Short, direct answers you can quote us on. If something here is unclear or missing, tell us and we will fix it.
No. Never. You give on the campaign's own page, processed by the campaign's own payment system. Ballotgrove never holds, touches, or processes political contributions, and never sees your card or bank details.
We are a privacy layer, not a payment processor and not a middleman. Your money goes exactly where it went before.
Ballotgrove is a planned nonpartisan membership organization for political donors. It gives you a protected email address and a masked phone number to use on any campaign's donation form, preferences that actually stick, and one clear record of every contribution you make.
You keep giving wherever you already give. Nothing about how you donate has to change.
No. Ballotgrove is nonpartisan by design and by intent, and it is being built to serve donors of every political stripe, equally. Nothing we publish supports or opposes any candidate, party, or ballot measure.
We do not ask how you vote, we do not infer it, and we do not want to know. The problem we are solving, being buried in messages after a single donation, belongs to everyone who participates.
Yes, and it should be. Federal law requires committees to report the name, address, occupation, and employer of donors above certain thresholds, and that information becomes public record. Ballotgrove does not change that and would not want to.
What the law does not require is your personal email address and your phone number. Those are the channels, not the identity, and those are what we protect. Transparent identity, protected channels.
Yes, and they should be able to. Messages sent to your protected address forward to you according to rules you set: everything, a weekly digest, or nothing at all.
The difference is that your choices work whether or not any campaign cooperates, because the mail travels through a channel you control.
Every organization reaches you through its own version of your address. So when mail arrives from a committee you have never given to, you can see exactly which door it came through, and close that door with one click.
It is the first time the list trade has been visible from the donor's side.
Ballotgrove is planned as a 501(c)(4) membership organization. It is not formed yet and has not filed for status.
Dues will not be tax-deductible, and neither are political contributions. A 501(c)(4) is a social welfare organization, not a charity. What you get instead is a member-funded organization with no investors and no advertisers to answer to.
The plan is a few dollars a month, roughly the price of one coffee, with an optional higher tier for people who want extras like per-campaign numbers.
Dues fund the organization. There are no investors, no advertisers, and nothing about you is ever sold or rented. Members are the mission, not the product.
Pandokin is being built for charitable giving. Ballotgrove is for political giving. They are planned as legally separate organizations because federal law keeps charities entirely out of political campaigns.
As a donor you would sign up once and see both kinds of giving in one place, clearly separated and correctly labeled. More about our family of organizations.
Your address is an ordinary, deliverable email address at a normal domain, and we are designing it to behave like one, because an address that gets blocked is not protection.
If a form ever refuses it, you can give with your own address as usual and still add the record to your wallet. You are never stuck choosing between privacy and participating.
No. We can see that you chose to record a contribution, because you asked us to keep that record for you. That is the whole of it.
We never ask about your views, we do not build a political profile of you, and we do not sell or share anything about you with campaigns, parties, committees, or vendors.
It is a working name while we are in formation, and it may change. If it does, members will hear it from us first, and nothing about the promise changes with it.
Not yet. Ballotgrove is in formation, which means the organization does not exist yet and there is nothing to sign up for beyond the waitlist.
We publish this site because we would rather build in the open than promise in the dark. Join the founding waitlist and we will tell you the moment the door opens.
Leave your name and we will tell you the moment membership opens.
Join the founding waitlist