Fraud on ActBlue: Gov. Laura Kelly's campaign listed on US House report
"No evidence that any of these candidates or entities solicited the fraudulent donations"
Updated with comments from Governor’s office
On Thursday three US House committees jointly released a 479-page report: Fraud on ActBlue: How the Democrats’ Top Fund Raising Platform Opens the Door for Illegal Election Contributions.
The report revealed ActBlue’s lack of commitment to fraud prevention through ActBlue internal memorandums shared with the committees.
This interim staff report details the Committees’ troublesome preliminary findings. Internal documents produced to the Committees by ActBlue and its fraud-prevention contractor, Sift, demonstrate a lack of commitment to stopping fraud and paint a picture of complacency on ActBlue’s fraud-prevention team. Put simply, the documents reflect a fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention at ActBlue—one that has left the door open for large-scale fraud campaigns on Democrats’ top fundraising platform.
. . .
Rather than seeking to reduce or eliminate fraud on the platform, ActBlue’s chief fraud-prevention official was willing to accept 10 percent more fraud while he focused on DEI.
— Executive Summary, Fraud on ActBlue House report
ActBlue uses Sift, an “AI-powered fraud decisioning” platform, to assign a fraud likelihood score from 0 to 100 to most transactions. “Transactions with high Sift scores (indicating a high likelihood of fraud), from high-risk countries, or bearing other indicators of fraud may be flagged for automatic rejection or manual review.”
“Following Sift’s review, ActBlue automatically accepts 99.8 percent of donations.”
“ActBlue rejects significantly ‘less than 0.1 [percent] of all contributions’ for suspected fraud.”
22 significant fraud campaigns
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly’s campaign was included in a list of “22 significant fraud campaigns.”
ActBlue’s apparent lack of interest in policing fraud is inexcusable on its own terms. But it is especially dangerous in light of the platform’s awareness that fraudulent actors have repeatedly sought to donate to Democrat campaigns and causes through ActBlue. With little more than a token fraud-prevention program, ActBlue has detected at least 22 wide-ranging domestic and foreign fraud campaigns pushing donations to candidates, campaign committees, and advocacy groups at every level of American politics. Most alarmingly, ActBlue has detected foreign fraud attempts emanating from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Iraq, Jordan, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia. The 22 fraud campaigns outlined in ActBlue internal documents show patterns of fraudulent donations to:
Democratic National Committee (DNC)
Governor Laura Kelly (D-KS)
Representative Steven Horsford (D-NV)
Representative Kevin Mullin (D-CA)
Former U.S. Senate candidate Luke Mixon (D-LA)
Former U.S. House candidate Audrey Denney (D-CA)
Supervisor David Canepa (D-San Mateo County, CA)
Mayor Erin Joyce (D-Braintree, MA)
Councilor Kendra Hicks (D-Boston, MA)
Alderman Justin Sawyer (D-Chicago, IL)
Center for American Progress (CAP)
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
The Ocean Agency
Global Zero
ChildFund International
Courage California
National Bail Out
Vote Common Good
Defund Apartheid Action
Democratic Committee of Morris Plains (NJ)
Volusia County Young Democrats (FL)
Souderton Democrats (PA)
The Committees have no evidence that any of these candidates or entities solicited the fraudulent donations, though at least three campaigns did knowingly attempt to profit from them after being informed of their likely fraudulence. Internal documents indicate that the campaigns of Representative Kevin Mullin (D-CA), former U.S. Senate candidate Luke Mixon (D-LA), and Supervisor David Canepa (D-San Mateo County, CA), resisted when ActBlue asked them to return possible fraudulent donations.
Kelly’s “look out” details from ActBlue memorandums
Gov. Kelly’s July 25, 2022 campaign finance report covers the June 8 to June 14 2022 date range listed above in the ActBlue memo. Kelly report is 901 pages long!
June 8 contributions are on p. 243 and June 14 contributions are on p. 222. The report only identifies contributions types of “Check” and “Credit Card” — so the Act Blue contributions are likely “Credit Card.” It’s unclear how many of the reported contributions during that period might have been the subject of ActBlue’s concern.
Kelly’s report showed a monthly expense of $3023 to pay ActBlue credit card processing fees on July 7, 2022. With ActBlue transaction fees of 3.95%, Kelly’s campaign appears to have received about $76,500 in the month covering the dates of interest in the ActBlue memo. (Candidates must pay this credit card fee to avoid in-kind contributions from ActBlue, which in some cases would exceed contribution limits.)
Should Kansas adopt FEC-like ActBlue reporting?
ActBlue provides name, address, occupation, employer details for every dollar in FEC reports because of federal law.
Since Kansas has no laws about similar ActBlue reporting for state and local elections, there are no ActBlue reports to review that would cover Gov. Kelly’s ActBlue contributions.
The existing campaign finance reports often only show “efunds” as the source of a contribution, so the name of the money conduit is often not known with certainty.
FEC data is online and available in electronic form that can be analyzed using software. Kansas data extraction from PDFs is not always perfect and can be tedious to correct and analyze.
Comments from Gov. Kelly’s Office
Comments about this matter were solicited via email from Gov. Kelly’s office and her campaign.
The governor’s campaign office replied with suggestion to refer any questions to the governor’s office.
Response from governor’s office:
Thank you for your interest in this matter. Because this is the official state office of the Governor, we cannot comment on campaign matters.
That's quite the runaround scheme there! Of course one can send another letter to the campaign office reminding them that the governor CANNOT comment on campaign matters from the governors office. Do we know how big a chunk of her donations this represents?
"Comments about this matter were solicited via email from Gov. Kelly’s office and her campaign.
The governor’s campaign office replied with suggestion to refer any questions to the governor’s office.
Response from governor’s office:
Thank you for your interest in this matter. Because this is the official state office of the Governor, we cannot comment on campaign matters."