GOP set up Twitter "numbers stations" to get around Super PAC rules

Super PACs are allowed to raise unlimited funds to support election campaigns, but can't coordinate with those campaigns; this especially means that campaigns can't share expensive private poll data with PACs to help fine tune their campaigns — which is exactly what Republicans did with their cryptic, unlabelled Twitter accounts that acted as dead-drops with messages like "CA-40/43-44/49-44/44-50/36-44/49-10/16/14-52–>49/476-10s" to let affiliated PACs know what the polls had shown.

The groups behind the operation had a sense of humor about what they were doing. One Twitter account was named after Bruno Gianelli, a fictional character in The West Wing who pressed his colleagues to use ethically questionable "soft money" to fund campaigns.

A typical tweet read: "CA-40/43-44/49-44/44-50/36-44/49-10/16/14-52–>49/476-10s." The source said posts like that — which would look like gibberish to most people — represented polling data for various House races.

Posting the information on Twitter, which is technically public, could provide a convenient loophole to the law — or could run afoul of it.

"It's a line that has not been defined. This is really on the cutting edge," said Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization focused on campaign finance issues. "It might not be legal. It's a cutting edge practice that, to my knowledge, the Federal Election Commission has never before addressed to explicitly determine its legality or permissibility."

How the GOP used Twitter to stretch election laws [Chris Moody/CNN]

(Thanks, Jonathan!)