Peter Schweizer Explains: What Is ‘Smurfing,’ and How Does It Threaten Election Integrity?

The 2020 election was decided a margin of fewer than 50,000 votes cast in in four swing states across the entire country. In four large cities in these states — Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee — anywhere from 85,000 to 268,000 votes were added to Joe Biden’s total in the wee hours of election night.

That doesn’t necessarily mean there was fraud. It was explained as the counting of the absentee ballots.

But as Eric Eggers, author of the 2018 book on election shenanigans called FRAUD points out, “it was this sort of magical, mysterious infusion of votes that caused a lot of people to have very real concerns about the security of American elections.”

On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eggers talk about this and other election-security matters, including a practice called “smurfing.”

Schweizer says, “There are so many basic ways that the electoral system can be manipulated… It’s a very complicated thing when you hold elections. They’re decentralized. States and local governments are the ones that manage them, and something that occurs in one city could have huge ramifications. It’s not just the counting of the ballots and of the votes that matters. It actually starts before then, actually in how our campaigns increasingly are being financed.”

“Smurfing” is actually quite dangerous. It relates to taking large donations and breaking them into a series of smaller donations to mask that they are large donations in order to get around campaign finance law limits, Schweizer explains. The Government Accountability Institute (GAI) is currently investigating about fifty different threats to American elections, and “smurfing” campaign contributions is one of the least understood ways of corrupting American elections.

Back in 2012, GAI did one of its very first reports about “Obama.com” and highlighted how foreign money could be entering American political campaigns (a violation of federal law), because the site was not requiring credit card verification by including the three- or four-digit CVC security codes that every credit card carries.

Just this past August, House Republicans demanded the Federal Election Commission (FEC) look into allegations of “smurfing,” after seeing a flood of millions of dollars pour into the brand-new campaign of Kamala Harris campaign in its first days. Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) demanded the FEC investigate recent allegations “of fraudulent, deceptive, and potentially illegal behavior” on the part of ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform that’s hauled in millions of dollars in donations for Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign and its affiliated entities, according to Fox News.

Other investigative reporters, such as James O’Keefe, have also looked into contributions totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors who, when interviewed, denied ever having made them.

The hosts discuss other election threats including dirty voter rolls, ballot harvesting by non-government organizations, efforts to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls, and other issues during the show. GAI’s report on these issues will be out soon.

For more from Peter Schweizer, subscribe to The DrillDown podcast.

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