It may be that the FEC data records multiple occurrences of the same donation.
An investigation into the Republican platform WinRed is also equally necessary.
"Saurav Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission enforcement attorney and the federal campaign finance reform director for Campaign Legal Center, responded to an X post claiming that a single Michigan donor gave more than 20,000 times since 2019 to ActBlue.
“I’ve seen several posts like this recently, so as someone that has spent a lot of time with @fec data allow me to present a simple and non-nefarious explanation for how one person can easily make thousands of donations in a few years,” Ghosh wrote in a July 29 X post, which was one of the links ActBlue shared on Friday.
Ghosh noted that when someone gives to a particular campaign or cause through an online fundraising platform like ActBlue or its Republican counterpart WinRed, it’s “recorded as TWO transactions in FEC data reports, one for the contribution from donor to platform, and one for the contribution from platform to candidate.”
The platforms, Ghosh wrote, collect contributions that are spread to multiple candidates, meaning donors give to funds that could be divided among several campaigns.
“A donor can give a small amount to the fund, and FEC records will show a very small amount donated to each candidate,” Ghosh wrote. “So with just a few clicks the donor can make a single monthly donation that looks like they made dozens of separate mini-donations. They almost certainly didn’t.”
Ghosh added that the “same analysis could apply to WinRed aggregate funds backing multiple GOP candidates” and that the FEC “probably needs a better website interface (or an improved reporting system) to make it clearer how this all works.”
“But unless and until they adopt one, this reporting framework will no doubt continue to generate confusion, unfortunately,” his X thread concluded."
