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The US Federal Election Commission approved a Google plan on Thursday to let campaign emails bypass Gmail spam filters. The FEC's advisory opinion adopted in a 4-1 vote said Gmail's pilot program is permissible under the Federal Election Campaign Act and FEC regulations "and would not result in the making of a prohibited in-kind contribution."

The FEC said Google's approved plan is for "a pilot program to test new Gmail design features at no cost on a nonpartisan basis to authorized candidate committees, political party committees, and leadership PACs." On July 1, Google asked the FEC for the green light to implement the pilot after Republicans accused the company of giving Democrats an advantage in its algorithms.

Republicans reportedly could have avoided some of their Gmail spam problems by using the proper email configuration. At a May 2022 meeting between Senate Republicans and Google's chief legal officer, "the most forceful rebuke" was said to come "from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who claimed that not a single email from one of his addresses was reaching inboxes," The Washington Post reported in late July. "The reason, it was later determined, was that a vendor had not enabled an authentication tool that keeps messages from being marked as spam, according to people briefed on the discussions."

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Earlier this month, Google sent a request to the Federal Election Commission seeking an advisory opinion on the potential launch of a pilot program that would allow political committees to bypass spam filters and instead deliver political emails to the primary inboxes of Gmail users. During a public commenting period that's still ongoing, most people commenting have expressed staunch opposition for various reasons that they're hoping the FEC will consider.

"Hard pass," wrote a commenter called Katie H. "Please do not allow Google to open up Pandora's Box on the people by allowing campaign/political emails to bypass spam filters."

Out of 48 comments submitted as of July 11, only two commenters voiced support so far for Google's pilot program, which seeks to deliver more unsolicited political emails to Gmail users instead of marking them as spam. The rest of the commenters opposed the program, raising a range of concerns, including the potential for the policy to degrade user experience, introduce security risks, and even possibly unfairly influence future elections.