The Sunlight Foundation’s Luke Rosiak reported on Friday the Republican National Committee spent $1.4 million on the redesign of GOP.com, a figure which totals more than five times what the RNC’s Democratic counterpart spent to host and maintain Democrats.org. Sources familiar with the RNC’s digital makeover, however, contest Sunlight’s report, calling it “ridiculous.”
Rosiak writes:
The biggest disparity seems to be bandwidth costs–the RNC paid Smartech Corp., a Republican-focused hosting firm, more than a million dollars, plus $22,000 to Eloqua, compared to the DNC’s $203,000 to Sprint, Switch and Data and Servint Corp.–despite the fact that the two sites’ traffic, which determines bandwidth usage and, largely, hosting costs, was the same.
But the design of the site itself was costly, too. In the months prior to the October 13 launch of GOP.com, the committee paid $328,000 to 11 firms for Web development.
For an organization that prides itself on investigative research, the Sunlight Foundation is comically inept at reading campaign finance data. “They should learn to read an FEC report,” remarked my source.
The most outrageous of the RNC’s web-related expenditures, Sunlight’s exposé goes, is the $1 million-plus disbursement to Tennessee-based Smartech Corp. for hosting services. Smartech, considered by many a heavyweight in Republican web hosting, began consulting for the RNC in 2000.
“I can tell you from my tenure there that the Smartech bill includes a lot of things that aren’t GOP.com,” said former RNC eCampaign Director Michael Turk. “If you go back and look at that bill over time, I suspect it has always been high, regardless of who was Chair and regardless of whether they were rolling out a new GOP.com.”
