Imagine you are 80 years old and the unexpected knock on your door turns out to be an eager young journalist who wants to know how on earth you found the time, money, and energy to make all those small political donations to Democratic candidates and progressive activist groups.
"What are you talking about, young man? I think I gave Bill Clinton $10 a long time ago, but I haven't given anybody in either party a penny since that contribution," you exclaim.
Turns out, the young journalist excitedly explains, that Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show you made more than 20,000 donations in recent months with a total value in excess of $800.000!
And oh by the way, according to those same FEC records, you are still living at an address in Virginia, not the New Jersey home where this increasingly tense interview is taking place.
Something clearly isn't right. Either the FEC records represent some sort of computer glitch or you are a victim of Smurfing. Never heard of Smurfing? Here's how Election Watch defines it:
"The term 'Smurf' or 'Smurfing' is generally said to be what happens to an 'Individual' where an Individual's name data has the appearance of being used or stolen to make additional transactions to campaign(s)/committee(s). Some consider this to be a form of fraud, money laundering and/or identity theft.
"While these matters seem to remain at least somewhat under debate, or yet still to be debated and/or resolved, we nonetheless find Individuals transaction data within the herein datasets that demonstrate numbers and patterns of transactions under Indivuals names that indeed appear to be highly questionable."
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares recently told Act Blue — the digital fund-raising giant for Democratic candidates and progressive causes — that he is concerned the organization is being used or is allowing illegal fund-raising within the Commonwealth of Virginia. Act Blue quickly responded by denying all wrong-doing and accusing Miyares of political grandstanding.
Is the Virginia AG correct? Further investigation will, hopefully, provide him and Act Blue abundant opportunities to make full presentations of whatever evidence each might offer in a court of law. Act Blue is innocent until proven otherwise.
For now, here are the basic facts: Election Watch is a Wisconsin-based political donation analysis operation that relies on FEC data to compile its state-by-state database of what appear to be thousands of examples of Smurfed political contributions.
Election Watch emphasizes that FEC data is far from perfectly reliable:
"Although the statistical and summary data presented in this site are compiled with the best effort to be accurate, the data obtained from the FEC & Wisconsin CFIS has a number of difficulties when working to compile statistics from.
"There are constraints such as blank Names, Cities, States, Zip codes as well as invalid dates (zero dates and dates in the future). There are many States, Cities and Zip codes that are simply invalid. Names in the transaction records are mixed and we find what appears to be individuals having made transactions under variations of names (eg: DOE, JOHN & DOE, JOHN MR. etc)."
That said, FEC data is relied upon by political strategists of all stripes, legislators from both parties, academics and commercial marketing firms because it is generally reliable. When something looks suspicious, it bears serious examination by officials like Virginia's AG.
Election Watch has compiled thousands of examples of a recent pattern that consists of elderly women making tens of thousands of donations of varying amounts to Democratic candidates and progressive activist groups.
The problem is, a donor who is listed as having made 25,000 donations of varying amounts needed, assuming three minutes per donation, would have to do nothing but make contributions 24/7, for 52 days. No bathroom breaks, no meals, no sleep.
Nobody in their right mind would do that, of course, but consider the odds of how long it would take a 75 year-old woman to make 25,000 individual donations. Extend the time for each donation from three minutes to five minutes and the total of days required working 24/7 goes up to 87.
And we haven't even mentioned the additional fact that the contribution totals for legions of the donations compiled by Election Watch are substantial. The first entry for Virginia, for example, totals nearly $840,000.
There are no doubt grandmothers in this country who care so much about Democratic candidates and progressive causes that they would hand over a huge chunk of their retirement savings. But to believe there are hundreds of thousands of such grandmothers stretches credulity.
Here's a theory: Somebody (China? Russia?) is providing millions of dollars to big groups of individuals being paid to submit donations of varying amounts using names of elderly folks gleaned from old FEC records via Act Blue and/or other contribution conduits. Do the candidates or causes know this is being done? That's one of the key questions to be answered.
Stay tuned, folks, this could be huge.
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