Elizabeth Waffle is 88 years old. She lives in a trailer. She does not own a computer. And according to ActBlue's records, she has made 14,696 political donations over the past five years — averaging eight per day, every single day, at $9.18 a pop.
Her response when told about the $150,000 attributed to her name: "One hundred and fifty thousand? Hell no. I don't have that kind of money."
Twitchy reported that 47 of those donations were directed to the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic Socialist running for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. Forty-seven separate transactions from one elderly woman to one candidate. A woman who, again, does not own a computer and had no idea any of it was happening.
Let's do some quick math. Fourteen thousand six hundred and ninety-six donations at $9.18 each comes out to roughly $134,830 — run through the name and address of a single octogenarian in a trailer park. The donations didn't come in bursts. They came in at a steady clip of eight per day, five years running, with the mechanical consistency of a script, not a human being.
That's because it almost certainly wasn't a human being.
The pattern fits what investigators have described as foreign money "rinsing" — using the stolen identities of elderly Americans to push foreign cash through domestic fundraising platforms in small enough increments to avoid detection. ActBlue's platform processes the transactions. The names on the donations are real people. The money is not theirs.
ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones has had the opportunity to explain how this keeps happening. She chose a different route. During a congressional hearing on foreign contributions flowing through the platform, Wallace-Jones invoked her Fifth Amendment rights 22 times. Not once or twice on narrow legal questions. Twenty-two times.
The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination. It does not typically inspire confidence in your platform's integrity.
El-Sayed's campaign has not addressed how a woman with no internet access became one of its most prolific small-dollar donors. The platform that processed the transactions has a CEO who won't talk. And the 88-year-old whose name was used is sitting in her trailer wondering how her identity ended up attached to a six-figure Democratic fundraising operation.
Progressive fundraising has long celebrated the "small-dollar donor revolution" as proof that their candidates are powered by ordinary Americans. ActBlue has been the crown jewel of that narrative — the democratized platform where grassroots energy translates into grassroots dollars. That story requires you to not look too closely at who the donors actually are.
Elizabeth Waffle made eight donations a day for five years. She didn't know about any of them. The platform processed every single one. The CEO took the Fifth 22 times.
That's not a fundraising platform. That's a pipeline with a privacy policy.