In case you haven’t noticed, this year’s political season is going to involve a lot of money. Now, the Federal Elections Commission is set to open another portal into the depositories of campaigns. The FEC is set to approve a campaign whereby people can donate via text message, just as they do to donate to charities or vote for American Idol. The big challenge, of course, is recording information about the donor to ensure the record keeping that necessarily goes along with contributions such as these.
Text donations would be capped at between $10 and $50 per billing cycle and campaigns would enforce that restriction through tracking donations from “a single user’s mobile phone number” to a single “premium short code” assigned to the political committee. The short code would also enable the aggregator and carriers to ensure “the $50 limit is never exceeded for one political recipient.”
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