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Naomi Kritzer Profile picture
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24 Mar, 30 tweets, 9 min read
From the departments of "are you fucking kidding me?" and "Republicans in Disarray," this is sure a thing.
This made me really curious whether Democratic fundraising is vulnerable to similar levels of grift, and I THINK the answer is no, although I'm not 100% sure, but I went digging through the terms & conditions for WinRed, ActBlue, and Anedote, and let me tell you what I found.
If you donate to Democrats, you've probably used ActBlue. I checked their terms & conditions and found basically nothing about fees at all.

secure.actblue.com/content/finepr…
My recollection is that they do the same thing as GoFundMe and try to guilt you into an extra donation to cover costs and default it to some percentage of your donation but you can reduce it to $0, although I went online just now and tried to get that to show up with no luck.
So OK, WinRed.

WinRed is a Trump platform. When they rolled it out, they tried to bully their competitor Anedot out of business, and the grift was already clear.

huffpost.com/entry/trump-wi…
From that HuffPost article. Note that this extra set of fees is not even the grift we're talking about -- this is just money that goes into the pocket of their credit card processor revv.com and Gerrit Lansing, a former RNC staffer. While the Democrats’ platform charges a flat 3.95 percent
But yeah, OK, I pulled up the actual WinRed Terms & Conditions, and they basically say, "you're writing us a blank check."

winred.com/terms/donor-te… Processing Fees. We reserve the right to charge a processing
Given this, it's definitely not surprising that the setup was basically IMMEDIATELY abused.

This is a grift well-known in charitable fundraising. There are "charities" where over 80% of money raised goes to the for-profit company making phone calls.

charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=…
The alternative fundraising platform that is used by the non-Trump wing of the Republican party is Anedot. I found this article trying to figure out whose fundraising page would show me what it looks like.

insidesources.com/in-fundraising…
The Lincoln Project is one such group! (I should have been able to guess that.)

Don't worry, I'm not actually giving them any money, but I set up a donation to see what it would look like. CONFIRM YOUR DONATION. One-Time Payment ... $1 Want 100% to
I am not a fan of the Lincoln Project, which IMO is just another set of grifters. But this is a genuinely transparent donor page. They're telling you what the fees are, they're politely asking you to cover them, and they're letting you opt out.
Here are the Anedot Terms & Conditions. (I find it kind of weird that it's a Google Doc and I could click "request to edit" but PRESUMABLY they would deny this request. One would hope.)

docs.google.com/document/d/1sK… 5.5 Service Charges Anedot will provide the Service to Merch
Oh, hilariously, the pricing page link routes you to a dead page.

help.anedot.com/anedot-basics/… Oops! You may be lost The page you are looking for doesn't e
Anyway, one more thing I went digging for, which was the identity of IMGE, which was taking a HUGE amount of the donations coming in, even after recouping the $30,000 they fronted. They're a consulting/digital marketing firm.

imge.com/about-us/
Per that leaked e-mail (which I put in again below, in case you've gotten lost), IMGE was skimming, like, 20% of the donations made through the main Minnesota GOP page.

If I were a Minnesota Republican, I WOULD NOT BE OKAY WITH THAT.

drive.google.com/file/d/18wIuUz…
If I were a Minnesotan Republican, I would not be okay with ANY of this.

As a Minnesota Democrat: well, it's better for my candidates -- the Democrats -- if their Republican opponents are operating with a serious fundraising disadvantage, I guess?
Anyway, I guess it's not surprising that WinRed, as the Trump-sponsored Republican fundraising platform, has grifting options built RIGHT INTO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS.
Given that WinRed, the Trump-sponsored Republican fundraising platform, built grifting capacity RIGHT INTO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, I think it is highly unlikely that Minnesota is the only state where this was happening.
I guess my final question is this.

How easy is it to take advantage of this capacity?

Like, if I set up a "fundraiser" for a Republican candidate somewhere with WinRed, could I say I was a vendor and take 90% of what people donated? Who would have to sign off on this?
One final (for now) note. If you're curious which MN Republicans are horrified by the grift vs. which MN Republicans think everything here is fine and Max Rymer should remember that snitches get stitches, the Facebook post here is illuminating.

facebook.com/789948917/post…
I am also curious about this. My guess is that the cash split was automated, because if someone at the MN GOP was writing checks they surely would have noticed this earlier? Maybe they'd hired IMGE to create their website.

Also, regarding ActBlue, they charge a percentage for processing and several people confirmed that my memory of a "tip" request is accurate.

I'm thinking about past financial shenanigans that have come to light in MN politics and now I'm wondering, should the payments to these "vendors" have gone into the campaign finance reports filed by the MN GOP? Or not, because it was skimmed off before it hit their bank account?
The thing that honestly kind of blows my mind is that the central state GOP party, whose job is supposed to be supporting candidates, basically robbed their own candidates in order to send money to consulting firms.
Thousands of donors from around the state sent in donations of $10 or $25 or $100, fully expecting that, you know, $9 or $23 or $96 would go to the candidates they wanted to support.
I disagree with their choice of candidate, but these were people who were acting in good faith, taking part in democracy, and giving to people they supported.

And their $10 or $25 or $100 went to IMGE or some other "fundraiser" and no one told them.
I honestly do not know how anyone at this point can look at the GOP and think this is a party that stands for anything at all.
I DM'd ActBlue because I wanted to get confirmation that they don't let "fundraisers" skim donations.

They do not. Here's their page about how to see where your money goes.

support.actblue.com/donors/contrib…
They added, "Folks who are interested in fundraising on behalf of the groups using our tools can create community forms or supporter forms," with a link to that tool:

support.actblue.com/donors/raising…
The thing that struck me really forcefully about that second link is that ActBlue is set up with the assumption that if you're fundraising for a candidate or cause, you want to RAISE MONEY FOR SOMEONE OR SOMETHING YOU CARE ABOUT.

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We're on like Internet 4.3 before we even get to LiveJournal.
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