A Capital Research Center investigation says 83 tax-exempt voter-registration and turnout organizations spent nearly $639 million during the 2024 election cycle, documenting what the watchdog describes as a coordinated Democrat-aligned and left-wing network tied to voter outreach, redistricting, the Census, ranked-choice voting and efforts to change how presidential electors are awarded.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed through tax-exempt organizations involved in voter registration, turnout campaigns and other election-related initiatives during the 2024 cycle, according to a new investigation that identifies the activity as part of a broader left-wing operation aligned with Democrat electoral interests.
The 64-page analysis from the conservative Capital Research Center examined 83 major 501(c)(3) organizations engaged in voter-registration and get-out-the-vote activities and calculated that they collectively spent approximately $638.7 million in 2024.
That represented a 30% increase from 2020 in nominal terms and approximately a 10% increase after adjusting for inflation, according to the report cited by Breitbart News.
FINAL CRC CharitiesInfluencingElections WebDraft by yourNEWS Media
Over roughly the same period, inflation-adjusted spending through conventional political action committees declined by about 20%, CRC found.
The organization argues that the divergence reflects a deliberate shift by Democrat-aligned donors and progressive strategists toward charities that can receive tax-deductible contributions while generally disclosing considerably less information about their donors than traditional political committees.
“Americans deserve to know whether tax-deductible charitable contributions are being illicitly used to subsidize partisan political operations,” CRC President Scott Walter said.
“This report follows the money and reveals a coordinated infrastructure working to influence who votes, how districts are drawn, how we elect our President, and ultimately who controls the government,” Walter continued. “Congress, the IRS, and state authorities need to examine these findings and hold ‘charities’ accountable.”
CRC’s investigation, The “Charities” Influencing Elections: 2024 and Beyond, extends well beyond voter-registration spending. Researchers examined funding associated with Census participation campaigns, congressional redistricting, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and ranked-choice voting, arguing that those efforts form interconnected components of a larger Democrat-aligned election-influence infrastructure.
The report characterizes much of that network as left-wing and contends that supposedly nonpartisan charitable programs have frequently concentrated resources on demographic populations expected to vote disproportionately for Democrats.
One of the earliest examples cited by CRC comes from 2015, when leaked emails belonging to longtime Democratic operative John Podesta revealed a proposal for a $100 million voter-registration initiative.
Podesta later chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
According to CRC, the proposal was sent to Podesta by the president of the private foundation belonging to Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, a major donor to progressive and Democrat-aligned causes.
The plan contemplated using 501(c)(3) foundations and charities to register millions of voters in eight battleground states.
CRC said tables accompanying the proposal calculated how many “total non-white” votes the project might generate. Researchers also pointed to edits that reportedly removed language referring to “beating Republicans” and “reshaping the electorate.”
The watchdog argues those documents demonstrate that the proposed effort sought to increase participation among demographic groups considered more likely to support Democratic candidates while formally operating as nonpartisan voter registration.
Wyss later became a major financial supporter of progressive nonprofit organizations, directing hundreds of millions of dollars to groups including the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund.
Both were formerly managed by Arabella Advisors, whose network of nonprofits and sponsored projects developed into a major source of funding for left-wing causes and has frequently been described by critics as a dark-money operation.
A separate internal document cited by CRC suggests Democratic-aligned political strategists had explicitly calculated the electoral value of charitable voter-registration programs by 2020.
A leaked memo from the Democratic-aligned super PAC Mind the Gap described charitable voter registration as “4 to 10 times more cost effective than the next best alternative” for “netting additional Democratic votes,” according to the report.
The flow of charitable money accelerated again before the 2024 election.
The Democracy Fund, founded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, organized an effort called “All by April” encouraging donors to issue election-related grants to 501(c)(3) groups sufficiently early in the year for the money to influence programs before the November election.
CRC said 174 donors signed the pledge.
The initiative estimated that it mobilized approximately $155 million, including $79 million in new election-related grants to 501(c)(3) organizations.
Among the largest organizations examined by researchers was the Everybody Votes Campaign, an umbrella operation encompassing the Voter Registration Project, Voter Registration Project Education Fund and Register America.
The organization raised more than $75 million in 2024, up from roughly $50 million in 2020, according to CRC.
Large portions of that money were subsequently distributed to nonprofit organizations and canvassing operations aligned with progressive and Democratic voter-mobilization efforts.
One recipient was Field+Media Corps, which received $4.6 million from the Voter Registration Project in 2024 for what was described as “voter registration support.”
Seven employees of the company were later charged by Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday with offenses including forgery and tampering with public records after thousands of allegedly fraudulent voter-registration forms were submitted across several battleground districts.
The criminal charges involved employees of the firm and do not by themselves establish wrongdoing by the Voter Registration Project or other funders.
Another recipient associated with the Everybody Votes Campaign was the New Georgia Project, an organization founded by Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate who unsuccessfully ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022.
The New Georgia Project later agreed to pay a record $300,000 penalty after the Georgia State Ethics Commission found campaign-finance violations connected to activity surrounding Abrams’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign.
The organization subsequently dissolved.
CRC devoted additional attention to the Voter Participation Center, a progressive nonprofit whose voter-registration programs have focused on constituencies it describes as “underrepresented.”
The organization came under scrutiny during the 2024 election cycle after its digital advertising was found to exclude users whose online interests included NASCAR, Duck Dynasty and golf.
Critics argued those filtering choices disproportionately excluded audiences considered more likely to lean Republican, reinforcing concerns that the organization’s supposedly nonpartisan operation functioned as part of a left-wing voter-mobilization strategy.
The controversy prompted Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., to request an IRS investigation into whether the Voter Participation Center’s activities remained consistent with requirements governing tax-exempt organizations.
CRC also contrasted the organization’s previous claims about voter suppression with its later analysis of Georgia turnout.
After Georgia approved an election-integrity law in 2021, then-President Joe Biden denounced the legislation as “Jim Crow 2.0.”
The Voter Participation Center joined an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn the law.
But a September 2025 analysis produced by VPC subsequently found that turnout among the constituencies it defines as underrepresented — Black, Latino and Asian voters, voters younger than 35 and unmarried women — increased by almost 200,000 votes, or 6.8%, between the 2020 and 2024 elections in Georgia.
During the same period, turnout among voters outside those categories declined by nearly 180,000, according to the analysis cited by CRC.
Researchers argue similar left-wing philanthropic networks have played significant roles in other parts of the election system.
Private philanthropic spending surrounding the 2020 Census totaled more than $118 million, according to the report, up from approximately $38 million during the 2010 Census.
The Funders Committee for Civic Participation and its Funders Census Initiative helped organize that effort with backing from the Ford Foundation and other major progressive donors.
The Census Bureau later determined through its post-enumeration survey that six states had been undercounted and eight states had been overcounted.
CRC cited an outside analysis concluding that the resulting errors were substantial enough that two congressional seats awarded to Democratic-leaning Minnesota and Rhode Island would otherwise have been apportioned to Florida.
Another portion of the investigation examines more than $66 million in political and philanthropic spending related to an April 2026 Virginia redistricting ballot measure.
The proposed congressional map could have shifted Virginia’s delegation from a 6-5 Democratic advantage to as much as a 10-1 Democratic advantage, according to the report.
CRC said supporters of the redistricting proposal were “significantly better resourced” and traced millions of dollars to organizations and committees connected with billionaire George Soros, the Service Employees International Union and groups previously associated with the Arabella Advisors network.
Virginia voters approved the measure.
Two weeks later, however, the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the resulting congressional map because of procedural violations.
The report also examines the campaign to enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Under the compact, participating states agree to award their presidential electoral votes to the candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote, regardless of which presidential candidate wins the popular vote inside each participating state.
The agreement would take effect only when states representing at least 270 electoral votes — enough to elect a president — have joined.
Participating jurisdictions currently account for 222 electoral votes, according to CRC.
The watchdog traced financial support for the movement to progressive and Democrat-aligned donors, organized labor, organizations associated with Soros, the Tides Foundation and nonprofits formerly linked to the Arabella network.
Ranked-choice voting represents another area examined in the CRC investigation.
Under variations of that voting system, voters rank multiple candidates rather than selecting only one, with additional rounds of tabulation conducted if no candidate initially meets the required threshold.
CRC noted that voters rejected ballot measures involving ranked-choice voting in at least five states during 2024.
Nineteen states have enacted laws prohibiting its use, according to the report.
Taken together, CRC argues the financial records reveal a structural change in how Democrat-aligned donors and left-wing advocacy organizations attempt to influence American elections.
Rather than concentrating resources exclusively in political parties, candidate committees and super PACs — entities operating under established political-disclosure requirements — the report says substantial election-related spending is moving through nonprofit organizations legally designated as charitable and nonpartisan.
CRC maintains that the result is a left-wing election-influence system capable of receiving tax-advantaged contributions while shielding many donors from the public disclosure normally associated with political spending.
“The report is built around a simple through-line,” CRC said in announcing the findings: “much of the ‘money in politics’ that voters distrust doesn’t flow through political channels — it hides within charities that pretend to be nonpartisan.”
The findings represent CRC’s analysis of the organizations, financial records and election-related programs it reviewed. Whether individual nonprofit activities violate federal tax law would ultimately depend on the specific facts and applicable IRS rules governing 501(c)(3) organizations, which are prohibited from participating or intervening in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to candidates while remaining permitted to conduct certain nonpartisan voter-registration and civic-engagement activities.
Original article
Comments