ActBlue admits to security failures likely allowing foreign campaign donations
The Democrat-aligned fundraising giant is still facing scrutiny for its lax security measures, which Republican legislators say have enabled widespread fraud and permitted foreign actors to have an impact on American elections.
Under pressure from Republican lawmakers, a major left-wing fundraising group is admitting that its security measures are insufficient and may have allowed foreign donors to influence American elections.
The Democrat-aligned fundraising organization ActBlue wrote to Republican legislators Oct. 5, announcing a new “passport verification program,” according to Fox News, after congressional investigations found that ActBlue failed to verify the nation of origin for donors’ passports and instructed employees to ignore indicators that donors were foreign nationals.
As Zeale News reported at the time, the House Judiciary, Administration, and Oversight and Government Reform Committees published a report in September on ActBlue’s lax donor identity verification processes. According to the report, ActBlue supervisors would instruct employees to accept donations from foreign credit cards and foreign IP and billing addresses.
The report also found that ActBlue supervisors admitted that passport information was not verified. Instead, the Democrat-aligned fundraising organization would claim that it was up to individual Democratic campaigns receiving funds to verify passport information. ActBlue’s passport verification system only required the correct number of digits for an American passport before approving donations, instead of verifying the passport number is real and American.
In its Oct. 5 letter, ActBlue said that it is adding a new “passport-based identity verification” program “as a further enhancement to ActBlue’s multi-layered approach to fraud and foreign-contribution prevention.”
“In doing so, it also enables U.S. citizens located abroad — who have been unable to contribute on the ActBlue platform since 2025 — to resume participating in the political process by supporting the candidates and causes of their choice," the letter continued. "The new program uses the best available technology to allow eligible donors located abroad to verify their identity using a valid U.S. passport. It reflects substantial engineering investments by ActBlue to ensure that, as it resumes processing contributions from foreign addresses, its compliance systems can withstand scrutiny.”
House Administration Committee Chairman Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said that ActBlue’s updated passport verification program is essentially a confession that the organization’s practices violated federal law.
“This decision to implement a NEW passport verification program only confirms what we've been saying: ActBlue failed to verify the citizenship of individuals who made donations from abroad. That's unacceptable,” Steil said in a statement to Fox News. “This new policy should have been in place on day one. Right now, far too many questions remain unanswered, including what percentage of the billions of dollars that have flowed through ActBlue came from illegal foreign sources.”
Steil, along with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky, have pledged to continue seeking answers and accountability from ActBlue.
According to records reviewed by Zeale News, ActBlue raised more than $17.5 billion in donations from 2016 to 2025, not including ActBlue’s own fee revenue.
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