ActBlue’s own privacy policy just confirmed the very passport-check system House investigators say barely checked anything at all.
Quick Take
- House committees say ActBlue’s donor verification only counted characters, not a real passport number.
- Missouri’s Attorney General opened a probe into “faulty, potentially deliberately unsound” donation checks.
- ActBlue’s updated privacy policy now spells out a detailed passport-verification process, raising questions about what changed and why.
- ActBlue says 99.99% of its donations came with a U.S. address or passport number, calling its system strong.
What The House Report Actually Found
Three House committees released a third interim staff report on September 16, 2026. It claims ActBlue’s so-called passport verification “requires only that a donor enter the correct amount of characters” to fill a field. The report says the system never checked whether that number matched a real, valid U.S. passport. A box with enough digits in it was apparently enough to pass.
The report goes further. It alleges fraud-prevention analysts got instructions to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt” even when red flags popped up. That phrase alone should give any donor pause. A system built to screen out foreign cash isn’t supposed to lean toward leniency when something looks wrong. It’s supposed to lean toward caution.
Investigators also flagged a gap around third-party payment tools. Donations made through services like Apple Pay or PayPal reportedly skipped passport checks altogether in some cases. If true, that means the one safeguard ActBlue pointed to as proof of compliance had a side door that bypassed it entirely.
Missouri Steps In With Its Own Investigation
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway opened a state investigation on September 26, 2026, after the House Administration Committee forwarded its findings. Her office says it has reports that ActBlue “could have received and used money directly from foreign sources” because of weak, possibly intentionally weak, verification steps. That’s a state law enforcement officer, not just a partisan committee, now asking formal questions.
Federal law bans foreign nationals from donating to U.S. elections, full stop. The Federal Election Commission’s own guidance says organizations can’t knowingly accept money from a source they have reason to believe is foreign. Weak verification doesn’t erase that duty. It just makes it harder to prove violations happened, which is exactly why investigators want the underlying system logs and training materials.
ActBlue’s Defense And What It Reveals
ActBlue has not stayed quiet. The group’s updated privacy policy now describes a detailed “Passport Verification Information” process, including a passport image, number, birth date, expiration date, country of issuance, and a live photo of the donor’s face. ActBlue told Fox News its new program uses “the best available technology” to verify donors living abroad.
Here’s the catch. If the new system is this detailed, what exactly was the old one checking? ActBlue told Congress back in 2023 that passport information was “required” from foreign-address donors and that only verified donations were processed. The House report says that claim doesn’t match what the actual code was doing. Both statements can’t be fully true at once.
ActBlue also points to numbers in its defense, saying 99.99% of nearly $990 million in contributions came from donors with a U.S. address or a passport number on file, with a tiny fraction from Americans abroad. That statistic sounds reassuring. But it measures whether a field got filled out, not whether what got typed into that field was ever actually real.
Why The Gap Between Policy And Practice Matters
This case fits a familiar pattern in political fundraising. Weak identification systems, allegations of fraud, and partisan fights over what the evidence proves tend to show up together, long before any court settles the matter. The Federal Election Commission has pursued misrepresentation cases for decades, and this one may join that list, depending on what investigators find.
Dem fundraising giant makes damning admission as GOP probes foreign donation allegations
ActBlue said it was updating its passport verification standards in a letter to House GOP investigators
Democrats' largest campaign fundraising platform says it has strengthened its donor…
— News News News (@NewsNew97351204) October 6, 2026
What’s not in dispute is this: a passport number field that only checks character count is not verification. It’s a formality dressed up as a safeguard. Whether that gap was sloppy design or something deliberate is now exactly what House investigators, Missouri’s Attorney General, and eventually the courts will have to sort out.
Sources:
ago.mo.gov, foxnews.com, washingtonexaminer.com, cha.house.gov, newsmax.com, stlamerican.com
