With millions of Americans put out of work this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, key questions about where the money is really coming from need to be answered.
A new study recently released by a conservative advocacy group reveals the progressive fundraiser site ActBlue received about half of its 2019 contributions by individuals who appeared to be unemployed.
The Take Back Action Fund’s study showed that 48.4% of ActBlue’s 2019 contributions had come from people that listed themselves as being unemployed. The figure ticked up to 50.1% in 2020 when literally millions of Americans were put out of work by the coronavirus pandemic and prolonged government shutdown.
Untraceable, foreign origin possibilities
This is f*cking HUGE!
They may be able to RICO ActBlue and other money launderers.@timbpearce great read man! TY!https://t.co/WvsLPJltPX
— John Szpicki (@jszpicki) September 15, 2020
A higher unemployment rate listed among contributors to any political party efforts would make sense if examining 2020, but over 50% toward ActBlue Democratic endeavors for 2020 alone is reason to create curiosity.
Also, why were so many donors being listed as unemployed in 2019?
Those are the burning questions.
Take Back Action Fund President John Pudner said the vast proportion of contributions from individuals alleging to be unemployed indicates the possibility of international actors seeking to manipulate U.S. elections via illicit campaign donations:
“After downloading hundreds of millions of [dollars in] donations to the Take Back Action Fund servers, we were shocked to see that almost half of the donations to ActBlue in 2019 claimed to be unemployed individuals.”
Pudner dove into the peculiar numbers when looking into all these donations where literally millions of people were claiming to be unemployed while sending money via ActBlue:
“The name of employers must be disclosed when making political donations, but more than 4.7 million donations came from people who claimed they did not have an employer. Those 4.7 million donations totaled $346 million ActBlue raised and sent to liberal causes.”
Wow – this sounds fishy as hell. Nearly 50% of liberal donors using @actblue were untraceable and listed as unemployed (with a 4% national unemployment rate).https://t.co/rv1Bqs9Luh
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) September 12, 2020
“Auditing these suspect donations to determine if millions lied by indicating they were unemployed when in fact they were not, or if their names were just being used by a foreign programmer or someone else to move money without their knowledge, will take time.”
Considering the harsh allegations levied by Pudner and the released study, ActBlue has assured that there’s no funny business going on with regard to donors.
The donation platform conduit for Democratic efforts and candidates claims that many of these unemployed people donating money are just retired folks or unemployed spouses:
“We do see a significant portion of donors who report their status as not employed, such as retired donors or full-time parents.”
Furthermore, ActBlue claims that they have sophisticated system to make sure all donations and on the up-and-up:
“We use an array of data sources, internal validation and third-party services to verify the validity of transactions. We take the security of our platform and integrity of donations very seriously.”
So, perhaps the easiest way to fish out any funny business would be to essentially recreate the proverbial experiment with a GOP based platform. And sure enough, all that would need to be examined is the platform WinRed which amassed 4.9 million donations in 2019.
The majority of those retired since 2006/2007 have been Republican. So how is it that “retired” Dems (which have been statistically less charitable than Republicans) are over 50% of ActBlue donors and WinRed unemployed donors are only 5.6%? https://t.co/EzkFdBSEC6
— Greg Hoyt (@GregHoytLET) September 15, 2020
Considering the donor numbers are rather similar between ActBlue and WinRed, then certainly there’d be a similarity in the “lack of an occupation” of donors’ number.
Except, the numbers aren’t even close when compared.
The contributions that were processed by WinRed in 2019 showed that only 4% had listed themselves as being unemployed. Moving on to the 2020 donations on the same platform, that number only increased to 5.6% of people listing themselves as unemployed when donating through the platform.
I urge the @FEC and others to investigate this situation. Is money being laundered through @ActBlue from straw donors or foreign governments to Democratic candidates, or is this legit? Somebody needs to find out ASAP.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) September 12, 2020
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