ActBlue, the official fundraising platform for Democratic Party candidates, has told the House of Representatives it will begin actively verifying U.S. passport numbers submitted by online donors. The change, first reported by Fox News, comes years after Republicans on the House Oversight Committee accused the platform of failing to screen out illegitimate contributions.
In a letter to the House, ActBlue's lawyers framed the move as part of an "ongoing investment in the security of contributions processed from donors located abroad," according to Fox News. Under U.S. election law, foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to American political campaigns.
The concession did not impress Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and author of multiple books on foreign interference in U.S. politics. Speaking on the development, Schweizer pointed to his organization's long-running work on the issue. "At GAI, we've been on this for more than a decade," he said.
That work included a 2017 GAI investigative report finding that 91.3 percent of congressional Republicans with active donation pages required CVV verification in 2016, compared with just 8.3 percent of Democrats with such pages — meaning the overwhelming majority of Democratic members accepted online donations without the basic security measure used by virtually every online merchant.
Republicans on the Oversight, Judiciary, and House Administration committees have for years raised alarms about ActBlue's verification standards. This week's interim joint report from those committees highlighted internal ActBlue email threads, according to Schweizer, who noted the platform repeatedly directed its fraud prevention staff in ways the documents lay bare.
The pressure has already reshaped the organization. Several senior ActBlue officials have resigned. Former CEO Regina Wallace-Jones, when called to answer questions, invoked the Fifth Amendment 22 times, as Schweizer noted in a media appearance at the time.
The Paper Trail the Left Never Wanted You to See
The numbers from GAI's 2017 report are the heart of the case. During the 2016 election cycle, 91.3 percent of Republican congressional donation pages required a CVV — the three-digit code tied to a card — while only 8.3 percent of Democratic pages did, per GAI. A platform processing billions of dollars for Democratic candidates without that check was, in effect, running an open door for anyone with a card number, anywhere in the world.
ActBlue now says it will verify passport numbers from donors located abroad. That is a step the platform could have taken at any point in the last several election cycles. Instead it arrived only after congressional investigators on three separate committees forced the issue into public view.
Our Take
Let's be clear about what just happened. ActBlue just admitted — in writing, to Congress — that for years it processed online donations without verifying that the money came from Americans. Not that it was accused of it. Admitted it. If a bank told regulators it had been skipping ID checks for a decade and would now start doing them, we'd call it a scandal. When the bank is the cash pipeline for one political party, the legacy media calls it a housekeeping update.
The timing tells its own story. ActBlue didn't tighten its rules because it suddenly found religion on election law. It tightened them because Republicans on Oversight, Judiciary, and House Administration kept digging, because internal emails kept surfacing, and because people like Peter Schweizer refused to let the story die. That's how accountability actually works — not through press releases, but through subpoenas, reports, and persistence.
Twenty-two Fifth Amendment invocations from a sitting CEO. Senior officials walking out the door. A 2017 report showing Republican campaigns at 91.3 percent CVV compliance and Democratic campaigns at 8.3 percent. This is not a paperwork problem. This is a system that was built loose on purpose, and everybody in Washington who benefited from it knew it.
So here's the question every American should be asking: how much foreign money actually flowed through those open doors, into which races, and who is going to be held responsible now that the receipts are public? Because so far, not a single Democrat campaign has volunteered to give back a dime.
