The phone rings. The caller knows your name, and opens with a dad joke.
“Carla? Finally, it’s good to hear a kind voice. That last call was tougher on me than my mother-in-law’s meatloaf. (chuckles) I’m only kidding.”
He is asking for donations, for a group that helps the police.
This is not a policeman. This is not even a human. This is a computer, making thousands of robocalls with the same folksy voice.
And like “Frank Wallace,” the American Police Officers Alliance is not what it seems.
In theory, it is a political nonprofit called a 527, after a section of the tax code, that can raise unlimited donations to help or oppose candidates, promote issues or encourage voting.
In reality, it is part of a group of five linked nonprofits that have exploited thousands of donors in ways that have been hidden until now by a blizzard of filings, lax oversight and a blind spot in the campaign finance system.
Since 2014, the five groups have pulled in $89 million from small-dollar donors who were pitched on building political support for police officers, veterans and firefighters.
But just 1 percent of the money they raised was used to help candidates via donations, ads or targeted get-out-the-vote messages, according to an analysis by The Times of the groups’ public filings.
About 90 percent of the money the groups raised was simply sent back to their fund-raising contractors, to feed a self-consuming loop where donations went to find more donors to give money to find more donors. They had no significant operations other than fund-raising, and along the way became one of America’s biggest sources of robocalls.
It is not clear why the groups plowed so much of what they raised back into more fund-raising calls; compared with other political nonprofits, their fund-raising expenditures were extraordinarily high.
But one other set of expenditures was especially notable: The groups also paid $2.8 million, or 3 percent of the money raised, to three Republican political consultants from Wisconsin who were the hidden force behind all five nonprofits, according to people who worked for the groups and who in some cases were kept in the dark by the consultants about the finances of the operations.
Those three consultants helped organize the nonprofits, the people said, then billed them — through shell companies that obscured the connection.
The campaign-finance system is built to police who puts money into politics, legal experts say. These groups embodied a flaw: The system is poorly prepared to stop those who raise money and channel it somewhere other than candidates and causes.
By minimizing their aid to candidates, the consultants who helped set up the five nonprofits avoided scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission and most state watchdogs, and put their groups under the jurisdiction of a distracted and underfunded regulator, the Internal Revenue Service. As a result, their spending records were posted not on the F.E.C.’s easily searchable site, but on a byzantine I.R.S. page written in bureaucratic jargon.
To understand what these groups did with their $89 million, The Times analyzed 15,851 pages of their financial reports, including 135,843 separate expenditures, searched corporate records in 10 states, and interviewed the nonprofits’ leaders and vendors.
Four of the five nonprofits remain active. In statements, they said they had not sought to avoid oversight, enrich insiders or deceive donors.
Instead, the groups said, they simply believed in helping politicians indirectly — not by giving them money or buying them ads or mentioning their names, but by obliquely raising issues that could shift voters their way.
To that end, the groups said, even fund-raising calls from “Frank Wallace” were part of their mission. Since they mentioned policing — a topic voters might care about — the calls were not a means to an end in the work of influencing elections. They were the work itself. (...)
“I do this to help people without a voice organize, raise money and design a platform,” Mr. Connors said in a statement. He confirmed his company’s ownership of Voter Mobilization LLC. “Yes I am paid for what I do (everybody is) but my real compensation is the satisfaction of Americans getting involved in the system,” he said. (...)
The organizations’ calls were recorded by Nomorobo, a company that collects robocalls so it can help customers block them. The company’s founder, Aaron Foss, said it had recorded tens of thousands of calls from just these four groups — putting them among the most prolific and longest-running robocallers his network has ever tracked.
The calls captured by Nomorobo were made using a powerful new technology, a “soundboard,” according to a spokesman for the groups’ largest vendor for fund-raising calls, New Jersey-based Residential Programs, Inc.
A soundboard is a computer program, preloaded with snippets of recorded dialogue, down to uh-huhs, thank-yous and mother-in-law jokes. By clicking buttons, an operator anywhere in the world can “speak” to donors in colloquial English without saying a word.
“One, it keeps everybody on script. Two, you don’t hear the foreign accent. And three, you don’t hear the call center noise,” Mr. Foss said.
“If you say, ‘Are you a robot?’,” Mr. Foss said, “there’s a button that says, ‘No.’”
The calls worked. The groups have reported bringing in more than 18,000 donations. More than 92 percent were for amounts smaller than $200.
“They say this will help with fallen officers, and this will help in a political way with getting new uniforms for the firemen. But in a political way, not a direct way,” said Louise McConkey, 72, a retiree in Puyallup, Wash., who has made 35 donations to the five groups.
But Ms. McConkey said that her donations, totaling $3,650, left her with less to give to other causes she believes in, like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She said she was surprised to learn how little money went to directly supporting candidates.
“I’m pretty upset,” she said. “I think they owe people the money back.”
by David A. Fahrenthold and Tiff Fehr, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Marquette Tribune
[ed. Republican "consultants" scamming their own donor base. Is anyone surprised? American capitalism at its finest, exploiting loopholes for profit.]
