Today at 11 AM Central Time, any and all comments to the Federal Election Commission on their pending decision regarding presidential primary matching funds on contributions received through ActBlue are due.
Multiple organizations are vocally opposing this ban, as it effectively disregards ActBlue’s nature as a grassroots fundraising system and largely violates the meaning of matching funds through public funding. As the netroots’ own Adam Bonin wrote in his letter to the FEC on behalf of DailyKos and BlogPAC:
Obviously, while ActBlue is a “political committee” in the strictest sense of the term, in reality it does not act as such. ActBlue is a conduit for individual contributor preferences, to track and aggregate small-dollar contributors. It asserts no control over the recipients of its funds; the site’s only criteria is that the recipient be a Democrat. It fulfills FECA’s anticorruption goals by reporting contributors’ names, addresses, employers, and occupations to campaign, which in turn provide that information to the Commission as is legally required.
This is a clear a case as any of reformers accomplishing via technology what law alone cannot do: leveling the playing field between moneyed interests and small-dollar contributors by allowing anyone to become a “bundler”, and to allow such contributors to have visual, real-time confirmation of their impact upon the process. In the same way that the public financing system itself is designed to encourage and magnify the impact of small-dollar contributions, ActBlue facilitates those contributions occurring in the first place.
If you’re at all interested in supporting the Edwards campaign’s position–which isn’t a tacit endorsement, but an affirmation of your belief in grassroots fundraising–please make sure to submit your comments. You can see more by reading desmoinesdem’s earlier post here.
You can do that in a variety of ways:
– Visit JohnEdwards.com and send a comment through our simple form.
– Write an E-mail to Mary Dove, the FEC Commission Secretary at mdove@fec.gov
– Fax your comments to the Secretary at (202) 208-3333 and to FEC’s Office of General Counsel at (202) 219-3923