ActBlue Raises Millions in Suspicious Gift Card Donations

Some people have long suspected this allows ActBlue or a mega-donor to easily break large donations down into smaller gifts to avoid campaign finance laws and Federal Election Commission scrutiny — once an individual donor or third-party organization has given $200 or more to a candidate, for instance, their information is supposed to be added to a public FEC database for the sake of transparency. ActBlue’s structure could easily allow illegal donations made online to be broken down into smaller gifts from claimed U.S. sources with little chance of exposure. ActBlue’s design would allow large donors to exceed contribution limits without even triggering the threshold for public reporting.

But now, computer analysis calls into question the legitimacy of these gifts.

Forensic analysis conducted by The Amistad Project in cooperation with Take Back Our Republic reveals that 4.7 million of the 9.7 million ActBlue donors are reported to be unemployed. That’s a whopping 48.4% of all ActBlue donors in 2019-2020.

In comparison, analysis of the Republican counterpart to ActBlue, WinRed, reports that 4.1% of its donors were unemployed, a figure that roughly matches the national unemployment rate during that time period.

Analysis reveals similar disparities exist between funding sources for the Democrat National Committee and the Republican National Committee, potentially reflecting the impact of ActBlue’s contributions. The DNC reports 40.6% of its donors are unemployed and the RNC 6.4%, while the Biden for President Committee reports 51% of its donors as unemployed compared to 2.7% of the Trump donors.

This raises questions that must be answered.

ConservativeChick

Article URL : https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/16/actblue_raises_millions_in_suspicious_gift_card_donations_144208.html