Rubio Urges Federal Election Commission to Investigate Allegedly Fraudulent ActBlue Donations

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) speaks in Washington on March 8, 2023. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

A U.S. senator is urging the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to investigate after journalists found people listed as having donated tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats saying they did not donate nearly as much.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told FEC officials that the “alarming reports” indicate that there were “fraudulent donations being reported to the FEC by ActBlue,” a nonprofit that helps facilitate donations to Democrat candidates.

“These reports indicate that numerous individuals, including senior citizens, have purportedly donated to ActBlue thousands of times a year. However, according to recent investigative reports, many of these individuals had no idea that their names and addresses were being used to give thousands of dollars in political donations, with most of these ‘donations’ going to ActBlue,” Rubio said in a letter.

James O‘Keefe, the Project Veritas founder who recently started the O’Keefe Media Group, kickstarted the investigations by reporting on his discussions with multiple people listed as having contributed major funding to candidates. The people said they didn’t donate nearly as much as they were listed as having contributed.

“Absolutely not,” Carolyn Lenz, an Arizona resident listed as donating $170,221 since 2017 across more than 18,800 individual donations, told O'Keefe’s new group.

Other reporters have since uncovered more people whose donations don’t line up with their statements.

“Someone is using my name,” Jan Weisburg, a California resident listed as having thousands of dollars a month, said.

“We cannot comment,” an FEC spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.

ActBlue has not responded to requests for comment.

‘No Surprise’

Rubio said that what has been uncovered is not surprising.

“It should come as no surprise that ActBlue serves as a vessel for fraud, considering the intentional lack of security engrained within their donation processes and systems,” he said.

ActBlue doesn’t require card verification value (CVV) numbers when a person inputs their credit card number.

The numbers have increasingly been used to verify a person’s identity and reduce the risk of fraud, particularly online.

Requiring the numbers “is standard practice across the e-commerce industry to reduce fraud and prevent unlawful foreign transactions,” Rubio, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said.

“In knowing that foreign actors use fake accounts to exploit donation systems that do not have robust verification processes and systems in place, most individual campaigns and political action committees require CVV numbers as part of making an online donation. However, in breaking with most organizations, ActBlue does not require CVV numbers as a requirement for donating, and thus lending itself as a facilitator of fraud,” he added. “I urge the commission to investigate ActBlue’s reporting and insufficient security guardrails.”