A new 64-page report alleges a sprawling network of left-wing organizations spent roughly $638 million through tax-exempt voter-registration groups during the 2024 election cycle, and the money trail leads through leaked memos, forgery charges, and ad-targeting schemes that excluded conservatives.
The Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, examined the financial records of 83 leading 501(c)(3) voter-registration and get-out-the-vote organizations and found they spent approximately $638.7 million in 2024. That figure represents a 30 percent jump over 2020 levels, roughly 10 percent after adjusting for inflation. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted spending through traditional political action committees fell by about 20 percent. The report, titled The "Charities" Influencing Elections: 2024 and Beyond, was obtained exclusively by Breitbart News ahead of its public release.
CRC President Scott Walter framed the stakes in blunt terms.
"Americans deserve to know whether tax-deductible charitable contributions are being illicitly used to subsidize partisan political operations."
Walter called on Congress, the IRS, and state authorities to examine the findings and hold the organizations accountable. The report's central argument is straightforward: much of the political money that voters distrust does not flow through regulated political channels at all. It moves through charities that claim to be nonpartisan, shielding donor identities and offering tax deductions that conventional PAC contributions cannot.
The roots of the current infrastructure stretch back at least a decade. In 2015, leaked emails belonging to John Podesta, the longtime Democratic operative who chaired Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, revealed a detailed plan from the president of Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss's private foundation. The plan proposed spending $100 million through 501(c)(3) foundations and charities to register millions of voters across eight battleground states.
Tables embedded in the plan calculated the number of "total non-white" votes the effort could generate in each state. Still-visible edits showed that passages discussing "beating Republicans" and "reshaping the electorate" had been removed before the document was sent, suggesting the authors understood the language would undermine any claim of nonpartisanship.
Wyss has since funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations including the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund, nonprofits formerly managed by Arabella Advisors, one of the left's largest dark-money operations. The flow of money from a single foreign-born billionaire into a web of tax-exempt groups that shape American elections raises questions that neither the IRS nor Congress has adequately answered.
By 2020, the strategy had matured. A leaked memo from Mind the Gap, a Democratic-aligned super PAC, described charitable voter registration as "4 to 10 times more cost effective than the next best alternative" at "netting additional Democratic votes." That internal admission, that the charitable route was chosen precisely because it was the cheapest way to produce Democratic ballots, sits at the heart of the CRC report's case. The Washington Examiner reported that the strategy also provides wealthy Democratic donors with tax deductions unavailable through traditional PAC contributions, effectively circumventing campaign finance limits.
Among the largest operations the report identifies is the Everybody Votes Campaign, an umbrella that encompasses the Voter Registration Project, the Voter Registration Project Education Fund, and Register America. EVC raised more than $75 million in 2024, up from approximately $50 million in 2020. It distributed money to other left-leaning nonprofits and canvassing firms.
One of those firms was Field+Media Corps, which received $4.6 million from the Voter Registration Project for "voter registration support" in 2024. After the election, Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday charged seven Field+Media Corps employees with forgery and tampering with public records. Prosecutors said thousands of allegedly fraudulent voter-registration forms had been submitted in several battleground districts across the state.
The charges remain pending, and key questions are unanswered: how many of the submitted forms were ultimately verified as fraudulent, and whether anyone above the seven employees knew about the alleged scheme. But the episode illustrates the risk that arises when hundreds of millions of dollars flow through loosely supervised nonprofit contractors with a partisan incentive to maximize registrations.
Democrats have long insisted that concerns about voter-registration fraud are overblown. Yet the Pennsylvania case is not the only example of a left-aligned registration group running into legal trouble. Stacey Abrams's New Georgia Project agreed to pay a record $300,000 penalty after the Georgia State Ethics Commission found campaign-finance violations stemming from its work during Abrams's unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial bid. The organization later dissolved. The broader pattern, Democratic leaders treating minority communities as electoral assets rather than constituents to be served, keeps surfacing in state after state.
If the charitable registration machine were genuinely nonpartisan, it would register voters regardless of their likely political preferences. The Voter Participation Center's advertising practices suggest otherwise. VPC, which targets what it calls "underrepresented" constituencies, was found to have filtered its digital voter-registration ads to exclude users whose Facebook interests included NASCAR, Duck Dynasty, and golf, hobbies associated with conservative-leaning men.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that VPC spent over $760,000 on more than 8,200 Facebook ads in swing states over a 90-day period, explicitly excluding 26 interest categories associated with Republican men. The group paid more than $17.8 million to Mission Control and nearly $40 million to the Pivot Group, both Democratic microtargeting firms, between 2020 and 2022. VPC's leader, Tom Lopach, previously served as executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Rep. Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican, called for an IRS investigation into whether VPC was complying with its tax-exempt status. IRS regulations prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations from participating in political campaign intervention, though neutral voter-registration drives are permitted. Whether VPC's ad-targeting practices cross that line is exactly the kind of question the IRS should be equipped to answer, and so far has not.
VPC's own analysis tells a revealing story. In September 2025, the group published a study of Georgia turnout showing that its designated "underrepresented" constituencies increased their vote totals by nearly 200,000, a 6.8 percent jump, between 2020 and 2024. Turnout among voters outside those categories fell by nearly 180,000. A genuinely nonpartisan registration effort would not produce such lopsided results. A partisan one would.
The 2024 cycle also saw an effort to accelerate the money flow. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's Democracy Fund launched the "All by April" initiative, urging donors to move their election-related grants to 501(c)(3) organizations well ahead of November. The initiative estimated it mobilized $155 million, including $79 million in new election-related 501(c)(3) grants. A total of 174 donors signed the pledge.
Moving money early gives registration groups more time to hire canvassers, build contact lists, and deploy mail and digital campaigns, advantages that traditional PACs, which often spend late in the cycle on advertising, do not enjoy. The "All by April" model also ensures that the money is committed before public scrutiny intensifies in the fall, when media attention turns to campaign spending.
The scale of the philanthropic infrastructure extends well beyond voter registration. CRC's report traces $118 million in philanthropic spending surrounding the 2020 Census, up from $38 million in 2010. The Funders Census Initiative, formed with support from the Ford Foundation and other major left-wing donors, organized much of that spending. Census counts determine congressional apportionment, and the stakes are enormous. A Census Bureau post-enumeration survey found that six states were undercounted and eight were overcounted. A CRC-cited analysis concluded the errors were large enough to shift two congressional seats, one from Minnesota and one from Rhode Island, that would otherwise have gone to Florida.
Whether those errors resulted from the philanthropic spending or from the Census Bureau's own operational failures is unclear. But the fact that well-funded left-wing groups poured three times as much money into Census outreach in 2020 as they had a decade earlier, and that the resulting count favored blue-leaning states, is the kind of coincidence that demands scrutiny, not dismissal. The broader Democratic abandonment of rural and working-class voters makes the party's reliance on institutional shortcuts all the more striking.
The report also documents how the same donor infrastructure has moved into redistricting. More than $66 million was traced behind an April 2026 ballot measure in Virginia that would have redrawn the state's congressional map. The potential shift was dramatic: Virginia's congressional delegation could have moved from a 6-5 Democratic advantage to as much as 10-1 in Democrats' favor. Millions of dollars were traced to committees affiliated with George Soros and the Service Employees International Union.
Virginia voters approved the measure. Two weeks later, the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the new map, citing procedural violations. The court's intervention stopped the gerrymander, but the episode revealed how much money left-wing donors are willing to spend to reshape the playing field outside traditional campaign channels.
On other fronts, the infrastructure has met resistance. Voters rejected ranked-choice voting ballot measures in at least five states in 2024, and 19 states have enacted outright prohibitions against the practice. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electoral votes to the national popular-vote winner, currently includes states representing 222 of the 270 electoral votes needed for it to take effect. Groups linked to the Tides Foundation have backed the compact's expansion. Each of these efforts, ranked-choice voting, the popular-vote compact, redistricting, represents a different lever for changing election outcomes without winning the argument on policy.
Mark Zuckerberg's $400 million in so-called "Zuck Bucks" during the 2020 election previewed the model. County-by-county analysis showed spending of $7 to $15 per voter in Biden-won Georgia counties versus $1 to $3 per voter in Trump-won counties. In Wisconsin, grants averaged $3.75 per person in Biden counties against $0.55 in Trump counties. The charitable wrapper made the spending look neutral. The distribution pattern did not.
Progressive journalist Sasha Issenberg wrote of the Voter Participation Center that "even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all of its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats." That candid assessment, cited by the Washington Examiner, captures the contradiction at the center of the entire enterprise. The groups claim nonpartisan status to keep their tax exemptions. Their own allies acknowledge the purpose is partisan.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has grown increasingly comfortable with using institutional power to achieve outcomes it cannot win at the ballot box. The $638 million charity machine is the financial expression of that instinct, a system that lets billionaires fund partisan voter drives, claim tax deductions for doing so, and avoid the disclosure requirements that apply to every traditional political donor in the country.
Scott Walter put the challenge directly.
"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. Congress, the IRS, and state authorities need to examine these findings and hold 'charities' accountable."
The IRS already has the authority to revoke tax-exempt status from organizations that engage in political campaign intervention. Rep. Tenney has called for an investigation into VPC. State attorneys general, as Pennsylvania's Dave Sunday demonstrated, can bring criminal charges when registration fraud surfaces. The legal tools exist. What has been missing is the political will to use them against a network that enjoys the protection of powerful donors and sympathetic media coverage.
None of the organizations or individuals named in the report, Wyss, Omidyar, Soros, VPC, or the Everybody Votes Campaign, have publicly responded to its findings. Their silence is not an admission, but it is not a rebuttal either. When a conservative group spent a fraction of this amount on election-related activity, the left demanded investigations, hearings, and new disclosure laws. The same standard should apply regardless of which side writes the checks. The willingness of some Democrats to cross party lines on matters of principle suggests not everyone on the left is comfortable with the arrangement.
If $638 million in tax-deductible donations can be routed through charities to register voters for one party while excluding the other, the word "nonpartisan" has lost its meaning, and taxpayers are subsidizing the fraud.
