Liberal fundraising platform ActBlue employs “unserious” fraud prevention techniques that make it easy for foreign donors to contribute to Democrat campaigns, according to Republican lawmakers.
House Republicans released a report Wednesday accusing ActBlue, the fundraising platform used by Democrats, of taking a “lax approach” to fraud prevention. Internal messages included in the report appear to show supervisors advising fraud prevention employees to give donors the “benefit of the doubt” when looking at potential red flags.
“ActBlue’s ‘knowing and willful’ acceptance of illegal foreign political donations and subsequent cover-up, as well as its lenient approach to preventing fraudulent donations, are of great concern to the Committees,” the Republican report said. “ActBlue, one of the largest online political contribution platforms, maintains unserious fraud-prevention practices that allow illegal foreign donations in U.S. elections.”
Messages included in the report appeared to show ActBlue pushing for donations from donors with potential red flags to be accepted despite concerns from fraud prevention staff.
One message showed a supervisor telling a staffer that a donation “set off a lot” of “alarms” with a fraud prevention contractor used by ActBlue but that they agreed with the staffer “in giving them the benefit of the doubt and accepting this.”
Another message involved a supervisor saying “great accept,” even though the “donor has a few foreign IPs, but they are all consistently in the same place.”
In one message, a staffer was told that they should have accepted a donation despite the donor using “an Arkansas state code which isn’t great, but [the] system can be wonky with requiring state codes for foreign donors.”
ActBlue told The Daily Wire the Republican report was a “political stunt.”
“There’s nothing to see here. After we released findings of a third-party forensic analysis that completely undermined a central claim that they have made against ActBlue, Republicans are refusing to move on,” the platform said. “Instead, they are orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign. This coordinated campaign against ActBlue isn’t about the facts or legislating; it’s about Republicans’ efforts to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda.”
The fundraising platform claims that over 99% of donations in 2023 “came from donors who provided ActBlue a U.S. address or a passport number.”
The Republican report took issue with the passport verification process used by ActBlue, highlighting a customer service page detailing ActBlue guidelines.
The page explained that “we use some very basic validation — number of characters — to ensure that the number entered is a valid passport number, but we do not verify the information in any other way. We do not, for instance, check the information provided against a government database. We merely store the information and continue with the contribution flow.”
This system opened up the door for massive exploitation, the GOP report argued.
“Despite ActBlue’s ineffective passport verification process, ActBlue employees regularly relied on the feature to determine that donors were not foreign actors,” the report said. “ActBlue’s policy for passport verification from foreign donations was woefully inadequate for meaningfully identifying and flagging foreign donations.”
House Republicans have been investigating ActBlue for months over accusations that it took fraudulent donations.
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