This is how I do it on my personal website (http://samryan.co.uk/). It makes no sense for me to put together a real automatically updating counter so every couple of days I check the real growth rate and adjust it manually. It obviously looks shady on a politicians website and I think doing it with something like donations where it's tied to a real world action is a bit... silly and they should have disclosed that it was an ESTIMATE however I don't think it is as heinous as other people suggested. It's only an issue if the donations don't exist.