Accepting Campaign Contributions by Credit Card on a Candidate’s Personal Campaign Committee’s Website: A registrant may use a commercial vendor to collect contributions from visitors to the registrants website. The vendor may not exercise any discretion or control over the amount of the contribution or who receives the contribution. The registrant must obtain the information about the contributor to enable the registrant to comply with the disclosure requirements of the campaign finance law.
Guidelines Relative to Non-advocacy Candidate Commentary, Voter Registration, and Get-out-the-Vote Efforts: Non-registrants, including corporations, may communicate to the general public their views about issues and/or about a clearly identified candidate, without subjecting themselves to a registration requirement, if the communication does not expressly advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate; expenditures which are “coordinated” with a candidate or candidate’s agent will be treated as a contribution to that candidate; intra-association communications are restricted to “a candidate endorsement, a position on a referendum, or an explanation of the association’s views and interests” distributed to the association members, shareholders, and subscribers to the exclusion of all others, are exempt from Ch. 11, Stats., regulation; and a non-partisan, candidate-non-specific voter registration or voter participation drive is not subject to the registration and reporting requirements of Ch. 11, Stats.
Conversion of Federal Committee to State Committee and Use of Funds: A federal campaign committee may convert to a state committee and use funds collected for federal purposes in a state or local campaign by filing a campaign finance registration statement, pursuant to s.11.05, Stats., with the appropriate filing officer and simultaneously filing a campaign finance disclosure report showing the sources of all funds on hand at the time of the report to the requirements of s.11.06(1)(a), (b), (c), (d), and (f), Stats.
