Rep. Mary Peltola has partnered with a company that will track her supporters’ purchases, and round-up to the next dollar, an amount that will be donated to her reelection campaign.
By using Good Change, Peltola allows her supporters to have all their commercial transactions captured in what is promised by the company to be a secure system.
That means purchases made with credit cards for flights, books, food, booze, dating, toys, and porn will be sieved through the company’s database, which will automatically round up the purchase amount, and put it into a digital wallet for Peltola.
The Alaska Democratic Party has also partnered with Good Change to raise party funds.
The company describes the process this way:
1. Your donors will open a GoodChange account, then connect a credit card or bank account with GoodChange.
2. Each time they make a purchase, we will round up their spare change to the nearest dollar.
3. At the end of the round up cycle, GoodChange will transfer your donors’ total spare change into your GoodChange account.
There is a fee for the service, so not every penny will go to candidates. There’s a 10% fee captured by Good Change, plus a $3 charge for every new donor. If you return an item and get a refund, you won’t get the round-up portion back.
This is new territory for campaign fundraising. It’s not associated with ActBlue, which is the very successful crowdfunding application founded in 2004 and used by Democrats, which quickly transformed campaign fundraising, raising millions for Democrats quickly, and causing a competing firm, WinRed, to launch in 2019 to support Republican candidates.
Good Change, which appears to cater to Democrats, was started by a couple of millennial-age women in Arkansas, and is also being used by Rep. Adam Schiff, who is running for Senate to replace retiring Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
The Democratic Party of Arkansas is another client, as is the Arkansas Black Caucus. Adam Frisch, a Democrat challenging Rep. Laurent Boebert of Colorado, also is signed up to use the system.
