Meet The Tax-Exempt ‘Charity’ Secretly Bankrolling Democrats’ Get-Out-The-Vote Operations
A left-wing, tax-exempt charity styling itself as “nonpartisan” is secretly funding Democrat-favorable voter registration efforts in key battleground states across the country, according to a new report.
Published by the Capital Research Center (CRC) on Tuesday, the report details how the Voter Registration Project (VRP) — which for years was privately known as the Everybody Votes campaign — funneled millions of dollars from left-wing billionaires into leftist groups in highly contested battleground states to register likely-Democrat voters.
“[F]unded by the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, and coordinated with cutthroat Democratic consultants, the Everybody Votes campaign used the guise of civic-minded charity to selectively register millions of ‘non-white’ swing-state voters in the hopes of getting out the Democratic vote for a 2020 presidential win. It worked,” the report reads.
As documented by the report, VRP seemingly first came to fruition in November 2015, when John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman, received an email from the president of EMILY’s List, a political action committee that backs pro-abortion, female Democrats for public office. The email “asked if [Podesta] approved of the Everybody Votes campaign, a $106 million project designed to last five years and generate 2.2 million new votes in eight states by 2020—a project Podesta had been ‘hoping for.’”
The proposal, according to CRC, was nearly identical to a plan sent to Podesta earlier that year by the president of the Wyss Foundation, a tax-exempt organization founded by left-wing Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has “a history of illegal interference in U.S. elections.” That plan was purportedly crafted by Corridor Partners, a Democrat consulting firm.
According to CRC, the Corridor Partners plan had been edited to remove blatantly partisan language, suggesting an effort to obscure the initiative’s true purpose of registering likely-Democrat voters. It’s worth mentioning that federal law expressly prohibits partisan voter registration through nonprofits: “voter education or registration activities conducted in a biased manner that favors (or opposes) one or more candidates is prohibited.”
Both the Corridor Partners plan and the Everybody Votes campaign plan emphasized the importance of registering voters in eight focus states, and both included highly contested ones such as Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada.
[RELATED: Report: Democrats Are Weaponizing Nonprofits To Run Partisan Voter Registration Drives]
The CRC report goes on to highlight how VRP became a popular destination for donations from left-wing billionaires and millionaires seeking to influence U.S. elections. In 2018, a left-wing PAC known as Mind the Gap — which was founded by the mother of disgraced former FTX CEO and Democrat mega-donor Sam Bankman-Fried — issued a memo informing leftist donors that “the most effective tactic” to score “additional Democratic votes” is “nonpartisan voter registration focused on underrepresented groups.”
This strategy, if focused on Democrat-leaning so-called “underrepresented groups,” could be “2 to 5 times more cost-effective at netting additional Democratic votes than the tactics that campaigns will invest in (chiefly, broadcast media and digital buys),” the memo advised. Notably, Everybody Votes is one of the three groups the memo specifically recommended to donors.
In the years since its inception, Everybody Votes, or VRP, and its affiliated organizations have reportedly received millions of dollars from prominent left-wing figures and groups. According to CRC, VRP received more than $5 million from billionaire Warren Buffett’s Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. The group has also been gifted more than $10 million from leftist billionaire George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society.
So, what exactly has VRP done with the tens of millions it received from leftists? According to the report, “VRP and its sister groups have distributed $127 million in grants from 2016 through 2021 to more than 80 different state and national left-leaning activist organizing groups,” which have “paid for an unprecedented scale of ‘nonpartisan’ voter registration work, with roughly $56 million paid out during 2020 alone.” These funds were also made available to left-wing groups in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2020 and 2021.
VRP also poured millions of dollars into Democrat consulting firms, many of which specialized in voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts.
On its website, Everybody Votes boasts about registering 5.1 million new voters, 76 percent of whom are “people of color.” The group further claims 56 percent of the 5.1 million new voters are women and 47 percent are under the age of 35. In other words, these are predominately voters most likely to vote for Democrats in any given election.
These efforts to fund voter registration operations in key states across the country seemingly had a prominent impact on the 2020 election results. According to CRC researchers, VRP’s 5.1 million new registrations gave Biden “somewhere between 1 million to 2.7 million votes across eight specially chosen swing states during the 2020 election.”
“If the state-by-state projections of the campaign’s Democratic consultants held true into 2020, the Everybody Votes campaign’s ‘massive registration surge’ would have provided Democrats more votes than the total margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania,” the report reads. “Biden ultimately won each of these states in 2020, netting him 53 electoral college votes.”
Everybody Votes is also purportedly gearing up to repeat its efforts ahead of the 2024 election, according to CRC.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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