An 80-year-old Midwestern woman from an affluent suburban area made nearly 9,000 small donations totaling more than $330,000 to political causes and candidates in four years, according to federal election records.
She says she didn’t.
One of many examples cited by Election Watch is a 77-year-old Colorado woman referred to as "Donor A." She contributed more than 59,000 times in separate donations totaling over $279,000 in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.I've seen where you can donate, to Rantburg, fer instance, so much money, at some period you specify.
Another contributor, Donor B, 74, a woman from Kansas, donated 65,489 times, giving over $223,000, over the same time period.
I recall some candidates bragging a lot of their contributions were small donations, with a high percentage of female contributers.
Another example from the Election Watch study is an individual referred to as Donor D. The FEC database shows Donor D making more than 37,000 separate small contributions during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, including a few in early 2023, totaling more than $139,000.
A little grade-school math suggests that 'auto-donation period' would be more than one per hour, 24/7.
Most of those contributions went to a handful of political action committees in increments of three and five dollars each. The same PAC is listed as receiving 10 to 15 three and five-dollar donations in a single day from Donor D, day after day.So maybe automatic donations every two hours. I bet Alexa could do that.
An individual contributor referred to as Donor E, 72, from Louisiana, is recorded by the FEC as donating 6,554 times in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles with contributions totaling $421,112. Election Watch researchers discovered other contribution entries attributed to 24 different variations of Donor E’s personal identity information.
"The differences appear to be deliberate. These are not mistakes that are found and then corrected on next year’s report. They remain year after year.
Cousins, probably - maybe second cousins.
Gleason said, "The frequency and sheer volume of the transactions over years makes me think the activity is not likely a little old man clicking his PC’s pay button 50,000 times."In my opinion, it is behaviorally impossible for thousands of Americans to each be making thousands of donations per year. It is so methodical and structured that it appears to be done by a computer program.
"The beauty of our study is it is based on the FEC’s own data. When I asked them for an explanation, I heard nothing. What can they say?"