What ActBlue donors would James O'Keefe find if he came to Kansas?

In 2020 a Johnson County woman gave over 36,000 contributions that totaled over $123,000 to ActBlue, more donations than anyone else in the country

Mar 30, 2023

James O’Keefe has moved on from Project Veritas to his new O’Keefe Media Group.

On Tuesday OMG published its first story and videos about “a national plot to utilize senior citizens matching a similar profile as vehicles to launder millions of dollars into political campaigns.”

FEC data shows some senior citizens across the US have been donating thousands of times per year.

O’Keefe suggests we all should be “knocking on doors and asking questions.”

But in Kansas what doors should we knock on and what questions should we ask?

Can readers locate any of the Kansas donors listed below and discover their story for giving so many donations to ActBlue? Were all donations legitimate?

This article will focus on ActBlue contributors that donated a large number of times — thousands or even tens of thousands of time. A follow-up article will focus on ActBlue donors that contribute fewer times but with much larger dollar contributions.

In January WatchdogLab analyzed ActBlue data from the FEC over elections cycles, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022. That article looked at the national picture of ActBlue donors (number of times, number of dollars), employers and occupations.

Kansas Lists

See the national Top 1000 lists at the bottom of this article for the three elections cycles 2022, 2020 and 2018.

Below we extract the Kansas ActBlue donors and show their national ranking compared with all donors.

2022 Election Cycle

Download this list in an Excel file:

Actblue Top Counts Kansas 2022 Edited

11.4KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

The largest Kansas donor in the recent 2022 election cycle was Dorlan Bales from Wichita, who is the Development Director at Sunflower Community Action according to FEC records. Sunflower Community Action is a progressive organization.

Dorlan gave 6370 contributions to ActBlue that totaled $33,509, which was distributed to 247 “earmarked” progressive organizations. His national rank based on number of contributions was 51 with only 50 individuals across the country giving more times.

Dropping to #2 in Kansas in 2022, Paula Bandt from Stilwell gave only 4792 contributions that totaled $15,427 going to 273 earmarked organizations.

We say “only 4792” because in 2020 Bandt gave a staggering 36,276 contributions that totaled $123,092. She was #1 in the country for number of donations to ActBlue in 2020 by a very large margin. Bandt ranked 123rd in 2022.

2020 Election Cycle

Download this list in an Excel file:

Actblue Top Counts Kansas 2020 Edited

12KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

2018 Election Cycle

Download this list in an Excel file:

Actblue Top Counts Kansas 2018 Edited

11.3KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

FEC Verification of Donations

Anyone can verify the donations listed in the tables above by going to the FEC data site.

FEC site to find contributions from specific individuals. Caution: multiple people across the country can have the same name — so check addresses.

Enter a name and download a file with all the contributions. Be sure to filter by state since other people with that same name can exist in other parts of the country.

Can readers ask ActBlue donors about their long list of contributions? Why so many?

A few of the FEC records for the 23,260 contributions made by Dorlan Bales in Wichita. Bales made 6270 contributions via ActBlue in the 2022 election cycle.

Here’s a summary of the 2022 Kansas names showing the number of ActBlue contributions found for 2022 compared with the number of all ActBlue contributions that can be downloaded from the FEC site.