Hotair

Via Bryan Preston, your must-see clip of the day. But before you watch, re-read Ed’s posts from October 26 and October 29 of 2008. This isn’t the first time AVS protections have mysteriously disappeared from Team Hopenchange’s donations page, and it’s not just the missing security-code field that got them in trouble in 2008. Remember how they made a point of accepting money from untraceable prepaid credit cards then too? WaPo raised an eyebrow at the time:

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…

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…

Juan Proaño, whose technology firm handled online contributions for John Edwards’s presidential primary campaign, and for John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2004, said it is possible to require donors’ names and addresses to match those on their credit card accounts. But, he said, some campaigns are reluctant to impose that extra layer of security.

Republican Patrick Ruffini tested Obama’s AVS procedures at the time, attempting to donate five dollars by providing an address different from the one linked to the credit card he used. Result: Transaction accepted. Said Ruffini, who worked on online organizing for Bush’s campaign, “The ability to contribute with a false address, when the technology to prevent it not only exists but comes standard, is a green light for fraud.” Note the part too about AVS protections being “standard.” Mark Steyn checked the prefab template for his own little web store at the time and found that the defaults were all set for maximum verification. To make the system as lax as it was — and apparently still is — at BarackObama.com, you had to deliberately weaken its security checks. Which, per the staff’s own admission to WaPo, they did.

I recommend re-reading that old WaPo piece in its entirety as it cites the case of a retired insurance manager whose name had been stolen to donate $174,800 to Obama. In reality, the manager had never donated a cent. Team O claims that they catch all this stuff on the back end when they review the names and donations to look for suspicious activity, which is easy to do when the phony contribution came from “Bart Simpson” but not so easy to do when it came from “Paul Smith” or some other generic yet plausible (and possibly stolen) name. In fact, the end result of all this nonsense was an FEC discretionary review (i.e. audit) of the campaign. You would think, after that, that they’d do everything by the book this time. But when your fundraising’s going worse than expected, maybe your priorities change — assuming anti-fraud priorities were ever there to begin with.

Exit question: Should we be worried that these same guys are pioneering new ways to donate electronically?

Obama Donations - Anyone, Anywhere

*Stories passed along courtesy of Philomena at americaspartynews.com

By Jon N. Hall
American Thinker

A Doonesbury cartoon on a recent Sunday contained a distillation of a current talking point among progressives: "Question: What fraud? Voter fraud is close to non-existent!"

Progressives think that if they make the above claim as though it were an indisputable fact, it will become a fact.  All they have to do is repeat the claim over and over again until it sticks.  To wit:

An editorialist for The New York Times asserts: "There is almost no voting fraud in America."

At the Center for American Progress[*], Eric Alterman writes: "Members of the mainstream media often give too much credence to empty claims of 'voter fraud.'"

At the Brennan Center for Justice, we read: "Allegations of widespread fraud by malevolent voters are easy to make, but often prove to be inflated or inaccurate."

In The Nation, left-wing firebrand Katrina Vanden Heuvel alleges: "Voter fraud -- the impersonation of a voter by another person -- is extremely rare in the United States."

An uncouth gal for Daily Kos writes: "Some [Republicans] acknowledge that voter fraud is essentially non-existent."  (Who are these Republicans?)

At Mother Jones, we read: "While Republicans have argued such rules are necessary to combat 'voter fraud,' examples of the kind of in-person voter fraud that might be curbed by such requirements are miniscule."

At Slate we read: "Large-scale, coordinated vote stealing doesn't happen."

A lady at Think Progress writes: "Like conservative state legislatures across the country, Maine Republicans have been pushing a Voter ID law, ostensibly to prevent non-existent voter fraud."  (Italics added.)

A blogger at Media Matters writes: "Instances of actual voter fraud are very rare."

(There may be a subliminal message in there somewhere.)

The above claims are as absurd as a big-city mayor claiming that last night, no cases of wife-beating occurred in his fair city because, well, no one reported any to the police.

Question: how is a poll worker manning a voting station supposed to know that a voter checking in to vote is about to commit voter fraud -- if that voter is registered?

Read more at American Thinker ... 


*Center for American Progress: Shut Up Conservatives Through Election Fraud

Doo Doo Economics blog

During a 12/9/11 CSPAN covered "Presidency of Barack Obama" event, panelists including former Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter made the case that progressives need to stop the conservative movement through election fraud. Conservatives must be beaten in the 2012 election "when they have 9% unemployment and every external factor in the economy working in their behalf, if they got stomped or even beaten in this next election then they're going to have to" reconsider their beliefs. Alter added, "They won't make that assessment until they get beat.  But they won't get beat if people are waiting for somebody else to do it."

These comments followed a discussion on opposing sane voting procedures. Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly editor in Chief, disdainfully commented that "Part of the problem is that for the average person, the average voter, the idea that you need a drivers license to vote doesn't seem all that outrageous...You and I might know that there is little to no actual voter fraud..., but to the average person to be careful about voter fraud doesn't strike them as a stretch."

Faiz Shakir, Vice President of the far left Center for American Progress injected vitriol into the subject. Shakir smugly fumed that there is "a callousness on the right of how we approach the franchise of voting. If people aren't allowed to vote on voting day, that's OK with them (Conservatives). Certain populations, students that can't vote, elderly that can't vote, that's alright." Shakir continued that what is needed is to "find a way for them to have voted...the vote is counted and then we ensure that the person who cast that vote was a proper person."

Yeah, right count them all then check if they are valid. 

Read more at Doo Doo Economics ...