I somehow got added to the Obama campaign mailing list, and their recent fundraising emails politely noted that their records did not show me having donated any money (I'm not American and don't live in the US). They also said that their records might not reflect my donation if I had made it through a different channel.
However, this article suggests that all the channels go to the same database. I wonder whether one of the following scenarios is correct:
* The database has eventual consistency (maybe my donation through channel X would take some time to be reflected by the campaign team);
* The message was a ruse to throw off independent and Republican analysts to the sophistication of the database;
Just for clarity, political contributions directly to a political campaign are a matter of public record in the US. Thus this piece of knowledge was not the result of new data mining techniques, it's been used for a number of years.
CYA is most likely, although #2 is possible. Changing names (due to marriage, for example), moving, losing (and thus getting a new SSN) are all possible, and might screw up the database. A small CYA phrase helps a lot.
I somehow got added to the Obama campaign mailing list, and their recent fundraising emails politely noted that their records did not show me having donated any money (I'm not American and don't live in the US). They also said that their records might not reflect my donation if I had made it through a different channel.
However, this article suggests that all the channels go to the same database. I wonder whether one of the following scenarios is correct:
* The database has eventual consistency (maybe my donation through channel X would take some time to be reflected by the campaign team);
* The message was a ruse to throw off independent and Republican analysts to the sophistication of the database;
* It was CYA in case something had gone wrong.