In this post, I linked to Michael Barone’s incendiary charges of “thuggery” related to the Obama campaign’s supposed failure of the campaign to use “AVS” (address verification) for credit card donations. Barone’s claim is that this allowed for fraudulent transactions or worse.

The Obama campaign sends along the following response:

“Credit card contributions to Obama for America are, in fact, processed using AVS (Address Verification System).

“If a billing address is verified via AVS, then the credit card contribution is processed without delay.  Some transactions caught by AVS may initially appear to a donor to have been accepted even though this is not the case.  Obama for America employs a manual process to review any transaction flagged by AVS, also taking into account other fraud risk factors, and using fraud detection services provided by our credit card processor.

“As an example, the contribution discussed here  http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/dubious-donations-illustrated-illegal-contributor-edition.php may have initially appeared to have gone through when the donor completed the transaction at 10:18 a.m. but it was rejected at 4:51 p.m. under our standard fraud detection procedures.

“So any claims that Obama for America has disabled  AVS are inaccurate; any question about this would have been answered–if the question had been asked.”