ActBlue is the online fundraising platform that processes small-dollar political donations for Democratic candidates, progressive campaigns, and allied nonprofits, acting as a federally registered conduit that collects money from individual donors and forwards it to the recipient each donor selects. Founded in 2004, it has moved more than $14 billion in contributions over two decades and is now the subject of a Republican-led congressional investigation, a Texas attorney general lawsuit, and proposed federal legislation targeting online donation practices.1ActBlue. ActBlue Celebrates 20 Years of Reliable, Innovative Solutions
How ActBlue Works
Under federal election law, a conduit receives contributions that a donor has earmarked for a specific recipient and passes them along. ActBlue does not itself contribute to candidates. It processes the transaction, takes a 3.95% processing fee that goes to card and platform costs, and forwards the donation to the campaign or committee the donor chose.2ActBlue. About ActBlue: Answering Your Most Asked Questions Because every transaction is reported to the Federal Election Commission, even contributions under $200 show up in public filings, which is more disclosure than direct sub-$200 donations to a candidate would require.3GovInfo. House Report 118-696
The feature that made the platform ubiquitous is ActBlue Express, which lets a donor store payment information once and then contribute to any participating campaign with a single click. More than 14 million people had signed up as Express users by 2024. ActBlue itself is a nonprofit and funds its operations through optional tips donors can add at checkout.
The Three ActBlue Entities
ActBlue operates through three legally distinct organizations, each covering a different piece of the fundraising world:
- ActBlue, the political action committee, is registered with the FEC as a hybrid PAC (Committee ID: C00401224) and handles contributions to Democratic candidates and political committees.4Federal Election Commission. ActBlue Committee Profile
- ActBlue Charities is a 501(c)(3) organization (EIN: 47-3739141) established in 2015 that processes tax-deductible donations to eligible charitable groups.5GuideStar. ActBlue Charities Inc.
- ActBlue Civics is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization (EIN: 45-5097038) that serves as the merchant of record for advocacy and civic groups. Donations through Civics are not tax-deductible.6Charity Navigator. ActBlue Civics Inc.
Which entity handles a given donation depends on the recipient, and it determines whether the contribution is tax-deductible, publicly reported to the FEC, or neither.
How Much Money Moves Through ActBlue
During the 2023–2024 election cycle, ActBlue processed $3.82 billion in total receipts and disbursed $3.79 billion, most of it passed through to recipient campaigns and committees.7OpenSecrets. ActBlue PAC Summary, 2024 The Wall Street Journal described the platform as “integral to the Democratic Party’s infrastructure,” estimating it helped Democrats raise $4 billion for 2024 contests.8The Wall Street Journal. Inside Democratic Fundraiser ActBlue’s Big Spending and Internal Drama Even in the off-year of 2025, donors gave $1.78 billion across 52 million contributions, a 41% jump from the comparable point in 2021.9ActBlue. Small Dollar Donors Shatter Records: Nearly $1.8 Billion Raised in 2025 For the 2025–2026 cycle through April 30, 2026, the platform reported $1.63 billion in total receipts and $1.52 billion disbursed to other committees.4Federal Election Commission. ActBlue Committee Profile
The platform is best known for the fundraising surges it can produce in hours. After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, donors gave more than $91 million through ActBlue in a single day, a record that still stands. The Dobbs decision in 2022 brought in more than $89 million. On July 21, 2024, when President Biden withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, ActBlue processed nearly $47 million across all races in seven hours and passed $100 million by the following afternoon.10The Hill. Harris Campaign Fundraising ActBlue11Fortune. Trump Kamala Harris Campaign Fundraising Battle The Harris campaign alone reported $81 million in its first 24 hours from 888,000 donors, 60% of them first-time givers for the cycle.12The New York Times. Harris Fundraising Biden ActBlue
The Republican Alternative: WinRed
ActBlue processes donations for Democratic and progressive causes only. Republican candidates use WinRed, a for-profit platform launched in June 2019, fifteen years after ActBlue was founded. During the 2020 cycle through November, ActBlue processed over $3.2 billion compared to WinRed’s roughly $1.9 billion.13OpenSecrets. ActBlue Outraises WinRed, GOP Catching Up
The Congressional Fraud Investigation
Beginning in late 2023, three House committees, Administration, Judiciary, and Oversight and Government Reform, opened a joint investigation into ActBlue’s donor verification practices. The inquiry has produced two staff reports and pulled the platform’s leadership into repeated depositions.
The First Report, April 2025
House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil first wrote to ActBlue in October 2023. ActBlue’s November 2023 response acknowledged that it did not require a card verification value (CVV) for all donation transactions.3GovInfo. House Report 118-696 On April 2, 2025, the committees released an interim staff report alleging ActBlue had weakened fraud rules twice in 2024. In April 2024, the report said, ActBlue raised internal thresholds for flagging suspicious transactions, a change its own staff estimated would let 14 to 28 additional fraudulent contributions through per month. In September 2024, the platform reportedly shifted from reviewing all transactions above a certain risk score to reviewing only a set percentage.14U.S. House Judiciary Committee. Fraud on ActBlue Interim Staff Report The report also asserted that internal training materials told staff to “look for reasons to accept contributions,” that PayPal transactions were not subject to the same fraud-detection process, and that management wanted certain anti-fraud changes kept “quiet.”
The Second Report, April 2026
A second report, “Fraud on ActBlue, Part II,” was released on April 20, 2026. It alleged the “knowing and willful” acceptance of illegal foreign contributions and a cover-up, and reported that by March 2025 every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team had resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave after the 2024 election.15U.S. House Committee on Administration. New Report Details Illicit Foreign Donations and Mass Resignations at ActBlue Between July and December 2025, the committees deposed five current or former ActBlue employees, including former General Counsel Darrin Hurwitz, former Associate General Counsel Aaron Ting, former Vice President of Customer Service Alyssa Twomey, and legal counsel Zain Ahmad. Each invoked the Fifth Amendment on every substantive question, refusing to answer 146 times in total.16U.S. House Judiciary Committee. ActBlue Employees Took the Fifth in House Depositions 146 Times A February 2025 internal memo from the law firm Covington & Burling reportedly flagged legal risks related to foreign-national contributions, and investigators said they identified donations originating from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Colombia.17U.S. House Judiciary Committee. New House Report Details ActBlue’s Illicit Foreign Donations and Cover-Up
CEO Wallace-Jones Invokes the Fifth
ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones appeared before the House Administration Committee on June 10, 2026, and invoked her Fifth Amendment right 22 times in response to Republican questions about how the organization vetted foreign donations.18The New York Times. ActBlue Fifth Amendment Congress19The Washington Post. ActBlue CEO Repeatedly Invokes Fifth Amendment at Congress Hearing The New York Times reported that Wallace-Jones became a target of the investigation in April 2026 after accounts that her own lawyers warned she might have misled Congress in earlier statements about ActBlue’s foreign donation screening.
What ActBlue Says in Response
ActBlue has denied wrongdoing and called the investigations partisan attacks. In a formal response dated June 26, 2026, it called the obstruction accusation “false” and said it had turned over seven document productions since fall 2023 totaling thousands of pages, plus a voluntary production of about 2,660 additional pages and a privilege log it said it was not legally required to create.20ActBlue. ActBlue’s Response to the Congressional Committees
On the fraud allegations themselves, ActBlue says every contribution is reviewed against what it calls “rigorous standards” and that it uses an external fraud-prevention tool assessing more than 140 signals per transaction, with flagged donations sent to manual review. It holds the highest merchant compliance rating under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and in 2025 it adopted a policy requiring Americans living abroad to be physically present in the United States to donate on the platform.21ActBlue. ActBlue Investigation: What’s Really Happening and What You Need to Know The organization has called the money-laundering and straw-donor claims “conspiracy theories” and points to an average donation size of roughly $40 as evidence its donor base is grassroots.
The Texas Lawsuit
On April 20, 2026, the same day the second congressional report appeared, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit against ActBlue in the District Court of Tarrant County, Texas (Cause No. 096-376890-26). The petition alleges violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, claiming ActBlue knowingly facilitated fraudulent, anonymous, and potentially foreign contributions by accepting gift cards and prepaid debit cards while telling the public and Congress it had stopped.22Texas Attorney General. State of Texas v. ActBlue LLC Original Petition Paxton’s office described an undercover test in which investigators successfully donated using gift cards, including one under a fake identity. The suit seeks more than $1 million in monetary relief plus injunctive relief.23Texas Attorney General. Attorney General Paxton Files Landmark Lawsuit Against ActBlue Attorneys general in Virginia, Wyoming, and Missouri have run separate investigations of their own.24U.S. House Committee on Administration. Chairman Steil Launches Expanded Investigation Into Online Political Donations Through ActBlue
ActBlue spokesperson De’Andra Roberts-LaBoo called the Texas suit “a thinly veiled attempt to distract from Ken Paxton’s numerous legal and ethical issues” and said the platform “has done more than any other, regardless of party, to prevent improper donations and protect donors.”25Courthouse News Service. Texas Accuses Democratic Fundraising Platform of Enabling Rampant Donor Fraud ActBlue also sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. On June 13, 2026, Judge Richard Stearns granted a preliminary injunction blocking Paxton from pursuing the Texas case, finding the Massachusetts court had personal jurisdiction because Paxton’s office had served investigation demands on ActBlue in Massachusetts and reviewed documents at its Somerville headquarters.26JURIST. Federal Court Blocks Texas AG Lawsuit Against Democratic Fundraising Platform
The SHIELD Act and Its Successor
Representative Bryan Steil introduced the SHIELD Act (H.R. 9488) on September 6, 2024. It would require every political committee that accepts online credit or debit card contributions to verify the card’s CVV and collect a U.S. billing address, ban contributions made through general-use prepaid cards, gift certificates, or store gift cards, and make it explicitly illegal to knowingly help someone contribute in another person’s name.27U.S. Congress. H.R. 9488 – SHIELD Act The House passed the bill by voice vote on December 16, 2024, but the Senate did not act before the 118th Congress ended.28ActBlue. Republican Legislation Proves ActBlue Is the Gold Standard As of May 2026, Steil has introduced a new version titled the Campaign Finance Transparency Act. ActBlue has argued the legislation validates its existing practices, saying it already implemented CVV requirements and that any new rules should apply equally to Republican fundraising platforms.
Leadership and Headquarters
Regina Wallace-Jones has been ActBlue’s president and CEO since January 2023, the organization’s fourth leader and its first Black woman in the role.29UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. 2021 MPP Alumnus of the Year She previously held executive positions at Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, Mindbody, and LendStreet. ActBlue is headquartered at 366 Summer Street in Somerville, Massachusetts.