Sounds like a good system to me, provided, of course, that the nobody cheated and told the elected politicians where the money came from.

I suppose that’s why the system was abandoned, and larger contributions now must be disclosed in Norway as well.

@SW: What about spending your own money to promote a candidate? Is that corruption too? And what’s the difference?

And I’m also interested to see the consequences of integrating and analyzing the data (semi-)publicly available in Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. There are certainly bound to be some interesting surprises (especially for the people who don’t realize exactly how public their voluntarily- and involuntarily-contributed information is).

But also I should have matched Nat now, with the full contribution to Obama. It should show up in the next refresh.

Am glad that this information is not private, the point of having this information public is to avoid some billionaire to over-fund a particular candidate, everyone is limited to 2,300.

Let me be the first to say that calling out the contributions of individuals in a blog post feels questionable, and makes me kinda queasy. It almost feels like a violation of privacy.

The principle of a private ballot of one man, one vote requires privacy because all men have an equal weight in the vote. Where each man can spend arbitrary amounts of money to influence the outcome of a campaign, it would be totally inappropriate to allow their donations to be kept secret.

Robert Love try to be as neutral as possible

This is not an accurate statement. Robert Love has been forthright in his personal opinions and attitudes, and has been abundantly clear in what drives his vote. His contribution isn’t at all surprising.

- Chris

If people are angry at you, they should be at the first source. It’s like security by obscurity : it didn’t work.

Anyway, Nat and Miguel were never secret about their opinion. Robert Love try to be as neutral as possible and I like to follow his really insightful Twitter report. I’m surprised he’s for McCain, in fact I never really asked myself what was his opinion. That’s kinda funny

But, anyway, I really hope that in the Gnome community, we can appreciate each other even if we don’t agree on politic.

So, really, I appreciate your post, it’s interesting.

I spent a lot of time wondering about if I was actually calling those people out. I didn’t call out any individual who didn’t write about politics, so I don’t feel like I’m attacking people who quietly made their choices. Each of them actively writes about politics in their own blogs. That said with them as friends it was difficult to not think that I’m lifting a skirt.

Votes had to be made private so that you couldn’t prove you voted for someone and thus be bought off.

I wonder how long it will be until we find a union member who is harassed or ostracized because he donated to an individual the organization didn’t endorse.

Though I’m not sure what effect being friends with these people has on me.