WASHINGTON—The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint from Republicans that Google’s Gmail app aided Democratic candidates by sending GOP fundraising emails to spam at a far higher rate than Democratic solicitations.
The Republican National Committee and others contended that the alleged benefit amounted to unreported campaign contributions to Democrats. But in a letter to Google last week, the FEC said it “found no reason to believe” that Google made prohibited in-kind corporate contributions, and that any skewed results from its spam filter algorithms were inadvertent.
“Google has credibly supported its claim that its spam filter is in place for commercial reasons and thus did not constitute a contribution” within the meaning of federal campaign laws, according to an FEC analysis reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee complained to the FEC last year, citing an academic study that showed that nearly 70% of emails from Republican candidates were sent to spam compared with fewer than 1 in 10 from Democrat candidates from 2019 to 2020.
The RNC and other campaign committees argued that Google’s “overwhelmingly disproportionate suppression of Republican emails” constituted an illegal corporate contribution to Democratic candidates.
But the FEC disagreed, finding that Google established that it maintains its spam filter settings to aid its business in keeping out malware, phishing attacks and scams, and not for the purpose of benefiting any political candidates.
The FEC said it was closing its file, according to a letter from agency lawyers to Google.
“The Commission’s bipartisan decision to dismiss this complaint reaffirms that Gmail does not filter emails for political purposes,” said Google spokesman José Castañeda. “We’ll continue to invest in our Gmail industry-leading spam filters because, as the FEC notes, they’re important to protecting people’s inboxes from receiving unwanted, unsolicited, or dangerous messages.”
The academic study cited by the GOP committees was conducted by North Carolina State University and determined that for one baseline group, Gmail marked 67.6% of emails from Republican candidates as spam compared with 8.2% of emails from Democratic candidates, the FEC noted.
But the FEC also noted that the academic study stated that its authors had no reason to believe there were deliberate attempts by any of the email services studied to create biases to influence voters.
“Though the NCSU Study appears to demonstrate a disparate impact from Google’s spam filter, it explicitly states that its authors have ‘no reason to believe that there were deliberate attempts from these email services to create these biases to influence the voters,’” the FEC said.
Write to John D. McKinnon at [email protected]
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