Are we just going to ignore the MONSTER financing Sarkozy accepted from Muammar Gaddhafi?

What stops someone from making a few thousand small incremental donations illegally from overseas via a campaign website?

 

So if you get a new email address or your IP address changes, you can never donate again? I don't think you have any sense of the logistics involved here.

 

Sarkozy was defeated and I think that French authorities should look into this.

Now you are hinting at some sort of conspiracy regarding US campaign financing and Gaddhafi's death. Do you have any direct evidence to support that?

 

"Stating the possibility" is hinting.

What stereotype? I asked you if you have any evidence how is that stereotyping?

 

If you're going to accept web donations, eliminating fraud is pretty diffcult to impossible for the same reason using a credit card fraudulently is nearly impossible to stop. It's even more difficult with web donations because you don't even need to deliver anything, so matching up an address to a person is impossible.

 

The simple reality is that the reason for someone to donate millions is to have more influence. If you have to use fake name and addresses to do it, you lose the influence you were trying to have in the first place, so it becomes fairly pointless.

 

That's certainly true - but that's not what you were responding to.

It would be pretty stupid for a campaign to knowingly accept a donation that would be otherwise illegal. It gives all the power to the donor - not only does the donor have influence, but they now have blackmail power. If the candidate doesn't do whatever they want, they can expose the illegal donations. No major campaign is going to accept that kind of risk.

Sure - but none of that was done illegally.

 

So basically it is the same as stating it but without doing it directly. For example if I say "Obama's dad was a Kenyan. One of Obama's grandparents said that he was born in Kenya. Why did it take so long for Obama to release his birth certificate?" Now is that just me asking a question or is that me indirectly stating something?

Then you are stereotyping yourself and / or jumping to a conclusion based upon your own views. Just asking someone for evidence isn't stereotyping.

And there is nothing wrong with that. I am just asking you a question if you have any evidence that such things have taken place in US election campaigns since you brought that up. You seem very defensive about a request for information that is a logical part of a discussion.

Thanks for doing so.

 

I think I won't bother believing the story about Sarkozy until the evidence is shown or a trial conducted. It's not that I find the story hard to believe, it's just that it could just as easily not be true, and I don't really want to be latching onto unsubstantiated allegations.

I think you misunderstood Mathloom. I don't think he was saying anything about US campaign financing and Gaddhafi. He was saying the American campaign finance system is structurally susceptible to similar forms of foreign bribery, so it could happen to us. With the anonymous advocacy stuff, it seems possible. But, to put in enough money to really put a presidential candidate into your pocket, you'd have to give him (or a super PAC) so much money that all the watchdog groups would get suspicious and sound the alarm. As a practical matter, it would seem hard to do.

 

Someone suggested that it was impossible to stop online fraud, and you suggested it was possible with IP addresses/etc. That's where I stepped in and that won't work. You can certainly just ban web donations, but that's different from securing them.

If you use fake names and addresses to get around donation limits (or make foreign donations), that's illegal. No campaign will knowingly let that happen because it would put them in a position to be blackmailed.

 

So you have no evidence of such thing happening and do you have any evidence that this had anything to do with Gaddafi's death?

 

I agree.

True and I will give him the benefit of the doubt but considering in his initial statement he brought up arms dealers and Gaddafi's death and then started to talk about the US campaign system I would hope he would provide some evidence for why he was asking.