From Jerad Najvar:
After brief discussion and comments by Jerad Najvar, attorney for Harris County Republicans, the TEC voted unanimously to approve a draft opinion permitting Texas political committees to accept contributions by text message. APPROVED OPINION HERE (the first page is a diagram of each method)
The request proposed two methods for processing text message contributions. One method would have permitted a political committee to accept small-dollar contributions without collecting the contributor’s identifying information, relying on the ability of political committees to accept small-dollar contributions without itemizing contributor information on its campaign finance reports. Although the FEC has approved this method for unitemized contributions, the TEC has previously decided (in Advisory Opinion 207) that Texas law doesn’t permit acceptance of even the smallest of contributions from an anonymous source. This method, therefore, was not approved.
The second method proposed that the committee use a series of reply text messages to collect the contributor’s name, address, and other required information before processing the contribution. This is the method approved today. The final opinion also confirms that the processing firms do not make a prohibited corporate contribution by advancing a portion of each confirmed text contribution to the political committee pursuant to a normal business agreement (in other words, the committee doesn’t have to wait until the contributor pays the cell phone bill before receiving some of the funds).
See here for the full opinion, and here for the background. I think this is perfectly sensible, and I’m glad to see it happen. I doubt this will be revolutionary, but it’s certainly a tool every candidate and grassroots campaign should have in its bag. I will be very interested to see how this gets deployed in the coming elections.
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