Let us start with a word problem. I give these to sophomores. They are not hard.
A woman is 88 years old. She is a widow. Her house burned down two years ago and she now lives in a trailer at the end of a rutted dirt road in rural Michigan, with her dog. She owns an old pickup. She lives on a modest pension. She does not own a computer. Her internet, in her own words, works “sometimes.”
Question: how many separate online political donations did this woman make over the last five years?
Take a second.
The answer, according to Federal Election Commission records, is FOURTEEN THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED NINETY-SIX.
Totaling more than one hundred fifty thousand dollars.
That works out to roughly eight donations per day, every single day, for five straight years. Christmas. Easter. The day of her husband’s memorial. The day her house burned to the ground. Eight a day, averaging about nine dollars and change apiece, from a woman who needed two tries to unlock her own phone on camera and who told a reporter, when he handed her nine hundred pages of her own supposed giving history, “Hell no. I don’t have that kind of money.”
Her name is Elizabeth Waffle. She lives near Milan, Michigan. Charlie LeDuff, a Pulitzer winner, drove out there with a camera and public FEC data and knocked on her door, which is apparently more investigative effort than anyone in official Washington had managed in five years.
She acknowledged making a few dozen small donations. A few dozen. Not fourteen thousand.
The records also show her donating from her trailer AND from an apartment she rented in town after the fire — on the same days. Same person. Two addresses. Simultaneously.
I teach Physics. I would very much like to meet the woman who solved bilocation while living on a fixed income and I would like her to explain her methodology, because that is a Nobel and she is out here spending it on Senate primaries in states she has never visited.
— THE ARITHMETIC NOBODY IN WASHINGTON WANTED TO DO —
Fourteen thousand six hundred ninety-six donations. Divided by one thousand eight hundred twenty-six days.
Eight point zero five per day.
Now here is the part I want you to actually sit with, because everybody skims past it. That is not eight donations she made in an afternoon. That is a pattern that never sleeps, never takes a holiday, never misses a Tuesday, and never varies enough to trip a reporting threshold. Every single amount kept small. Small on purpose. Small enough that it never triggers itemized federal reporting requirements.
That is not enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is lumpy. Human behavior is lumpy. A real donor gives twenty bucks when they are mad about something and then forgets for four months.
This is smooth. Machine-smooth. And any statistics teacher in America will tell you that when human data comes back too smooth, you have stopped measuring humans.
One of the candidates on her list was Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Socialist Senate candidate. Forty-seven separate donations to him over two years. This is a man who built an entire brand on getting corrupt money OUT of politics.
He has not, as of this writing, given her the money back so she can go fix her house.
Others on the list were out-of-state candidates she had never heard of. LeDuff read her a name off the sheet, Aaron Rugenberg. She said it did not ring a bell. It did not ring a bell at all. She looked at the whole stack and said the thing that a normal person with functioning judgment says: this is very abnormal, and I think something in there is off.
An 88-year-old widow with a walker had a sharper read on that data in ninety seconds than a compliance department reportedly had in five years.
— WHAT CONGRESS ACTUALLY FOUND, AND I DO MEAN “FOUND” —
Here is where the story stops being a charming local-news oddity and starts being a national security question.
Republican-led House committees — Judiciary, Oversight, and House Administration — have issued interim staff reports built on ActBlue’s OWN internal documents, obtained by subpoena. Not vibes. Not screenshots. Their own paperwork.
The April 2025 report found that ActBlue had itself detected at least twenty-two significant fraud campaigns in recent years, and that NEARLY HALF of them had a foreign nexus.
In one thirty-day window during the 2024 cycle, the platform flagged 237 donations coming from foreign IP addresses using prepaid cards.
Now. In any organization that is not actively trying to lose money, that is the moment you tighten the screws. You add friction. You raise the drawbridge.
ActBlue reportedly loosened its fraud rules. Twice. In 2024. During the election.
Internal materials reportedly instructed staff to “look for reasons to ACCEPT contributions” and to extend the benefit of the doubt even when red flags appeared.
Read that again, slowly, and then tell me with a straight face that this was a technical oversight. If your smoke detector goes off twenty-two times and your response is to take the batteries out and then remove one of the walls, you are not confused. You have made a decision.
And then there is the CVV thing, which is the detail that ends the conversation for anyone who has ever run a business.
The CVV is the three-digit code on the back of a card. Every online merchant on earth requires it. Your local pizza place requires it. It exists for exactly one reason: to make it harder to use a stolen card number or an anonymous prepaid card.
ActBlue historically did not require it. Not until roughly 2024, under outside pressure including an investigation by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Critics say the platform tested what requiring it would do to donation VOLUME first.
Let me translate that into English for the folks in the back. The most basic anti-theft control in electronic commerce, the one your teenager’s Etsy shop uses, was allegedly evaluated not on whether it stopped fraud but on whether stopping fraud would cost them money.
That is not a leak in the think tank. That is a business model.
— THE FIFTH AMENDMENT CHOIR —
The April 2026 follow-up report, Part II, alleges illicit foreign donations and a subsequent cover-up, and documents something I have never seen in any organization that was doing fine.
By March 2025, ActBlue’s legal and compliance team had essentially ceased to exist. Resignations. Firings. Extended leave. Nearly the entire department, gone.
Five current and former employees invoked the Fifth Amendment 146 times in depositions.
One hundred forty-six.
Then in June 2026, CEO Regina Wallace-Jones appeared before the House Administration Committee and invoked her Fifth Amendment right TWENTY-TWO TIMES. On questions about fraud prevention. On foreign contributions. On basics.
I want to be scrupulously fair here, because I teach kids to be scrupulously fair even when it is inconvenient. The Fifth Amendment is a real right. It is in there. I took an oath to defend the document it lives in and I would defend her right to use it with my last breath. Invoking it is not a confession and I am not going to pretend it is.
But it is also not NOTHING. And ActBlue’s position deserves to be on the record too: they say they evaluate over 140 fraud signals, that they block enormous volumes of bad activity, that the detections themselves prove the system works, that they refund improper donations, that they have tightened the rules, and that this entire thing is a partisan attack on grassroots Democratic fundraising. They deny systemic laundering. Fine. Noted. Printed.
Here is my problem with that defense, and it is the same problem I have with a student who shows me the answer without the work.
If the system works, hand over the paperwork and let us verify it. If your compliance department was doing its job, put them on the stand and let them say so. You cannot simultaneously argue “our fraud detection is world class” and “no one may examine our fraud detection,” any more than I can tell a parent their kid aced the exam and then refuse to show them the exam.
Quinn’s Seventh Law of Liberalism: it is different when you are a Democrat. Things conservatives get destroyed for are treated as résumé enhancements on the left. Imagine, for one single second, a Republican fundraising platform where the compliance department evaporated, the CEO took the Fifth twenty-two times, and elderly widows in three states were listed for donations they say they never made. Imagine the chyron. Imagine the special counsel. Go ahead. I will hold your coat.
— FEDERALIST 68, AND WHY THE FOUNDERS SAW THIS EXACT THING COMING —
Everybody quotes Federalist No. 68 for the Electoral College. Almost nobody reads the reason Hamilton gave for it.
He wrote that the most deadly adversaries of republican government would come from foreign powers seeking, in his phrasing, an improper ascendant in our councils. He was not worried about invasion. He was worried about INFLUENCE. He built structural friction into the machine specifically to make it expensive and difficult for a foreign interest to buy an American outcome.
Now here is 2026. A donation platform with weak identity verification, no card security code for years, prepaid card acceptance, documented foreign-IP traffic, and a policy of instructing staff to find reasons to say yes.
Hamilton spent his life building a lock. Someone left the door propped open with a folding chair.
And note the mechanism, because it is elegant and it is the whole ballgame. You cannot legally donate to an American campaign from abroad. But if you can break a large sum into thousands of tiny slices and attach each slice to a REAL American name and a REAL American address — an 88-year-old widow who will never in her life check FEC filings — the money enters the system wearing a citizen’s face.
The professionals call it smurfing. In 2024, Wisconsin Republican strategist Mark Block filed a racketeering lawsuit alleging his own identity had been used for hundreds of small fraudulent donations without his knowledge. Multiple other individuals have said the same thing.
One elderly widow is a story. A pattern is an operation.
— NOW WATCH WHAT HAPPENS TO ANYONE WHO TRIES TO LOOK —
Here is where I stop being amused, because this is the part of the article Mike Bski actually sat down to write.
Fraud is bipartisan in its temptation. It always has been. Ohio is my state and Ohio is in the middle of one of the largest Medicaid fraud crackdowns in the country right now. Texas and Florida rank near the top in raw Medicaid fraud dollars. No dollar in the Treasury has an R or a D stamped on it and I will not pretend otherwise.
What is NOT bipartisan is the reaction to being audited.
One party’s response to fraud has been: prosecute it, pause the payments, audit the rolls, publish the findings.
The other party’s response has been to sue.
Let me lay out the inventory, because when you see it stacked in one place it stops looking like a series of unrelated policy disputes and starts looking like a maintenance schedule.
ONE. DOGE. When a private citizen offered to build a team to hunt waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending, the response was not “great, here are the ledgers.” The response was arson. People burned Teslas. People firebombed dealerships. Sitting politicians publicly CELEBRATED the stock going down. Nobody, in all of that, ever produced a coherent sentence explaining what was wrong with finding fraud. Musk’s read on it holds up: the fraudsters complain the loudest.
TWO. THE SAVE ACT. A bill requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections. The standard objection is that it is unnecessary because non-citizen voting is “already illegal.” It is also already illegal to rob a bank. We still lock the vault. We still put a camera over the teller. Nobody has ever once accused a bank of voter suppression for asking to see your ID.
THREE. THE LAWSUITS. Twenty-four blue states, their attorneys general, and two governors filed suit to block DHS from making federal funds contingent on basic election-security compliance. Manual audits of a small sample of ballots. Reconciling voter lists. Actually using the SAVE database to check registrations. That is the horror they went to court over.
FOUR. THE VOTER ROLLS. THIRTY states are currently litigating against the Department of Justice to prevent it from examining voter rolls. Thirty. I have been alive fifty years and I have never once met an innocent person who spent years in federal court to avoid a spreadsheet audit. Not once. Innocent people hand over the spreadsheet, get cleared, and go back to work.
FIVE. NEW JERSEY. Roughly 6,600 non-citizens improperly registered through the Motor Vehicle Commission. People who pressed NO on a keypad when asked if they were citizens, and were registered anyway. More than four hundred of them voted. DHS analysis of the state’s own public data suggested as many as thirty-five thousand potential non-citizens, including 19,497 registrants whose name, date of birth, address, and Social Security number matched a confirmed non-citizen in federal files. The state discovered the problem in June 2023 and did not correct it until June 2024. When asked to share the identifying data with the federal government so it could be verified, the answer was that they are “not in the practice” of doing that.
They admitted the fraud and refused to let anyone measure it. In the same press conference. Into the same microphone.
SIX. USAID. When the shutdown of that agency began, we watched sitting United States Senators physically stand outside the building for the cameras. Lawsuits flew within days. And I want to be careful here, because reasonable people can absolutely argue about the value of foreign aid and I am not interested in pretending that debate is illegitimate. But notice what the fight was actually about. Not “here is our audit showing the money reached the intended people.” The fight was to preserve the FLOW while blocking the LOOK.
SEVEN. THE HEARING NOBODY SHOWED UP TO. A Senate hearing on federal fraud this month. The Republican dais was full. The Democrat dais was EMPTY. Senator Bernie Moreno said out loud what everyone could see: there are no Democrats present at a hearing about fraud. The ranking member appeared briefly, asked the twenty-five-year-old investigator zero questions, and used his time to dismiss the man’s work as sensationalized social media content produced for views.
The work in question produced fifteen federal indictments, ninety million dollars in charged fraud in Minnesota, and the largest Medicaid autism fraud case in the history of the Justice Department.
Sensationalized.
That is argumentum ad hominem, poisoning-the-well variant. It is not a rebuttal. It is what you reach for when you do not have one, and a United States Senator committed it on the record in a hearing about money he is constitutionally responsible for appropriating. The brain is a remarkable organ. It starts working in the womb and does not stop until the moment you are sworn into Congress.
Quinn’s Twenty-Sixth Law: liberals like the courts, right up until the decision does not go their way. Which is a curious pairing with Quinn’s Thirteenth: they never let a good crisis go to waste. Apparently the exception is a fraud crisis, which they let go to waste with a discipline bordering on the athletic.
— AND NOW THE PART WHERE THEY KEEP BEATING ME TO THE PUNCHLINE —
I have a bit I do. I like to invent something so absurd that no serious person would ever do it, and then let it hang there.
It has become nearly impossible to do this job.
What is next, they refuse to require the three-digit code on the back of a credit card because it might slow down donations… oh wait, I was just informed they already did that.
What is next, an entire compliance department quietly evaporates right before the subpoenas land… oh wait. March 2025. Gone.
What is next, a governor admits thousands of non-citizens are on her voter rolls and then, in the same twenty minutes, declares that the man who has been saying there are non-citizens on the voter rolls has zero credibility on election integrity… oh wait, she did that on live television, and I watched it twice to be sure I had not misheard.
What is next, twenty-four states sue the federal government to stop it from asking them to count a sample of their own ballots by hand… oh wait.
What is next, they sue to stop the audit and then hold a press conference about protecting democracy… oh wait, that one is scheduled for approximately every Tuesday.
I have run out of impossible things to invent. The source material refuses to hold still long enough for me to satirize it. That is a strange professional hazard for a guy who mostly just reads primary documents and grades lab reports.
— THE THREE POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS, AND EVERY ONE OF THEM DISQUALIFIES YOU —
So here is my question for every Democrat officeholder in America, and I want it answered without the word “billionaire” appearing anywhere in the response.
Why is your party the only one in this country fighting to PRESERVE waste, fraud, and abuse?
Not fighting for a program. Not fighting for a beneficiary. Not fighting for a single hungry child. Fighting the AUDIT. Suing the auditor. Skipping the hearing. Refusing to hand over the list. Loosening the fraud rules mid-election. Removing the compliance department.
There are only three explanations, and I have thought about this for months.
Either you did not read the reports and are simply voting the way the party told you to, against the interests of the people who sent you.
Or you read them and did not understand them.
Or you understood them perfectly and concluded your constituents are more useful to you uninformed.
Pick one. I am asking sincerely. Because your job description does not include any of the three, and “I was following leadership” has never once been an acceptable answer from a tenth grader, let alone a United States Senator.
And while we are here — what have you actually DONE for the people you represent?
Not announced. Not proposed. Not posted. DONE.
Because if the entire legislative contribution is widening the pipe without ever checking who is drinking from it, that is not compassion. That is farming. You need a dependent underclass in precisely the way the antebellum South needed one, and the only thing that has changed in a hundred sixty years is the paperwork. Chains became caseloads. Overseers became caseworkers. The plantation became a program. And the vote still gets delivered on schedule, every November, right on time.
Proverbs 11:1 says a false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is His delight. That is not a metaphor about feelings. In the ancient world the merchant carried two sets of stones, a heavy one for buying and a light one for selling, and Scripture is relentless about it — Deuteronomy 25:13-16 commands a full and just weight and calls the man with two sets of stones an abomination, and Amos 8:5 indicts the men who could not wait for the Sabbath to end so they could make the ephah small and the shekel great.
The sin was never the arithmetic. The sin was RIGGING THE MEASUREMENT so no one could check you. Which is, precisely, what a fundraising platform without a CVV field and a state that will not release its voter list are both doing.
— THE 1963 LIST, BECAUSE THE OUTCOMES KEEP MATCHING —
On January 10, 1963, Congressman Albert Herlong of Florida read into the permanent Congressional Record a list of 45 Communist Goals for America, drawn from Cleon Skousen’s research.
I am not telling you a cabal is working a checklist. I am a science teacher. I do not need intent to evaluate a result. I compare the OUTCOME to the PREDICTION, and when the outcome matches across independent trials over sixty years, intellectual honesty requires me to at least write it down.
Goal Number 15: capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
Goal Number 16: use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions. Thirty states are in federal court right now to stop an audit of their voter rolls. Twenty-four sued to block election-security funding conditions.
Goal Number 29: discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate and out of step with modern needs. Ask the current crop how they feel about the Electoral College that Hamilton designed in Federalist 68 for the specific purpose of keeping foreign money out of American elections.
Goal Number 32: support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture.
Write it down. Compare it to the news. Draw your own conclusions. That is all I have ever asked anyone to do.
— ABOUT THAT “WHITE SUPREMACIST” LABEL —
When the young man with the camera started filming empty buildings that were collecting millions in taxpayer dollars, a sitting governor called him a delusional conspiracy theorist and labeled his work white supremacy.
So let us examine the modern left’s actual standards for who gets the label and who does not.
Graham Platner. Democrat. Senate candidate. Roughly eighteen hundred Reddit comments under an alias in which he called himself a communist, wrote that all cops are bastards, asked why Black people do not tip, described rural white Americans as a category that is stupid and racist, and instructed women not to get so intoxicated that they end up having sex they did not intend and to act like an adult. His campaign director resigned over that last one. He advocated an armed working class and said serious antifascists should expect to fight with fists and guns if need be. He posed for a photo with a man in an 88 shirt. He has a tattoo he has spent months explaining. In 2014 he watched footage of a Hamas raid that killed Israeli soldiers and commented that it was a damn fine looking and successful raid, and that he dug it. And in 2026, after all the apologies, he used the r-word again in an interview.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren went to Maine to campaign for him.
Meanwhile the Southern Poverty Law Center — the organization that spent three decades manufacturing the “spot the Nazi on the right” industry — was federally indicted in May 2026 for allegedly funneling over three million dollars of donor money to the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the American Nazi Party between 2014 and 2023.
So the young man who filmed an empty daycare is a white supremacist, and the man with the SS skull who dug the Hamas raid gets a rally with two sitting Senators.
Quinn’s Second Law is not a punchline. It is a diagnostic instrument, and it works with unsettling reliability: if you want to know what they are up to, listen to what they accuse you of.
I spent twenty-three years in an Army uniform. I have escorted little girls to school in Iraq through areas where wanting an education could get a child killed. So when someone tells me the word Nazi still means something to them, I would like to see the receipt, and I would like it to have been printed after they got back from Maine.
— TAX THE RICH, SAID THE MILLIONAIRE, INTO THE PLATFORM —
I would be remiss.
The same donation apparatus under discussion is the primary vehicle for candidates who campaign on the moral urgency of taxing the wealthy. Candidates who are, with remarkable consistency, wealthy. Not merely wealthy — wealthy while sitting on the committees that write the tax code they then hire people to help them navigate.
So here is my standing offer, open to any of them, and it costs nothing but nerve.
Before I hear one more sermon about the greed of the rich, voluntarily remit DOUBLE what the IRS says you owe. Standard deduction only. No itemizing. No trusts. No carve-outs. No clever real estate. Publish the return. Do it for one single tax year.
Lead by example for twelve months and I will personally amplify your message to every follower I have.
Until then, you are a blatherskite selling a product you refuse to consume, and the rest of us are expected to buy it retail.
— THE CLOSING ARGUMENT —
I want to be honest about what this article does and does not establish.
It does not establish that ActBlue is a criminal enterprise. Investigations are ongoing. Charges have not been filed against the platform. ActBlue denies systemic wrongdoing and points to its detection systems as proof of diligence. That denial is in this article on purpose, because I am not in the business of hiding the other side’s best answer.
What it establishes is much simpler, and much harder to wriggle out of.
Every institution in this country was built on the assumption that people would behave honorably. Verification was treated as an insult. Documentation was treated as a burden. Skepticism was treated as bigotry.
And a generation of operators looked at all that trust and saw a WEAKNESS TO BE HARVESTED.
The response of one party has been to prosecute, pause, and audit.
The response of the other has been to sue the auditors, empty the hearing room, dissolve the compliance department, plead the Fifth 146 times, and go to federal court in thirty states to keep anyone from reading a list.
I did not choose those sides. I read the transcripts. They chose themselves.
Here is the whole solution, and it is not complicated. It is just expensive to the people currently getting paid.
Verify first. Pay second. Prosecute always. Publish everything.
An 88-year-old widow in a trailer in Michigan deserved better than to have her name used fourteen thousand times. And the honest small-dollar donors who DID give their nine dollars because they believed in something deserve to know whether their money went where they thought it went.
That is not a partisan position. That is just arithmetic with a conscience attached.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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