A leftist nonprofit is claiming conservatives spent $1 billion to “suppress voter participation, kick people off the voter rolls, and throw out legitimately cast ballots” in November’s election. But it has not published the complete study, which seemingly used flawed methodology to blame low voter turnout on “[r]ight-wing funding of election deniers and anti-voting rights organizations.”
“Millions of people wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so. Others did vote, but their vote was wrongly rejected and was never counted,” wrote Aaron Dorfman, CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, in leftist rag The American Prospect. “That didn’t happen by accident; it was planned for and funded.”
Dorfman failed to show examples of individuals being turned away from the polls or having their votes “wrongly rejected.” But as evidence of undue conservative influence on November’s election, he cited his group’s study to claim foundations and donors funneled “more than $1 billion” to supposedly “advocate purging people from the voting rolls, restricting vote-by-mail or early voting, removing drop boxes, and other ways of making it harder for people to vote.”
Never mind a few important points. The study only examined funding to conservative groups from 2020 to 2022 — years before November’s election; it cited overall funding to these policy groups, not funding specifically for election activities; and it failed to list which specific “election denial and anti-voting rights” groups it was referencing — though Dorfman cited the general budgets of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) and Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) as examples.
When The Federalist asked NCRP for comment and a copy of the original study, Research Manager for Special Projects Katherine Ponce — author of the study’s online webpage — offered availability to speak on March 24, but said researchers were “booked the rest of this week” with “deepening and expanding the scope of our anti-democracy funding research.” The Federalist asked again for a copy of the study itself, and Ponce said the “previous link includes all the data we have published to date. We are in the midst of collecting data and are releasing things as we find them out.”
“That so-called study is just hocus-pocus B.S.,” said Chuck DeVore, national initiatives officer at TPPF and senior contributor at The Federalist. “By the left’s rationale, anything done to ensure election laws work for free and fair elections and that those laws are implemented with best practices amounts to either voter suppression, election denial, or both.”
DeVore said that “there’s virtually no way” NCRP would know any details about TPPF’s funding. He also contested the allegation of “election denial.” “That’s kind of a blanket term that doesn’t really apply to anything that we were doing,” he said.
Josh Findlay, director of TPPF’s Election Protection Project, told The Federalist the group has various national initiatives on things like criminal justice and immigration, and just one of its many focuses is election integrity. He said the Election Protection Project worked on “improving election administration” ahead of November’s election.
“There’s absolutely no election denial happening here. Not only are we a non-partisan organization, but in addition to that, we just want laws to be enforced, and we want practices to follow transparency and security,” Findlay said. “We wanted to have an election that people could have confidence both in the process and in the results.”
TPPF deployed across various states to monitor the primaries ahead of November to ensure partisan balance of poll workers and compliance with election law, according to DeVore. And, while Dorfman claimed these groups were working to “suppress voter participation,” TPPF actually helped hurricane victims vote in western North Carolina.
“A lot of precincts and polling places were wiped out, and a lot of people were homeless, but they still wanted to vote. So how do you vote?” DeVore said. “Part of what we did was then fund, essentially, public interest advertisements saying, ‘Hey, the election’s coming up, here’s how you vote.’”
Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), told The Federalist that “only a fraction of, for instance, TPPF monies go toward anything related to voting, so almost certainly the methodology is garbage.”
“It’s hard to comment on a study whose authors lack the basic honesty to make it public, but it appears NCRP is counting 100 percent of grantees’ revenues or expenditures — NCRP doesn’t specify which — toward ‘vote suppression,’” Walter said. “It is repulsive to be called ‘anti-democracy’ by people who likely couldn’t tell you what the first three articles of the Constitution … and who — I strongly suspect — consider things like voter ID laws, passed via democratic elections and supported by large majorities of every ethnic group, to be ‘anti-democracy.’”
NCRP claims its work shows “a chilling commitment to regressive, right-wing goals, stark against the backdrop of fleeting support for social justice.” But Walters said CRC found leftists typically far outspend conservatives in public policy funding.
“Capital Research Center’s last effort at totaling left/right nonprofit public policy funding for the 2019 to 2020 cycle found more than a 10:1 left-wing advantage,” he said.
NCRP is a left-wing group that pushes “equity and justice” through philanthropy. Soon after its founding, according to InfluenceWatch, a Heritage Foundation scholar warned the group could become an “agent of radical change” to create a “quasi-governmental system dominated by an elite.” The NCRP has supported leftist causes like increased funding for “sex worker advocacy” groups, expanded immigration, and racial “reparations.” It has opposed so-called “restrictive voter ID laws,” though the Honest Elections Project found 88 percent of Americans support requiring photo ID to vote.
The group is planning to release more research on “the anti-democracy movement” and what it deems “anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant, and anti-abortion movements” in the next few months, according to its website.
Dorfman, NCRP’s CEO, has frequently criticized President Donald Trump and conservative philanthropy. According to InfluenceWatch, he was a lead organizer with the now-defunct leftist voting group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) from 1992 to 1997.
Authorities began investigating “thousands” of cases of potential voter fraud connected to ACORN employees in 2004. James O’Keefe, who would later found Project Veritas, exposed ACORN employees with undercover footage in 2009 for offering advice that, according to InfluenceWatch, “seemed to condone or support covering up prostitution, statutory rape, human trafficking, immigration fraud, and tax evasion, among other illegal activities.”
Logan Churchwell, research director for PILF, told The Federalist that leftist groups like NCRP have been struggling more ever since 2014.
“This is what message and movement stagnation looks like,” Churchwell said. “They’ve apparently entered their wailing and gnashing of teeth era from the outer darkness. It’s sad, really.”
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
Jesus Christ is King
Comments are closed.