Steil Works to Close ActBlue Loophole

If you wanted to donate a lot of money to democrat political campaigns, but couldn’t do it legally, you couldn’t ask for a better option than ActBlue.

ActBlue is web-based platform that acts as the middleman for small dollar donors. At the click of a button, anyone can pitch in as little as a couple of bucks to the democrat of their choice and act blue takes care of the rest.

It also creates a golden opportunity for people looking to evade campaign finance laws.

“Envision an individual who wants to break laws of campaign finance and wants to put money into US campaigns. If that individual went and purchased pre-paid debit and credit cards, went and grabbed publicly available information through the FEC website of any American donor. They’d have their name and address, could insert that on behalf of that person, process the prepaid credit or debit card, and money would flow into that campaign. This is a real risk as it relates to international actors,” according to Congressman Bryan Steil (R-Janesville).

Seems far-fetched? Investigative journalist James O’Keefe didn’t think so. He tracked down some of small donors – who supposedly made thousands of individual contributions adding up to big bucks.

Steil is leading an investigation of ActBlue through the house administration committee. He says allowing the use of prepaid credit and debit cards is what enables this crime, and you can’t put all the blame on act blue. Currently, there’s no law or regulation against it.

“The easiest action would be for the Federal Election Commission to take emergency rulemaking and end this practice, but we’ll ultimately continue to apply pressure there, as well as move forward on our path to move forward on legislation, and third to continue our investigation to shine light onto what we’re discovering in this regard,”

The scale and scope of this potential problem is unknown. Steil’s committee does not have direct access to ActBlue’s records, but evidence collected by citizen watchdog groups and journalists like James O’Keefe continue to mount up.

Given that ActBlue will raise billions of dollars this year alone for political campaigns, is reason enough for concern, and for government to take basic precautions against illegal activity.