Obama's fundraising websites flawlessly processed millions in questionable donations; his Obamacare sites, not so much

Of President Obama's many historic firsts, his 2008 and 2012 campaign fundraising websites achieved an unprecedented level of ignominy.

In the run-up to the elections, his websites are believed to have processed tens of millions in illegal campaign contributions, including:

• "Structured" contributions to evade donation limits

• Foreign contributions

• Stolen credit cards

• Untraceable prepaid cash cards

In addition, the 2008 Obama site explicitly supported the forgery of computer (IP) addresses for said donors.

But none of that was interesting to antique media.

A Tale of Two Websites

While Obama's fundraising websites processed tens of millions of page-views a month and handled a monstrous number of electronic financial transfer (EFT) transactions, his Obamacare site didn't fare nearly so well.

Obamacare's well-publicized technical failures continue to this day, more than a week later, prompting regular Americans to ask the following questions:

1. Why was the Obamacare site outsourced to an overseas company? Why did Obama ship jobs overseas?

2. Why did it outsource the work to a company infamous for suffering major data breaches?

3. And why did it use a company that had virtually no experience in implementing exchanges?

Those answers are left as exercises for the (*cough* campaign contributions *cough*) reader.

The federal government's red-faced CTO Todd Park says the exchange websites work fine as long as no one is using them. Yes, he really said that.

"These bugs were functions of volume,'' Park said. "Take away the volume and it works.''

Over at Reddit, technologists ripped the site's ridiculously poor design and architecture.

But don't worry, folks: between these geniuses and the IRS, what do you have to worry about?


Hat tips: BadBlue News and Brad.