(no subject)

[serene]

Decided to try to spend as little cash as possible on the registration drive, partly because cash is tight, and partly because the important thing is to register voters, and that's basically free, as it should be.

Pens: $5
Clipboards: $3 at the Creative Reuse Depot
Case of bottled water: $5

And then I'm making kettle corn, iced tea, and possibly cookies to take for the volunteers. It's still unclear to me if they're going to make me pay the booth fee at the flea market, because they've been treating me like a VIP, letting me miss deadlines, even, and they've still not mentioned money. Still, I'll take the standard $25 with me tomorrow and see how it goes. Even if I do have to pay it, though, that's less than $40 for the whole enterprise. Not bad.

Does anyone know if I have to declare the money I spend on the booth as a campaign contribution?

Comments

[hel]

I THINK since you're going to register people of any party, it's not a campaign contribution, cos you're not directly helping either candidate.

[redbird]

What I've ever known about election law is New York focused, but I gather that if you're registering voters regardless of party, it doesn't count as a campaign contribution. And that registration drives during the Democratic primaries this year also didn't, because while the people running them focused on areas where they hoped to register people who would sign up as Democrats and vote for a particular candidate, they would and did register Republicans and independents as well. (cattitude mentioned an aspect of this to me a few days ago, which he found online: the long-running and close Democratic primary had the almost certainly unintended side effect of getting a lot of people out there registering voters in traditionally Democratic areas, both those that Clinton's people thought would vote for her and those that Obama's thought would vote for him.)