Are Billionaires Laundering Illegal Political Donations in Your Neighborhood?

Smurfing is a money laundering technique where large sums of illicit money are broken down into smaller, less noticeable transactions to evade detection by regulatory authorities. Recently, smurfing has been used to launder illegal contributions into political campaigns through identity theft. Criminals identify someone who made contributions in the past (usually a senior citizen), and then make hundreds or thousands of small dollar donations in their name to a particular campaign or candidate, thereby evading campaign contribution limits. Thousands of people across the country are victims of this form of identity fraud, and thousands of candidates (whether knowingly or not) have benefited from these illegal contributions.

Voter Your Vision has developed a tool that uses publicly available data from the Federal Election Commission to identify individuals who have made a large number of contributions in any election cycle over the last ten years. Unusually high numbers of contributions (sometimes in the thousand or tens of thousands) are often an indicator of this type of fraud. By using this tool, determine if smurfing is happening in your neighborhood. By clicking this link CHECK YOUR ZIP!, and following the directions below, you can determine if smurfing is happening in your neighborhood.

Check Your Zip! Instructions

 Open the STATE box in the upper left of the page, then click on the check mark next to STATE to uncheck all the states in the list. Then type in the abbreviation for your state (in my case I will type in VA for Virginia) and check the box for your state, then close the box. It should look like the image below.

We can see a list of those people who made the most political contributions in Virginia since 2014. At the top is Judy Bonin, who made 15,650 separate contributions in just 2022 alone, and many others who made thousands of contributions. This looks like smurfing.

Next, click on the zip code box and deselect all of the zip codes by clicking the check mark next to cleaned_zip_code, then go down the list and select your zip code. In my case, the second zip code is mine, so I will select that. The top contributor in my zip code is Nancy Evinger, who made at least 5829 contributions in the last ten years, with 3991 in 2022 alone. That looks like smurfing. In fact, all of the top six look like smurfing.

Confirming Data and Further Analysis at the FEC

 Our tool works off downloaded data, and may not be up to date, so now let’s go to the source, the Federal Elections Commission. Click View info on fec.gov next to a name, and you will go direct to that person’s data at the FEC. In my example, I see that Nancy Evinger has 7964 entries and is not employed. If I want to limit data to a particular election cycle, I can scroll down on the left to “REPORT TIME PERIOD” and input that filter, but in my case, I will use it all. Now we have our data set for analysis. 

The next step requires a basic knowledge of Excel. On the upper right of the FEC page find the Export button and click that. When the download is ready, click Download at the bottom left of the page, then find the file in your downloads folder and open in Excel.

 There are a lot of columns here I am not interested in, so I will hide D-M, O-U, and X-AH. It should look like this:

Next, let’s do some basic checks. 

First, sort the address column A-Z. To ensure we have a single address, check the first address listed against the last. If they are not the same, delete all the rows for irrelevant address(es). In my case they are all the same.

Now, sort by report_year (column C) and record the number of contributions for each year and the total contributed for each year. I get:

Looks like the smurfing began in 2020. Next, sort by committee_name (column B). I found donations went to 50 different PACs and candidates across the country, with the majority (62%) going to ActBlue. While in this case all of the contributions went to Democrats or Democrat-leaning PACs, there are reports that in some states Republicans have also engaged in smurfing.

This is the basic data I was interested in. I will review some more of the top contributors in my zip code (and check my own name at the FEC website), then visit Ms. Evinger and other to confirm that that they did not make these contributions and that their identity has been stolen.