Ask the President-elect if he'll support an audit of his campaign fundraising

We'll get an idea of how deep Barack Obama's commitment to installing a new politics of openness and honest is when we see if he allow the Democrats to pressure the Democratic members of the FEC to block an audit of his campaign finances. As Hans A. von Spakovsky explains, John McCain's finances must automatically be audited because he accepted public financing. But it will take a vote of four FEC commissioners to initiate an audit of Obama's fundraising. And so one of the Democratic commissioners will have to agree to the audit. And there is certainly a lot to be investigated.

The federal campaign finance law requires campaigns to report the name, address, occupation and employer of every contributor who gives more than $200. Yet according to the Washington Post, National Journal and Newsmax, the Obama campaign took (or failed to take) steps to ensure it was not alerted to problem donations.

Some of the acts and omissions are so cavalier, it's hard to believe they weren't intentional. For example, the Post reported that the Obama campaign accepted prepaid credit cards that are untraceable, and National Journal reported that the campaign didn't implement a verification procedure to even match the names of contributors using regular credit cards with the names and addresses of the credit card holders.

When asked about it, the Obama campaign said such matching wasn't "available in the credit card processing industry." That is completely untrue--such verification procedures are offered by companies that service credit-card transactions, as well as by banks and telecommunications companies (and was standard procedure for the McCain campaign).

In contrast to the McCain campaign, the Obama campaign also refused to divulge the names of the millions of small-time donors who contributed (many repeatedly) under $200 to the campaign (totaling $218 million), saying it was "too difficult." However, as Neil Munro of National Journal reported, there are "few technical obstacles to sorting and identifying small-scale donors."

Of course, disclosing that information would have revealed the many instances of fictitious donor names uncovered by the press (like "Doodad Pro"), which the campaign blithely accepted. Media reports show that Obama's campaign apparently lacked even basic software protocols to catch obviously fictitious addresses (like a donor's state being listed as "NA" or "ZZ") or employer names (like DFDFGDFG), or to accumulate small donations made repeatedly by the same individual. If the campaign had done that, it would have had to refuse the contributions, return them when they went above the maximum of $2,300 per election, or identify donors once their contributions top $200.

The Obama campaign deliberately minimized their security procedures to protect against such illegal donations. Clearly there needs to be a thorough audit to see what went on. If this was all clean and there weren't illegal donations, then the campaign should be cleared of any taint. He should not be able to escape an audit simply because he had the audacity to raise so much money, some perhaps questionably, and turn down the public financing. Perhaps some enterprising interviewer will seek to get a commitment from the President-elect to support an FEC audit and not use political pressure to get the Democratic commissioners to vote to block any examination of his record.