By TIM MEISBURGER | CHRONICLES OF AMERICAN CULTURE
Ever wonder why your representative voted in opposition to an issue supported by a majority of his constituents? It may be because he is secretly more accountable to illegal donors than he is to his voters.
Recent research by Vote Your Vision, a national election integrity organization, suggests that illegal campaign contributions through identity theft are much more common than is generally known, and are likely the largest factor undermining the quality of democratic representation provided by our politicians.
“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, there have been numerous reports that smurfing has been used to launder illegal contributions to political campaigns through identity theft.
Criminals do this by identifying someone who made contributions in the past (usually a senior citizen), and then they make hundreds or thousands of small dollar donations in that person’s name to a particular campaign or candidate, thereby evading campaign contribution limits.
Tens of thousands of people across the country are victims of this form of identity fraud in every election cycle, and thousands of candidates (whether knowingly or not) have benefited from these types of illegal contributions.
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Editor’s note: Check the list of high frequency donors in Alaska at this link. Use the tool to drill into Alaska information on those who have made more than 100 donations to campaigns and follow the links to the FEC file on the donations and where they went. Is your name on the list? If so, have you been smurfed?