The U.S. Federal Election Commission on Thursday approved a Google plan to allow campaign emails to bypass Gmail’s spam filters. The FEC’s opinion, passed by 4-1 votes, states that Gmail’s pilot program is permitted under the Federal Election Campaign Act and FEC regulations “and would not result in making any prohibited in-kind contribution” .
The FEC said Google’s approved plan is for “a pilot program to test new Gmail design features at no cost and on an unbiased basis for authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership PACs.” On July 1, Google asked the FEC for a green light to implement the pilot after Republicans accused the company of giving Democrats an advantage in its algorithms.
Republicans reportedly could have avoided some of their Gmail spam problems by using the correct email setup. At a meeting in May 2022 between Senate Republicans and Google’s Chief Legal Officer, “the strongest rebuke would come” from Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who claimed that not a single email from any of the his addresses was reaching inboxes,” The Washington Post reported in late July. “The reason, it was later determined, was that a vendor hadn’t enabled an authentication tool that prevents messages from being marked as spam, according to people informed about the discussions.”
As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick explained: “[I]It sounds like Rubio’s spam operation didn’t set a DKIM/DMARC authentication setting. I know this affects a lot of people. Hell, it’s something we dealt with at Techdirt after realizing that Google was sending a lot of our emails to spam. But instead of whining about ‘bias’ against us, we looked into the details and figured out how to fix our email setup.”
Republicans cited a study to support their claims of bias, but one of the study’s authors said Republicans had misrepresented the findings. The Democratic National Committee told the FEC that Gmail’s plan will help Republicans expand the use of “abusive fundraising tactics.”
Gmail users don’t want this
Gmail users who submitted comments to the FEC overwhelmingly criticized Google’s plan. The FEC received more than 2,500 comments, which can be found on the scroll page.
The committee’s three Republicans and Democratic Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum voted for the order to approve Google’s plan. The Hill wrote that “Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat who voted against the order, said she “has a hard time getting around the fact that this is a unique advantage offered to political committees, and only to political committees.” “
Lindenbaum reportedly said, “I don’t want… [support this]and it’s for the same reasons that all commentators don’t want it, but I think the law and the commissioner’s regulations and the commission’s precedent allow it.” Democrat Shana Broussard abstained from the vote.
“We appreciate the prompt review of our request by the FEC and we will consider the positive and negative feedback we received during the public comment period,” Google said in a statement to Ars. “Our goal during this pilot program is to assess alternative ways to address bulk sender issues while giving users clear control over their inboxes to minimize junk mail. We will continue to monitor feedback as the trial rolls out to ensure that it achieves its goals.”
