Kanye West Campaign Accused of Accepting Donations From Minors

The 2020 presidential election is over and done with, but Kanye West‘s presidential campaign is still facing scrutiny and possible legal action from the Federal Elections Commission over alleged improprieties.

On March 5, The Daily Beast published an investigation into West’s Birthday Party Campaign, which has been reportedly eyed by the FEC over an abnormal number of complaints. “In five-plus years of doing this I’ve never come across something like this,” said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told the publication about ‘Ye’s campaign.

Jennifer Bloom, mother of 16-year-old donor Ian Bloom called West’s campaign “a scam.” Her son purchased $3,280 worth of Kanye 2020 merch with hopes of making a sizeable flip on the secondary market. He reportedly has not received a single item he purchased. “I don’t know what’s happening there,” Ian Bloom said. “I ordered like 20 hoodies off his campaign website, along with a lot of other people that I know. They said it would be three weeks, and after that I emailed the support team, and the email just wasn’t a thing.” He is still trying to dispute the charges with his credit card company.

There is also the issue of accepting campaign donations from minors, which is illegal. Students reportedly account for upward of 1,200 of the West campaign’s 3,161 donations, with the contributing total being. $349,160. “I can say with confidence that at least half of us in the group have to be still in high school,” Bloom added. Two other minors came forward, including 15-year-old Andres Zapata who claimed he donated $1,300 in January but has yet to receive his items. Merch is no longer available on Kanye’s campaign site.

XXL has reached out to Kanye West’s publicists and presidential campaign for comment.

Kanye confirmed he was running for president in 2020 last July, getting a late start on his already unfathomable run to become the POTUS. Things were shaky from the start with Kanye reportedly hiring and firing a 180-person campaign staff within a week of announcing his run. After reigniting his campaign in September, he reportedly asked the unwed people on his staff to abstain from having sex.

The rapper-politician struggled to get on ballots in several states and was even removed from the ballot in Illinois after it was discovered that 1,900 of the signatures his campaign allegedly obtained were invalid, prompting some to believe the FEC would launch an investigation into voter fraud.

Kanye raised $2 million from contributions from individuals and spent $12.4 million of his own money on his campaign, according to FEC data. He was strangely confident about his chances of winning. However, he only secured 60,000 total votes.

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