If you disclose the results only to a politician, then you are making a donation, by any reasonable meaning of the term.
“Donation” conventionally refers to money or tangible resources: you can donate a thousand dollars, the use of a building, or your services in some professional capacity, but the word’s usually not used for advocacy, data, or analysis. I’m not sure there’s a word for an unsolicited gift of privately held information that you don’t intend to publicly disclose; if you did intend to disclose it at some point, it’d be a leak.
In this case you’re essentially working as a think tank, though, and I don’t believe think tank funding is generally counted as a direct political contribution. Might work differently in Europe, though.
“Donation” conventionally refers to money or tangible resources: you can donate a thousand dollars, the use of a building, or your services in some professional capacity, but the word’s usually not used for advocacy, data, or analysis. I’m not sure there’s a word for an unsolicited gift of privately held information that you don’t intend to publicly disclose; if you did intend to disclose it at some point, it’d be a leak.
I suppose that disclosing data bought from a commercial polling service would count as political donation, though I’m not sure what regulations actually say in various jurisdictions.
Anyway, certainly there are ways to perform political activism that don’t count as campaign donations, my point is that their effect on the outcome of the election is likely not the same as direct donations of money, ads, building use, and other tangible goods or services.
“Donation” conventionally refers to money or tangible resources: you can donate a thousand dollars, the use of a building, or your services in some professional capacity, but the word’s usually not used for advocacy, data, or analysis. I’m not sure there’s a word for an unsolicited gift of privately held information that you don’t intend to publicly disclose; if you did intend to disclose it at some point, it’d be a leak.
In this case you’re essentially working as a think tank, though, and I don’t believe think tank funding is generally counted as a direct political contribution. Might work differently in Europe, though.
I suppose that disclosing data bought from a commercial polling service would count as political donation, though I’m not sure what regulations actually say in various jurisdictions.
Anyway, certainly there are ways to perform political activism that don’t count as campaign donations, my point is that their effect on the outcome of the election is likely not the same as direct donations of money, ads, building use, and other tangible goods or services.