Tag: elections

“Dead To Rights”: Internal ActBlue Records Show Foreign-Flagged Donations Waved Through, Whistleblower Messages Deleted

For years, the left has lectured Americans about the dangers of “foreign interference” and dark money in our elections. But a sweeping congressional investigation has laid bare a vast Democratic fundraising apparatus that paved the way for just that: ActBlue, the billion-dollar financial engine of the Democratic Party, created a mechanism that encouraged illicit foreign cash – and then, investigators say, covered it up. Read on.

On Wednesday, House investigators released “Part III” of their bombshell investigation into ActBlue’s fundraising practices. The findings outline a staggering pattern of willful blindness, internal censorship, and a frantic race by executives to plead the Fifth.

Here is how the Democrats’ top fundraising platform built a system that welcomed very questionable cash, and how their own staff tried to bury the evidence.

Step 1: The “Smurfing” Machine

The scandal was officially brought to light in April 2025, when the House GOP released Part I of its staff report. Lawmakers detailed a structural nightmare: ActBlue had intentionally bypassed standard banking security measures, such as requiring CVV verification codes for credit card donations.

That gap is what made “smurfing” plausible – a money-laundering technique in which a large, illegal contribution is chopped into thousands of small donations, each attributed to a real person who, allegedly, never made it. The prepaid cards obscure where the money came from; the borrowed names make it look like a stream of legal small-dollar gifts from ordinary Americans. The donations themselves aren’t hidden – as a conduit, ActBlue itemizes every one in its FEC filings regardless of size, which is how the donor lists cited below were compiled. The question is whether anyone at ActBlue was checking whose names were being used.

The allegation itself predates the House probe. It surfaced in March 2023, when James O’Keefe’s O’Keefe Media Group – working from FEC-record analysis compiled by Peter Bernegger’s Election Watch – published videos of elderly donors listed in federal filings for thousands of small ActBlue contributions far beyond anything they said they’d given. Sen. Ron Johnson wrote the FEC in April 2023; Chairman Steil’s committee ran its own analysis of FEC records and in September 2024 referred its findings to five state attorneys general, citing anomalous donor profiles consistent with unwitting “straw donors”; President Trump’s April 2025 memorandum directed DOJ to investigate “straw” and “dummy” donations. ActBlue calls the inquiry politically motivated. The House reports don’t settle it. What they document is that ActBlue’s own records show at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, account takeovers used to make straw donations that appeared to come from regular donors, and 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election – and that when investigators asked former Associate General Counsel Aaron Ting under oath whether smurfing is prevalent on ActBlue, he took the Fifth.

Step 2: The Cover-Up and the Fifth Amendment

When ActBlue’s own legal and compliance teams realized the potential scale of illicit foreign donations flowing through the platform, panic set in. But instead of correcting the record with Congress, as its own lawyers advised, the execs allegedly moved to suppress the findings, as outlined in the committee’s Part II report.

Internal records show what happened to the last lawyer who escalated the foreign-donation problem. After the 2024 election, ActBlue’s outside counsel had warned the company in two memoranda that its screening of overseas contributions lacked the rigor it had described to Congress, and that its November 2023 letter to Chairman Steil may have been false or misleading. On February 25, 2025 – his first full day running the legal department – legal counsel Zain Ahmad put those memoranda in front of ActBlue’s board of directors and executive team.

The silencing began the next day. He was locked out of his email and Google Drive, against ActBlue’s own leave policy. When he objected in a 277-person IT channel – calling it retaliation and citing the company’s whistleblower and anti-retaliation policies – IT director Hanna Bonin deleted the messages as fast as he posted them: his request to restore access, his policy citations, the policies themselves, and finally his plea to “stop deleting my requests,” which vanished five seconds after it went up. Six deletions in one night. An HR staffer told the chief people officer it “look[ed] like blatant retaliation.” When his email came back the next day, HR was discussing how to “key in on him” using the company’s security tools.

Keep reading

‘Coercion’: Ballot harvesting concerns in nursing homes spur new push to protect vulnerable seniors

As the Trump administration seeks to crack down on potential voter fraud in nursing homes, an election watchdog group is providing additional information to long-term care facilities, citing several past criminal cases involving political operatives and staff who took advantage of vulnerable elderly residents.

A Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services memo from late July cited two major cases in recent years, one out of Texas and another out of Wisconsin, involving elderly people being exploited in long-term care facilities for collecting votes.

The memo says facilities have a “responsibility to preserve residents’ rights to vote and to promote participation in the democratic process.” But says, “this activity should not violate federal or state voting laws.” And that staff “cannot engage in inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents’ rights.”

“Residents who require assistance to vote should have the option of receiving assistance from the person of their choosing and should be offered the option of receiving assistance from their authorized representative,” the CMS memo says.

The Election Integrity Network released a toolkit for instructing senior facilities on how to comply with the CMS guidance.

Among other things, the toolkit suggests facilities or caregivers avoid assumptions and ensure a resident expresses interest in voting; refer that interest promptly to a designated voting coordinator; and protect the resident’s choice and ensure there is no pressure to vote for or against a candidate.

Magan McCreary previously worked at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in Texas, Connecticut, and Rhode Island before becoming an executive assistant at the Election Integrity Network. She was surprised at what she saw.

“I’ve seen coercion from state volunteers saying ‘this is how I would vote.’ I didn’t stay at a facility after I saw social workers filling out ballots,” McCreary told the Daily Signal. “There is a lack of education about the vulnerability, and too many see it as less of a civic duty and more of something to cross off the activity box. There is a breakdown in the training.”

Concerns about election integrity, voter intimidation or undue influence in nursing homes long predate the Trump administration.

Keep reading

‘Shady’: Watch Dem activist admitting to ’roundabout way of paying people for their votes’

In a stunning development that does nothing to support the Democrats’ wild claims that election fraud is so rare as to be nonexistent, an official with a political action committee linked to Democrat socialist Texas Senate candidate James Talarico has admitted to “essentially” paying people for votes.

“It’s a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially,” explained Sky McAdams, an “organizing manager” for Texas Majority PAC, on an undercover video.

The video, obtained by Townhall Media, explains the program offers voters $25 to attend a one-hour “class.”

“We are paying people $25 … a roundabout way of paying people for their votes,” explains McAdams.

It’s part of a scheme to elect Talarico to the U.S. Senate.

In the video, McAdams says it’s called a “paid relational program,” which is operated by Relentless that uses software called Rally. In a campaign finance report filed in July, Texas Majority PAC said it paid Relentless $500,000 for a “relational organizing program,” or about 20 percent of all its expenditures up to that point. At $25 per vote, that could be good for 20,000 ballots.

Keep reading

Rand Paul: Blue State Democrats Using Welfare System to Bribe People for Their Vote

Tuesday on FNC’s “The Will Cain Show,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) discussed alleged welfare corruption across the country and argued that some states used it to incentivize voting for Democrats.

“How do we exist as a nation, Senator, if we essentially are open to the world and give welfare to everyone that wants to come to the United States?” host Will Cain asked.

Paul replied, “No, we can’t. And, actually, a whole population of these people came. Not only they’re receiving welfare, but became experts at stealing welfare, so many of the folks in Minnesota. Now we found in L.A. I think they had 432 hospice centers in L.A. When they cut off their money, the Trump administration cut the money off, only 12 of them complained. That means the rest of them were just worried about being caught. They’re fleeing somewhere not to be caught. But that means 80, 90 percent of these things are fraud. We found the ‘Learing Center,’ the adult learning centers, all the stuff that Nick Shirley found in Minneapolis. So a big problem of this is that the federal government funds it and the state governments police it. So if you’re policing something you don’t pay for, do you really care if it’s wasted?”

“So it’s mostly blue states — New York, Minnesota, California, where the Democrats bribe people to get their vote. They say, here, you can all have welfare, and we’re not going to check to see whether you need it or not or whether you’re stealing it, because Uncle Sam, the federal taxpayer, is going to pay for it. It’s a terrible system, and I propose that we shift this all back to the states, so the payment and the policing would be at the state and they would bankrupt themselves if they didn’t police the system.”

Keep reading

Free Cash for Drugs – Vote Democrat

For years, anyone who dared question the integrity of the election process was treated as some conspiracy nut. We were told election fraud was virtually nonexistent, that safeguards were more than adequate, and that demanding tighter controls was somehow an attack on democracy. Well, take a walk through Skid Row in Los Angeles and explain this one. Federal prosecutors have now charged three people in an alleged operation that paid people on Skid Row to sign California ballot petitions using the stolen identities of registered voters.

They pulled the identities of actual registered voters from a database, handed those identities to people on the street, paid them to copy the information onto petitions, and had them forge the corresponding signatures. That is precisely the type of manipulation we were repeatedly assured should not concern us.

James Brass, known as “Lord,” has been arrested and charged along with Courtney Price and Jateisha Herron. Prosecutors say the operation ran from February through August 2026. Brass allegedly received approximately $41,600 from coordinators associated with one petition-management company, while false declarations were signed claiming the circulators had personally witnessed the supposed registered voters signing the petitions.

Skid Row contains some of the most vulnerable people in America. Homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction are everywhere. Earlier reporting from undercover investigations described people being offered cash, cigarettes and marijuana for petition signatures.

And this is not even the first federal case to emerge from Skid Row this year. Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong (no relation) agreed to plead guilty after admitting that she paid people, including homeless individuals, to register to vote. She normally received money for petition signatures only when the signer was a registered voter, so prosecutors say she began offering people money to complete voter registration forms as well. Some homeless people had no address, so she supplied her own former Los Angeles address for them to use. California automatically mails ballots to registered voters, meaning ballots associated with some of those registrations potentially could have been sent to an address where those individuals did not live or receive mail. How many warning signs does government require before admitting that vulnerabilities exist?

Keep reading

Appeals court rules against Trump admin’s push for stricter mail-in ballot requirements

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston has upheld a preliminary injunction blocking the implementation of a United States Postal Service (USPS) rule that requires stricter measures for voting by mail.

The court sided with the lower court’s decision handed down Thursday, enjoining the USPS rule from being implemented prior to the upcoming November 3rd elections.

“Thus, we see no obvious error in the district court’s conclusion that allowing this Final Rule to be effective for the soon-arriving November 3 election will likely result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the country while providing minimal — if any — gains in combating voter fraud,” the appeals court wrote.

In accordance with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” the USPS finalized a rule, effective August 21st, requiring ballot envelopes to carry unique barcodes and states to submit mail-voter information via a federal portal.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued the injunction due to the quick timeline of implementation and questions of constitutionality.

All fifty states allow voting by mail, highlighting the significance of any ruling pertaining to mail-in ballots. According to Talwani:

  • 27 states allow mail-in ballots without voters having to provide an “excuse” — Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
  • Two states allow all eligible citizens to vote by mail and permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail–Nebraska and North Dakota.
  • 13 states allow vote by mail with justifiable “excuses” — Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

The Trump administration has already requested that the U.S. Supreme Court issues a ruling in the case.

Keep reading

Tyrannical EU To Threaten AfD But Could Be Its Downfall

EU technocracy shows its face again – this time it’s aiming at German voters, the AfD in particular.

Brussels is discussing the freezing of EU funding for Saxony-Anhalt where the populist party just won. The €2.95 billion in EU funding for the German federal state for the current 2021-2027 budget period alone amounts to around €500 million per year and approximately 20 percent of the Saxony-Anhalt investment spending in schools, in hospitals, in daycare centers across the country.

Green MEP Daniel Freund is one of the lobbyists from Brussels who wants to strip Saxony-Anhalt of its EU funding because the voters in the German state ‘chose wrong’. He threatens that if the AfD-led government ‘undermines EU fundamental rights or the rule of law’ then the European Commission should take away his money. Freund did not wait for the new government to be sworn in, he attacked the voters in Saxony-Anhalt already before the election results had been confirmed.

It would be nothing new for the EU to use such a measure – as it has done already with Hungary and Poland. Brussels has frozen up to €18 billion of funding for Hungary so far because of alleged rule-of-law violations. Billions more have been withheld from Poland. In both cases, the EU’s financial pressure has had serious consequences for the governments and have contributed to changes of government which the EU regards more favorably.

It is undemocratic and the EU has been attacking Saxony-Anhalt for too long now. The European Superstate is trying to starve the region of vital public services – as is already the case in Hungary and Poland – if the voters there choose a party that is not approved of by the Brussels elite.

Keep reading

Revised Overseas Voter Form FPCA Eliminates Checkbox “I Never Lived In U.S.” – A Blow to Birth Tourism Voters and Non-Citizens

For years, Americans living overseas could use the federal government’s Federal Post Card Application (FPCA) to register to vote and request an absentee ballot.

The old form contained an odd checkbox option that said, “I am a U.S. citizen living outside the country; I have never lived in the United States.”

The new form removes this line and does more.

On August 13th, the Department of War issued an Emergency Revision Request letter to eliminate this line.

It also restructures ID questions. It now asks detailed questions, if they’ve ever been issued a valid Driver’s License or State ID, then prove it? Ever been issued a Social Security card, prove it. And so on.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved the changes on Aug. 28th, and the new form became official on September 1st, 2026. The checkboxes now list only overseas citizens who intend to return to the United States, or whose intent to return is uncertain.

The “never lived in the U.S.” checkbox didn’t accurately reflect the laws governing overseas voting. In the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), a civilian living overseas generally votes through the last place they “domiciled” in the U.S before leaving the country.

The DoW (DoD) called the old provision an “inaccurate eligibility checkbox for citizens who have never lived in the U.S.” and said it needed to be removed so the form would comply with UOCAVA.

Non-military individuals, like birth tourists, who have never resided in the United States are not a class of voters specifically defined by UOCAVA. Therefore, they “may not be able” to use the FPCA/FWAB form.

There have been numerous controversies in States like MI, NC, and PA where FPCA applications had little verification. In a 2022 Pennsylvania hearing, Deputy Secretary for Elections Jonathan Marks said: “There’s no systemic verification.”

Eliminating the checkbox is meant to reduce confusion and prevent people outside UOCAVA’s scope from believing they are eligible to vote.

The distinction between U.S. citizenship and a U.S. voting residence is important. They are not the same thing. A citizen living in another country may have every right of citizenship but still needs a state or voting jurisdiction through which to cast a ballot.

The old form appeared to recognize “never lived in the United States” as a separate category of overseas voter. The new form no longer does. It requires an applicant to provide the U.S. address in the state or territory where the person claims the right to register and vote.

The change does not mean that every citizen who never lived in the United States is barred from voting. States retain some authority over voter qualifications. Some states have laws allowing certain citizens who were born or raised abroad to use a parent’s former voting residence.

Keep reading