A group of practitioners and academics on Wednesday went public with their discontent with a foundational piece of Democrats’ fundraising infrastructure: ActBlue.
The group of 142 consultants, campaign staff, nonprofit staff, technology vendors, donor organizers, donors and academics released a joint letter to ActBlue’s executive leadership calling on the fundraising platform to do a “better job” protecting Democratic contributors from being “exploited.”
“Given ActBlue’s pivotal role in Democratic and progressive fundraising, it has a special responsibility to play a leadership role in protecting donors from deceptive practices,” the letter states. “And while ActBlue has taken some helpful steps in that direction, we believe it can and must do more.”
“Some of the folks behind the letter have been communicating directly with ActBlue about these issues for years,” said Josh Nelson, CEO of the Civic Shout ad platform for progressive causes. “After Sam Stein’s reporting in The Bulwark over the summer about the extent of the scam PAC problem, we put together an initial draft of the letter in mid-late August and started soliciting feedback from agency leaders and other practitioners.
“By the time the letter and recommendations were polished, we were roughly six weeks out from the election, so we decided to hold off for the time being. Then, after Regina Wallace-Jones’ interview on ‘The Great Battlefield’ in November, in which she committed to doing more on these issues, we decided to move forward in December.”
The release of the letter came the same day that House Republicans held a hearing to investigate “foreign interference” in U.S. elections.
Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil (R), chairman of the Committee on House Administration which held the hearing on Wednesday, earlier this year sent a letter to ActBlue to get documents and information related to its “donor verification policies and the potential for foreign actors, primarily from Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and China, to use ActBlue to launder illicit money into U.S. political campaigns.”
One of Steil’s concerns was foreign gift cards or prepaid credit cards used to make campaign contributions. On Dec. 10, Steil said he received information from ActBlue which indicated that the platform had started rejecting those payment options as of September, but had processed donations using them as recently as July.
Nelson told C&E: “Our concerns about ActBlue are totally separate from House Republicans’ pathetic attacks on ActBlue, which appear to be based on lies and conspiracy theories. The fact is, on the issues addressed in our open letter, WinRed is far, far worse than ActBlue across the board. We locked in the send date for the letter before House Republicans scheduled today’s hearing.”
Still, some of the recommendations are steps that might be favored by lawmakers concerned about transparency in the campaign donation ecosystem. For instance, one recommendation from the group is for ActBlue to “provide transparency and a voice to the digital fundraising ecosystem.”
Specifically, they’re calling on ActBlue to“create a mechanism for anonymously reporting potential violations and “regularly produce public reports outlining enforcement actions, including the number and nature of violations acted upon since the last report.”
Ultimately, the letter is about protecting donors from what these practitioners see as unfair solicitation practices, which remains the subject of a longstanding debate among fundraising practitioners on the left and the right.
The letter’s recommendations on this front include letting “users opt-out of sharing contact information not required by the FEC with entities they’re donating to,” and prohibiting “post-petition and post-survey redirects to ActBlue pages that include language falsely claiming the individual promised to donate.”
The letter to ActBlue’s executives concludes: “We look forward to collaborating on these ideas to ensure Democratic donors are better protected.”
In response to the letter, an ActBlue spokesperson told C&E: “ActBlue is a safe and secure platform trusted for decades by valued donors and partners, and we are continuously adapting our platform as technology, fundraising, and donor and campaign needs change.”
