Political Donations – The What, The Why, and The How

Political donations are money or resources given to a political candidate, both during an election and during an electoral term, in order that the donator’s interests are represented in some ways. This is often done by companies who believe that their views would be best represented by a specific candidate or party. This is entirely legal and in fact in the United States, whole campaigns have been funded specifically by political donations.

The only stipulations are that the donations are made public, and the states again have various state website to show who has donated to what various campaign. The issue lies when the thing donated is not simply money, but is instead leant resources or money that has not been openly declared, leading to some candidates being beholden to various parties, completely unknown to by the voter. In the United Kingdom, this has been attempted to have been curbed by a limit on donations that a party can receive. However, once a party is in power, it is slightly harder to track these donations.

Therefore, as a private citizen, a member of these countries, it is your right to know where the various demands on a politician lie. They have been voted in to support you and your ideas and yet they may have undisclosed influences or debts that they are required to fulfill over your own needs as a member of the electorate. If we lived in a world where there was perfect transparency (and the average voter was aware of all the influences as well as a past voting record of the candidate), we would be able to elect candidates who fully support what we want and need.

How can we call politicians a representative of the electorate when we do not know where their own views lie and how these will overcome the will of the people? For instance, with the current issue of Brexit, many Tory politicians have ignored the will of their local electorate in order that they can fulfill the will of the party and their various financial backers whilst still maintaining that they have the will of the people at heart. This is unacceptable for many and as such, people are looking for alternatives. We are giving you these tools in order that you understand the levity of voting for various candidates and therefore attempting to bring the world closer to a truly transparent system as described above.

In the United Kingdom, the Electoral Commission holds all the information on political donations in this sense (www.electoralcommission.org.uk) (www.goo.gl/DFJ24a). This holds the information about all the United Kingdom-based elections as well as any donations made by various donors in each financial quarter. It is a lot easier to do this in the United Kingdom than in the United States as a result of a centralized system as opposed to the state-by-state discovery that must take place in the United States. Fortunately, a website called open secrets https://www.opensecrets.org has been set up in order to collate these responses and a researcher can find who donated to what as a result of this.

The harder task, therefore, becomes finding out how to trace the more illicit types of donations. One of these ways we will describe in the company accounts section, where it will be possible for someone to search the name of a representative of the government and find out if that person is the beneficiary of any trusts or director of any companies, and with this find out if they are receiving money in secret.

Social Media Profiles

Nowadays, everyone has at least one social media profile, the most common currently being Facebook. We use social media for everything nowadays, however, from trying to find a job to finding love, in dating site profiles. We put so much of our data on them and yet we assume that they are perfectly safe and that only our friends can see what we do and what we post on them. And yet, they are perfectly easily accessed by other people looking to find information on you or what you are doing, from your employers to people nefariously trying to steal information and identities. And that is not to even touch on the fact that many social networks will sell your information to advertisers in order that they can get a better profile on you and therefore can offer more enticing products to you. These are lists that anyone can buy and there have been some scandals where scammers have bought lists from companies and used it to target the most vulnerable

Therefore, it is up to you, the sensible and educated consumer of these services, to find out what is openly available about yourself, insofar as you can tailor your image to the public and know what your bosses can see about what you do. You can also, with these tools, use them as others have used them as if everyone has the power to do this, then everyone knows the limitations of it and can be more mindful of the information that is out there and that you yourselves are transmitting on a daily basis. And it allows you to research other people who are doing nefarious things themselves.

– A very good tool for this sort of thing, is Maltego (Community Edition) from Paterva https://www.maltego.com/