Donations to Electoral Vote Predictor

Quite a few people have said they like the site so much they would like to contribute to the cost of running it. I have paid all the costs of running this site myself, about $5000 in 2004 for DNS registration, hosting (I had 5 dedicated commercial servers near the end of the campaign to handle the 700,000 visitors a day), prepayment of one small shared server until Dec. 2008 to keep the data available, and more. The 2006 was about the same, roughly. I strongly believe artists are entitled to be paid for their work so I always get the cartoons from www.politicalcartoons.com and pay for them rather than just taking them off the net. I see this Website as a community service. Numerous companies and individuals have asked to run ads on the site but I don't really want ads, not even Google ads. The many months required to build and run the site have actually been a much bigger drain than the money.

Towards the end of the 2004 election cycle, so many people wanted to contribute money that I opened a PayPal account and started accepted donations. All that money was spent on increasing the popularity of the site, by running ads on political blogs and especially on the Websites of college newspapers in Ohio, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and other swing states. That was largely repeated in 2006. A week on a popular blog can easily run $500, so it adds up.

Donations can be made by clicking on the PayPal icon below. If you have an account at PayPal you can use it. If not, PayPal takes all major credit cards. You do not have to open a PayPal account first. If you don't know what PayPal is, click here. Basically, it is a division of the auction website E-Bay designed to allow you to make payments to individuals and small businesses in a secure way without giving the recipient your credit card number. PayPal has 100 million customers and executes millions of secure transactions per day. Your browser must accept cookies from PayPal to use it. I tried using the Amazon Honor System earlier, but there were endless problems with it. Amazon is not really a bank; PayPal fundamentally is.

Ads ran on the following blogs in 2006

Ads ran on the following major blogs in 2004

Ads ran on the following small blogs in 2004

Ads ran on the following college newspaper Websites in 2004

Back to the main page.

If you like this website, please link to it to improve its Google PageRank and tell your friends about it.