The “Charities” influencing elections: 2024 and beyond

From the Constitutional Convention through the end of the 20^th century, American elections were a simple, widely understood and respected, core act of citizenship. Of course, everyone took our turns being displeased with the outcome of certain elections. But win or lose, Americans accepted that the greatest experiment in representative government was working. The evidence was strong: only lightly altered over that time, our electoral system has helped us unleash an exceptional culture of liberty and opportunity that is both historically unprecedented and still has no modern rivals.

That’s surely worth preserving. But the 21^st century has birthed well-funded movements that all presume otherwise and promote major changes to how the American people hire their politicians. Perhaps not coincidentally, as these movements preaching the supposed failures of our representative republic have multiplied, trust in our elections has declined.

This report profiles multiple examples.

In the conventional American tradition, voter registration was a nonpartisan, good government effort to increase participation. But today’s version has become fiercely partisan. The chapter titled “The Left’s voter registration grift thrived in 2024” explains how that happened:

The best explanation of the tax-exempt vote machine comes from the leaked emails of John Podesta. One such email, sent to Podesta in 2015 by the president of Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss’s private foundation, contains an extremely detailed plan for using 501(c)(3) foundations and charities [which are forbidden by law to carry out partisan election work] to fund and execute a $100 million plot to register millions of voters.

But not all voters. In callously presented tables, the plan sums up “total non-white” votes that might be generated in eight key swing states, while still-visible edits show entire paragraphs about beating Republicans and “reshaping the electorate” being removed [from an earlier version of the scheme . . .] the plan was to direct 501(c)(3) voter registration at only demographics whose voting tendencies just so happen to benefit the Democratic party for the specific purpose of winning elections.

By 2020, this program had become so pivotal for Democrats that a Democratic Super PAC boasted voter registration using the charitable sector  is “4 to 10 times more cost effective than the next best alternative” at “netting additional democratic votes,” after tax considerations are included.

This voter registration machine spent $638 million during the 2024 election, and much of that was raised by what are supposed to be nonpartisan charitable nonprofits. But many of those 501(c)(3) groups were forwarding most of the money over to 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofits.

Examples of nonprofits profiled in this chapter include (but are not limited to) the Voter Participation Center, State Voices, America Votes Education Fund, Democracy Matters Foundation, and the Guarantee Our Votes Projects.

Alongside this behavior, some groups, such as the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and its allies, have been alleging voter suppression. But in the chapter titled “The voting experts are full of it,” this report shows that VPC’s own research has repeatedly shown that the suppression has not occurred.

For example, in 2021 Georgia passed an election integrity measure that was dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0” by President Biden because he and his allies asserted it would suppress the votes of “underrepresented communities.” Similarly, VPC joined an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit to overturn the Georgia measure.

But a September 2025 report from the Voter Participation Center found the opposite of voter suppression, even though the Georgia law remained on the books for the 2024 election:

The research slide deck admits that “Turnout in 2024 was actually higher than turnout in 2020 among UC groups in some swing states – Georgia, Nevada, and Michigan.” Georgia’s “Underrepresented” or “UC” turnout, defined as turnout from African American, Latino, Asian, under 35, and unmarried women voters, increased by nearly 200,000 votes, or 6.8 percent, while “non-UC” votes decreased by nearly 180,000, or 9.2 percent. That means Georgia’s “UC” turnout increased while “non-UC” turnout decreased nationwide and particularly in states like California, New York and Wisconsin.

Not convinced by its own research, VPC is now an opponent of the federal SAVE Act, which merely requires proof of citizenship before casting a ballot. Repeating claims it used against the Georgia law, VPC now asserts the SAVE Act will “disenfranchise” voters from the “underrepresented groups.”

Another plan to rig future elections in favor of Democrats is revealed in the chapter titled “The vote machine is already planning for the 2030 Census.” If the voter registration charities were operating what is better described as a partisan “get out the vote” program, then Census charities are running a “get out the count” operation.

The main player here is the Funders Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP) and its Funders Census Initiative (FCI), formed in 2008 with support from the Ford Foundation and other major left-wing philanthropic donors.

This Big Philanthropy alliance spent $38 million to help the federal government count the people FCI most wanted to find for the 2010 Census. FCI also boasted of its work to defeat a proposal that would have required a citizenship question during that count.

This program was ramped up to $118 million (courtesy of more than 100 donors) for the 2020 Census. As the report notes, the bigger payday made a bigger difference:

… by the Census Bureau’s own admission, there was massive overcounting, mostly in blue states, and massive undercounting, mostly in red states. The 2010 Census was reported to have a minuscule error rate of less than 1 percent; in 2020, the census reported undercounting six states and overcounting eight. As Hans Von Spakovsky explained in 2022, the Census Bureau’s post-census survey data for the 2020 count shows that the over and under counts were so egregious that Minnesota and Rhode Island were apportioned two congressional seats that ought to have rightfully been assigned to Florida.

Corrupting the Census count, as this report notes, may have been the ultimate form of gerrymandering. But another chapter in this report, “Major donors to the Virginia redistricting ballot measure,” shows that election-influencing charities have also been hard at work creating new forms of the old-style gerrymandering.

In Virginia, this took the form of a ballot proposal that would have redrawn the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm election. If successful, this would have likely flipped Virginia from a narrow 6-5 Democratic majority (which more or less reflects the actual partisan divide among Virginians) to a 10-1 Democratic advantage (which does not).

It was the most expensive ballot measure in Virginia history, with supporters of the 10-1 Democrat-favorable map “significantly better resourced” than proponents of keeping the old map. Our report shows millions of dollars contributed by committees affiliated with George Soros, the Service Employees International Union, and what was once known as the Arabella Advisors network.

All this loot—more than $66 million—helped persuade a majority of Virginia voters to approve the measure in an April 2026 special election. But two weeks later the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the new map, citing procedural violations.

The U.S. Constitution is another “procedural” roadblock the election-influencing charities would like to sweep away. The chapter titled “Enemies of the Electoral College” profiles a movement that seeks to do away with the way every president since George Washington has been selected.

The largest and best-funded effort is known as the National Popular Vote (NPV) Compact. It would “award all electoral votes from all states within the compact to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of which candidate won the popular vote within each individual state.” The chapter explains the many problems with this, not least of which is diminishing the influence of low population states—exactly what the authors of the U.S. Constitution intended to prevent with the Electoral College and the Senate.

The alleged upside of the NPV Compact is that it would eliminate closely contested elections where the candidate receiving the most popular votes (a majority or not) does not win the Electoral College. Supposedly, this would create the appearance of a more united nation.

The chapter notes that this is mostly a solution in search of a problem:

The alleged problem this supposedly solves has happened just five times over sixty American presidential elections, and only twice since the election of 1888. Notably, the beneficiaries in the two cases that anyone alive can remember (Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016) were both Republicans. It should be no surprise that the NPV movement is animated more by partisan goals than policy objectives.

The report shows the NPV movement is also animated by some carefully selected, nominally Republican political professionals, to help it get across the line in red states. But here again, the old Arabella Advisors network, Big Labor, and other left-leaning contributors have been writing most of the NPV checks.

Hiring the Republican operators in a rent-a-pol campaign has been somewhat successful. At present, NPV has secured a commitment from states representing 222 of the 270 presidential electoral votes need to implement the Compact.

Finally, as if trying to muddle up the presidential election process after 238 years wasn’t sowing enough distrust, an even more confusing idea is profiled in the chapter titled “Ranked Choice Voting is down, but not out.” As the essay explains, the American tradition of “one person one vote” and “vote for the person you like” would be replaced with this contraption:

In the simplest form of an RCV election, all candidates, regardless of party, are placed in one pool and voters rank them in order of preference. If no candidate secures a majority of first place ballots, then the candidate with the fewest first place ballots is removed from consideration and the rankings on those ballots are reassigned. Voters who placed the removed candidate as their first choice have their second choice promoted as their top remaining (i.e.: first) choice. This process repeats until one candidate survives as the top remaining choice for the majority of the voters [who still remain in the count].

Notable supporters include Texas hedge-fund manager John Arnold … but not actual Americans. On Election Day 2024, voters in at least five states rejected ballot measures that would have implemented RCV. The report also shows RCV is so unpopular that 19 states have enacted total prohibitions against its use, with seven of them doing so since January 2025.

This shouldn’t be surprising. We know in our bones that making voting needlessly complicated corrupts the integrity of elections. We also know that charitable voter registration should not be slanted in favor of one political party. We know that corrupting the Census count corrupts our elections (and much else).

And though it isn’t as straightforward as a simple popular vote, we are taught in elementary school why the Framers of the Constitution created the Electoral College to preserve the role of states with small populations. It’s one of many good reasons why 13 colonies hugging the Atlantic Coast became 50 states spilling far out into the Pacific and nearly touching Russia.

That’s just one of many reasons why we respect our Constitution and change it only in very extreme situations. We are history’s most wildly successful nation because we run on elegantly simple software.

After emerging from the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin was asked what sort of government he and his patriot compatriots had drawn up. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he famously replied. Given what we now know that republic has accomplished, it shouldn’t be so hard to keep it. But as this report shows, Franklin was wise to issue the warning.

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Contents:

THE LEFT’S VOTER REGISTRATION GRIFT THRIVED IN 2024

• SIDEBAR: Government funding of voter registration

THE VOTING “EXPERTS” ARE FULL OF IT

THE VOTE MACHINE IS ALREADY PLANNING FOR THE 2030 CENSUS

ENEMIES OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

WHO FUNDS RANKED CHOICE VOTING?

THE MONEY BEHIND THE VIRGINIA REDISTRICTING FIGHT