ActBlue is a site that the Democratic Party often uses to raise money.
In the world of political campaigns, it is one of the most well-known places to ask for funds. ActBlue has already brought in billions of dollars for the 2024 presidential race. But there are still good reasons to question where those dollars were coming from.
In April, several independent investigative journalism groups, including O’Keefe Media Group and Election Watch, found what they said were cases of illegal activity involving millions in campaign donations to ActBlue that came from small donors who didn’t know who they were giving to.
“Smurfing” is what political experts call the act of breaking up large donations and making them under the names of small supporters to hide illegal donations.
There have been claims that ActBlue is illegally raising money ever since Vice President Joe Biden ran for president in 2020.
Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil leads the Committee on House Administration, which looked into Act Blue in November 2023 after hearing that the funding giant was breaking the law by accepting illegal donations and letting a lot of scams happen on the site. In August 2024, the group looked into things more deeply.
Steil wrote a letter to top FEC officials on August 5 asking them to “immediately start an emergency rulemaking to force political campaigns to verify the credit card verification value (‘CVV’) of political donors who gibe online using a debit or credit card and to stop political campaigns from allowing online contributions from gift cards or other prepaid credit cards.”
In September, Steil wrote letters to five states asking them to look into ActBlue’s claimed illegal actions as soon as possible.
Heine made a list of three things that Steil was worried about and wanted looked into:
– Donations that are highly disproportionate to a person’s wealth or past of giving.
– Donations from registered voters who usually vote for candidates from the same party doing so for candidates from the other party.
– An unusually high number of gifts from older people or people who have never donated before.
Since then, 19 AGs from states run by Republicans have joined this effort to look into things.
