Getting cleared to publish: your committee and your disclaimer

Why publishing is gated at all

Nearly every campaign site is legally required to carry a conspicuous "Paid for by" disclaimer naming the committee that paid for it — 11 CFR 110.11 federally, and almost every state has an equivalent. Electbase generates that line for you from your committee name, which means the name has to be right before anything goes live. A site that names a committee nobody registered, or carries no disclaimer at all, is the kind of mistake that is much cheaper to prevent than to fix in public.

Confirming your committee

Open Committee & compliance from your dashboard. There are two ways through, and you only need one.

If you have an FEC committee ID, enter it (the format looks like C00401224). Electbase checks it against the FEC's own database and confirms that the committee exists and that its name matches yours. That is the fastest route and needs nothing further from you.

If you don't — and most state, local, judicial and school board campaigns won't, because they register with their state or county rather than the FEC — use the certification instead. You confirm, in one checkbox, that:

"I certify that the committee named above is registered with the appropriate federal, state, or local authority, that I am authorized to act on its behalf, and that the committee name is correct as it should appear in the 'Paid for by' disclaimer on this site."

That record is kept with the exact wording you agreed to, on the date you agreed to it. If the certification text ever changes, what you already signed does not change with it.

If the FEC says your ID doesn't match

Publishing stays blocked, and certification will not release it — that is deliberate, because certifying a committee the FEC has just contradicted would defeat the point of asking.

Before assuming the worst, know that the name check is forgiving about the things that are not real differences. Capitalisation, punctuation and entity suffixes are all folded away, so all of these match each other:

So a mismatch usually means a genuinely different committee — a typo in the ID that happens to be another committee's, or an ID belonging to a different committee of yours. Check the ID first. If you're confident it's right, send us the ID and the name and we'll look at what the FEC is returning.

Renaming your committee later

If you change the committee name after certifying, the certification stops counting and you'll be asked to certify again. That isn't bureaucracy for its own sake: your disclaimer is generated from the committee name, so a rename means the line on your site would otherwise name something nobody certified.

The disclaimer itself

Your disclaimer lives in the Footer block and renders on every page of your site, not just the donate page. Electbase checks at publish time that the Footer block is present and the disclaimer field is filled in. If either is missing, the publish stops and tells you which.

Electbase checks that a disclaimer is there. It does not check the wording, and that is on purpose. The required language varies by state, by office and by committee type, and "Paid for by" is not the only lawful formulation. A builder that enforced one phrasing would break the campaigns most likely to have got it right. Presence is the part we can honestly guarantee; the wording is yours to get right with your state's rules or your counsel.

That also means the field is fully editable. If your state requires additional text — an address, an authorisation line, a "not authorized by any candidate" formulation for an independent committee — put it there.

What "cleared" looks like

Once your committee is confirmed and your disclaimer is filled in, the gate is done. It does not re-check on every publish, and it does not expire. The only things that re-open it are a committee rename after certification, or an FEC ID that starts coming back contradicted.