ACTION ALERT: FEC about to take a swipe at liberal online fundraising

Most of us let you know donate to your favorite candidates through a service called ActBlue. ActBlue itself doesn't take sides with regards to which candidate money will be raised for. Rather, you, we, decide who WE want to raise money for and ActBlue is simply a secure way to do just that. Well, the FEC is now about to declare that ActBlue is a PAC and that therefore presidential candidates can't get federal matching monies for funds raised via ActBlue (i.e., for a lot of your donations that you made via links on your favorite liberal blogs).

This is pretty absurd as ActBlue doesn't decide who we're going to support, and they're hardly a front for big bad wealthy corporate donors. They're not a PAC like other special interest groups that raise money for particular candidates, and raise big bucks from very influential people. ActBlue is simply a glorified version of PayPal. And if ActBlue is a PAC for FEC purposes, then why isn't any electronic service that permits candidates to raise money online? Under this logic, every candidate's online donations could be exempt from federal matching if that candidate used an outside service to process those transactions, because the outside service would be considered a PAC (i.e., someone bundling money for a particular candidate).

If the FEC does this, then they'll basically kill any fundraising that we can do via the blogs. After all, why give here if your donation will be matched (i.e., doubled) by giving elsewhere? Does the FEC really want to kill this experiment in participatory democracy in one fell swoop?

Markos has far more on this, including contact info for the FEC. They're taking public comments, this week only. So please weigh in.