Weaverville woman questions Obama donations

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Weaverville resident Erika Franzi has been getting a lot of attention recently for questioning donations to the campaign of Barack Obama. Check it out. This story has the potential to gain wider attention.

This is from The Caucus, a New York Times blog:

Erika Franzi, a 36-year-old mother of four, had been following recent news reports examining how people using obviously fake names had made thousands of dollars in contributions to Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign without being detected.

So this afternoon, sitting in her family room at her home in Weaverville, N.C., while her two-year-old was watching “Sesame Street,” Ms. Franzi got on her laptop to conduct an experiment. She used her debit card to make a $15 donation to Mr. Obama’s campaign.

Ms. Franzi, who described herself as conservative and preferring Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama, used the name “Della Ware” and entered an address of 12345 No Way in Far Far Away, DE 78954. Under employer, she listed: Americans Against Obama; for occupation, she typed in: Founder.

To her surprise, she said, her contribution went through in “fewer than three seconds.” Then, in order to be fair, she repeated the experiment on Mr. McCain’s Web site, entering the exact same information. Three times, she said, she received the message: “We have found errors in the information that you submitted. Please review the information below and try again.”

Ms. Franzi’s experiment would not necessarily be notable, except it appears that many others are doing the same thing.

The National Journal also has a long story. Here’s part of it:

The increasing use of online financial tools, debit cards and prepaid credit cards to make political contributions has created technological loopholes in federal and public oversight of campaign donations.

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On Thursday, authors on right-of-center blogs swapped stories from mostly unnamed McCain supporters claiming to have made pseudonymous online donations to the Obama campaign. Erika Franzi, a mother of four in Weaverville, N.C., told National Journal on Friday that she used a phony name, address and ZIP code, and had $15 transferred from her bank account to the Obama campaign, which then sent a thank-you e-mail. She made the pseudonymous donation after reading about other masked donations on right-of-center blogs, such as “The Corner” at National Review Online, she said. “I really don’t know what’s going on, but I think there is enough evidence [of problems] there that people should be questioning it,” she said.

The lack of information about Obama’s many small donors has prompted complaints by right-of-center activists, such as Frank Gaffney, founder of the D.C.-based Center for Security Policy. He recently authored an article in the Washington Times arguing that up to $100 million in foreign money may have been smuggled is small donations into the Obama campaign. When asked by National Journal to explain this high estimate, Gaffney responded that he had read it somewhere else.