The House committee that oversees election laws advanced a package of bills Thursday aimed at closing what Republicans call gaping holes in the country's campaign finance system, loopholes they say allow fraudsters and foreign nationals to funnel illegal money into American elections through online donation platforms.
Chairman Bryan Steil, the Wisconsin Republican who has led a three-year investigation into the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, pushed three bills through the committee and toward a full House vote. The measures would tighten donor verification rules, ban political contributions made with prepaid gift cards, and bar foreign nationals from bankrolling electioneering activities such as voter registration drives and ballot harvesting.
The timing is no accident. With the 2026 midterms approaching, the Republican-controlled Congress has accelerated its push to reform election and voting laws, and the ActBlue investigation has given Steil's committee a concrete target. As Just the News reported, three of the bills advanced Thursday grew directly out of that probe.
The centerpiece is the Campaign Finance Transparency Act. It would require every political donation made by credit or debit card to include a CVV or CVC security code, a billing zip code, and a cardholder name that matches the donor's name. Those are basic fraud-prevention steps that most Americans already encounter when they buy a pair of shoes online, yet current law does not require them for political contributions.
The bill would also prohibit political donations made with prepaid gift cards, a method that effectively lets a contributor hide behind an anonymous payment instrument. And it would force donation platforms to report all political contributions, not just those above a certain dollar threshold. Contributions from donors who lack a U.S. mailing address would require document verification to confirm that foreign actors are not using American identities to route money to preferred candidates.
A second bill, the Preventing Foreign Interference in American Elections Act, targets a different vector. It would ban foreign nationals outright from donating to electioneering activities, a category that includes voter registration campaigns, get-out-the-vote efforts, and ballot harvesting operations. Steil said he introduced the measure because the current system leaves the door open to exactly that kind of influence.
"Foreign nationals cannot be allowed to influence American elections. That's why I introduced the Preventing Foreign Interference in American Elections Act, which bans foreign nationals from donating to electioneering activities. This includes voter registration, get out the vote efforts, and ballot harvesting."
The third bill, the Stop Foreign Funds in Elections Act, takes aim at foreign money that flows not to candidates but to ballot initiatives, shaping what proposals voters see and how elections themselves are administered.
That concern is not hypothetical. In 2024, foreign billionaires moved money through nonprofit "dark money" groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund to support progressive ballot initiatives related to abortion access and automatic voter registration in Ohio, Arizona, and Nevada. The Stop Foreign Funds in Elections Act is designed to shut down that pipeline.
Steil's committee did not arrive at these bills by accident. The chairman has spent three years digging into ActBlue's operations, and what his investigators found was not reassuring. As Steil told Fox News Digital, "My investigation into ActBlue has demonstrated that the current campaign finance laws weren't drafted for the modern era we live in." He added: "The major gaps we've uncovered are being exploited by fraudsters and foreign nationals to make illegal political donations."
During the Thursday markup, Steil framed the problem in blunt terms.
"Through our investigation, we've learned that fraudsters and foreign nationals could exploit the current system to make illegal campaign finance contributions. That's an unacceptable vulnerability and we have an opportunity to fix it."
The investigation's findings have not come easily. An interim staff report released by the House Administration, Oversight, and Judiciary Committees earlier this year revealed that ActBlue employees invoked the Fifth Amendment at least 146 times during depositions conducted between July and December 2025. Two current officials and three former lawyers declined to answer substantive questions. As the New York Post reported, the committees' report also alleged that ActBlue withheld subpoenaed records and that CEO Regina Wallace-Wells made seemingly false statements to Congress.
"Their unwillingness to testify only amplifies the Committees' concerns," the interim staff report stated. It added: "Not a single employee offered testimony that could help ensure that American elections are free, fair, and decided by Americans alone."
That stonewalling is worth pausing on. When a major political fundraising platform's employees refuse, 146 times, to answer questions about whether their systems prevent foreign money and fraud, and when the company allegedly withholds subpoenaed documents, Congress has every reason to legislate the safeguards that the platform apparently will not adopt voluntarily. House Republicans had already demanded that ActBlue's CEO testify amid mounting concerns about the platform's donor verification practices.
The bills now head to the House floor, but anyone who has watched this Congress knows the harder fight lies in the Senate. The House-passed SAVE America Act, which would have strengthened voter identification requirements nationwide, already faltered and effectively died in the upper chamber after it became clear that every Democratic senator would oppose it.
That pattern tells its own story. Republicans pass election integrity measures in the House. Democrats block them in the Senate. And the loopholes remain open for another cycle. The SAVE Act's failure in the Senate remains a sore point for conservatives who see basic voter ID as common sense, not partisanship.
Whether Steil's new package meets the same fate may depend on whether the ActBlue investigation, and the 146 Fifth Amendment invocations, generate enough public pressure to move the needle. The specific provisions in these bills are hard to argue against on the merits. Requiring a CVV code for a political donation is not voter suppression. Banning gift-card contributions is not an attack on free speech. Verifying that donors are actually American citizens is not radical.
Yet Democrats have shown a consistent willingness to oppose election security measures that might inconvenience their fundraising apparatus. The question is whether that position remains tenable when the evidence of potential abuse keeps piling up.
These bills fit into a larger election-year strategy. The Republican-controlled Congress has ramped up efforts to reform election and voting laws as the midterms approach. Speaker Johnson has projected confidence about Republican prospects in 2026, and election integrity legislation gives the party a concrete agenda to run on, particularly when the opposition's primary fundraising platform is under active investigation.
The legislation also addresses a structural problem that extends beyond any single platform. Steil put it plainly: "Our current campaign finance laws were not written for the digital age." That is not a partisan observation. It is a factual one. The explosion of online small-dollar fundraising has created a system where millions of transactions flow through platforms with minimal verification. A $5 donation made with a prepaid gift card and a fake name may seem trivial in isolation. Multiply it by hundreds of thousands and you have a system-wide vulnerability.
The Campaign Finance Transparency Act's requirement that platforms report all political donations, not just those above a certain dollar amount, targets exactly this gap. Small-dollar fraud is harder to detect precisely because the individual amounts are small. Requiring full reporting gives regulators and the public the data they need to spot patterns.
Meanwhile, the foreign-influence bills address a threat that both parties have claimed to take seriously since at least 2016. Foreign nationals bankrolling ballot initiatives through dark-money nonprofits is not a hypothetical concern, it happened in 2024 across multiple states. If Congress is serious about preventing foreign election interference, banning foreign donations to electioneering activities is a straightforward place to start.
The political dynamics, however, remain complicated. Internal Republican tensions over legislative priorities have slowed the broader agenda, and Senate math remains unforgiving for anything that requires bipartisan support.
The three bills now await a vote on the House floor. If they pass, which seems likely given the Republican majority, the real test begins in the Senate. The SAVE America Act's fate looms as a cautionary precedent. Every Democratic senator opposed that bill, and there is no public indication that the dynamics have shifted enough to produce a different result for Steil's package.
Several questions remain unanswered. The committee vote count for advancing the bills has not been disclosed. The specific evidence from Steil's ActBlue investigation, beyond the Fifth Amendment invocations and the alleged document withholding, has not been fully detailed. And whether any of these measures could be attached to must-pass legislation, bypassing a standalone Senate vote, remains to be seen.
What is clear is that the current system has gaps wide enough for foreign money and anonymous gift-card donations to pass through. A three-year investigation produced 146 refusals to answer questions and allegations of withheld records. The platform at the center of the probe processes billions of dollars in political contributions.
Congress wrote the rules for a pre-digital era. Steil's bills would update them. The only people who benefit from leaving the loopholes open are the ones exploiting them.
