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A new report from three House committees finds that ActBlue’s “passport verification” only counted characters and that supervisors told fraud analysts to give donors flagged as foreign “the benefit of the doubt.” Conley let this happen on her watch, still features ActBlue as the main donate button on her campaign website, and has not said a word about the findings.

Pearl River, NY — September 21, 2026 —  On September 16, the House Committees on Administration, the Judiciary, and Oversight and Government Reform released an interim staff report concluding that ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s dominant fundraising platform, “maintains unserious fraud-prevention practices that allow illegal foreign donations in U.S. elections.”

The report is built on ActBlue’s own internal documents that show, according to the committees, the “passport verification” feature ActBlue described to Congress as a safeguard against foreign money “only ensures that the entered passport number contains a certain number of characters,” and the company’s records state that it does “not verify the [passport number] information in any other way . . . [or] check the information provided against a government database.” Employees could also enter a placeholder, “ACTBLUEXX,” that skipped verification for a donor going forward.

Internal review logs covering October 2022 through October 2024 show supervisors instructing fraud analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt.” In one entry, a donor with “a few red flags, such as IP/billing mismatch and a concerning IP provider name, a foreign credit card, an odd email domain,” and a browser fingerprint connected to previously rejected users was to be accepted because ActBlue “can’t say for sure that this is fraud.” The committees also found that ActBlue weakened its fraud-prevention standards twice during 2024. The New York Times reported in April that ActBlue’s own outside counsel, former Biden White House Counsel Dana Remus, warned in memos that the platform’s acceptance of illegal foreign contributions appeared to be “knowing and willful” and that its CEO may have misled Congress.

Cait Conley spent that same election year as Senior Advisor to the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, supposedly leading the agency’s election security work. And in September 2024, she told reporters that “election security is national security” and cited the intelligence community’s warnings about Russia, China, and Iran.

Today the primary donate button on Conley’s campaign website sends supporters to ActBlue. In the four days since the report was released, Conley has said nothing.

“Cait Conley likes to brag about how she led election security for the federal government in 2024. House investigators have now published internal logs showing that, during that same election, the platform that now processes her donations approved contributions flagged for foreign credit cards and foreign IP addresses,” said Lawler for Congress spokesman Ciro Riccardi. “Four days after this bombshell report, she has not said one word about it, and the ActBlue button is still prominently featured as the donation option on her website.”

Cait Conley owes Hudson Valley voters direct answers:

1. During her time leading election security work at CISA, were illicit foreign donations through online fundraising platforms ever raised with her or her team, and if so, what was done?
2. Will she stop raising money through ActBlue until the platform verifies donor eligibility against something more than a character count?
3. Will she review the contributions her campaign has received through ActBlue for the red flags the report identifies, and refund any that cannot be confirmed as coming from U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents?
4. Will she call on ActBlue’s CEO to produce every document the committees have requested?

“‘Mike Lawler and Cait Conley agree on something – that election security is national security. But on Cait Conley’s watch, it appears illegal foreign money flowed into American campaigns – an election security problem by any definition,” Riccardi concluded. “Cait should have done something before to stop it, but at least she can take one positive action today: she can stop taking money through ActBlue until it can show its donors are who they say they are. If she won’t, voters in NY-17 can fairly ask whether election security matters to her, or it’s just another canned line for her stump speech.”
 

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