I have some tips for avoiding the spam that inevitably follows from making political donations. It’s not perfect, but it helps.

The problem: I donated to 10 congressional candidates in 2018. This election cycle I’ve gotten personalized fundraising requests from about 40 candidates; a few of those 10, a lot unrelated. Email, cell phone calls, it’s never-ending. I feel like I’m being punished for supporting my candidates. How to stop it?

The cause: campaign donations are public records. Any time you give money to any campaign or party, your contact info goes to the FEC who then publishes a list of every donation made in the country. This information quickly gets picked up by the political parties and other data brokers into something called "the voter file", a giant spreadsheet with 2000+ rows for every voter and donor in the US. Your name, your address, your phone number, your email, your donation history, and a bunch of direct marketing data like demographics, political leanings, etc. It is basically impossible to avoid getting on this file.

The solution: give the bare minimum information when donating. I believe this is name, address, and employer. Phone number is explicitly not required; leave it blank or make one up (I use an obviously fake number). Email address is definitely not required by law, although many online sites do require it themselves. For those I use special burner email addresses, things like nelson+polspam@monkey.org. Sometimes that makes it easier to filter in Gmail.

A special note about ActBlue, the online donation platform for most Democrats. They’re great! They also have a very clear privacy policy where they only share your info with the receiver of the donation and the legally required FEC. However they do also share email and phone even if they don’t have to; that fake phone number and burner email can be a help.

Even if you put all this in place carefully stuff will leak through. Given a person’s name and address you can quickly find all sorts of extra data about them, particularly once you go to marketing databases that have been around 30+ years. They will end up with your cell phone and email and spam text you anyway. There seems to be no way avoiding it entirely.

One special trick for cell phones: reply to spam with the text STOP. Legitimate actors will typically honor that, although I’m not sure it’s perfect.

A request for my friends who work in voting data: please, please have some sort of opt out database. One central list of "this person really does not want to be contacted via cell phone". I know it looks like it will harm your business, but the unstoppable intrusion on donors’ lives will also harm your business.