Colorado Candidate Hits Up Massachusetts Non-Voter Via the Payment Processor That Helped Raise Tens of Millions for the Organization That Bought the Mansion
I was minding my own goddamn business in Shelburne, Massachusetts—2,000 miles from Colorado—when my phone lit up with a text from a retired Navy rear admiral I’ve never heard of, running for Congress in a district I’ve never set foot in, asking me—someone who has never voted in my life—to please send money right now so Lauren Boebert doesn’t steal the election.
The message was pure, uncut panic. Boebert is “trying to claim voter fraud.” She’s hired “one of Donald Trump’s attorneys.” There are “very unusual voting patterns.” Therefore I, a non-voter 2,000 miles away, must immediately click the ActBlue link and donate so every vote can be “fairly counted” and sanity and dignity can be restored to Colorado’s 4th. Stop to quit, of course. How civilized.
I checked the numbers because I’m not a complete idiot. She’s up by a few thousand votes with almost everything counted. That’s outside the automatic recount threshold. The other side can still pay for one if they want, and they’ve muttered about unusual patterns, but the text treats it like the Reichstag fire. The solution is not “wait for certification.” The solution is more money. Always more money. The previous money was apparently enough to run the campaign, but not enough to stop the steal that hasn’t happened yet.
And the collection plate is being passed on ActBlue. The same ActBlue that, back in 2020, processed a firehose of donations for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Tens of millions. The kind of haul that makes consultants salivate. What followed is now public record and still somehow treated as a minor accounting footnote by the people who spent two years screaming that silence is violence: a multimillion-dollar mansion purchase, family and consultant payments that made charity watchdogs raise an eyebrow, grants that looked a lot smaller once you got past the press releases, internal lawsuits, and the general vibe of a nonprofit that discovered it had more money than governance. ActBlue’s official position was essentially “we just process the checks.” Which is true in the same way a getaway driver is “just driving.”
So here I am. Never voted. Live in Shelburne. Don’t care about the 4th District. And I’m being cold-texted from 2,000 miles away by a campaign that wants me to treat a margin outside automatic recount as an existential threat to democracy, using the identical payment rail that once moved a small fortune to an organization whose subsequent spending looked less like mutual aid and more like a real-estate and consulting windfall.
I hit STOP. The admiral will presumably find other non-voters. ActBlue will take its cut either way. And somewhere, a mansion is still standing. Democracy, I’m told, remains in peril. It just needs another five dollars from people who don’t vote and live 2,000 miles from the district.