The Federal Election Commission site is pretty flippin' sweet...
This morning, grasping for blog ideas (there are too many to count at this point), I found a link to the Federal Election Commission website (thanks to the Ben Smith Politico Blog). This site has a lot of useful (and useless) information.
For starters, I learned that there is a limit to how much an individual can donate to a presidential candidate. This struck me as strange. For starters, how can the government tell me how much of my money I can spend? Can someone please look at this and explain to me how Hillary Clinton was able to donate $5M to her campaign (despite the fact that she is calling it a "loan," not a donation, which she is charging interest on)?
After reading about these limits, I decided to take a look at the McCain-Feingold Law, paying particular attention to the Millionaire's Amendment. I'm going to be perfectly honest- I'm not sure what the hell this is all about. Someone please enlighten me. (This could possibly explain the answer to my previous question.)
What I found to be creepy and interesting on the site was how you can look up donors. If you want to do a search and look at a map of presidential campaign finance, you just click here. It's all pretty fascinating and spooky.
North Dakota, which donated the least amount of money to presidential campaigns, donated the most to Giuliani. Weird.
Check out the site. It's pretty interesting. (Especially when you look up donors in various zip codes when you're feeling like a Special Agent.)
2 comments:
Candidates can give themselves as much as they want out of personal assets. The reason donations are limited is to limit the possibility of individuals or corporations being able to buy a candidate.
Gotcha, but why does the amount seem to be so low?
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