensive to do, you know. We work hard to maximize the return on mailings; sending them only to likely responders is an important part of that.
However, most political campaigns are heavily run with volunteer labor. And such a request is rare. So it’s quite likely that the volunteer doing the data entry* hasn’t done one of these before, and may not code it properly. So there is some chance that you could still get additional mailings from them due to such an error.
Data entry, because usually campaigns enter every contribution onto a database. They just have a Do-Not-Contact flag to mark that they don’t want additional mail, etc. Campaigns often have to enter every contribution, either by legal requirements (campaign finance laws) or by their accountant (to prevent a dishonest volunteer from ‘skimming’ contributions).
They may put me on their own “do not contact” list but could still rent/sell my name to other organizations. That’s what happened in the case of the contribution to my senator. Her office didn’t send more mail, a bunch of other, similarly inclined, organizations did.
But from the cite SmackFu found, it looks like I could donate up to $50 anonymously, which is about the level I was planning to give. Hmmmm…
Works well for web site registration.