Philanthropy’s Role in Efforts to Boost Claims of Voter Fraud – Inside Philanthropy

The history of voter suppression in the United States is long and sordid, encompassing everything from racially discriminatory “election protection” laws to outright physical intimidation, assaults, and murder of Americans attempting to exercise the franchise. The spate of voting bills that have flooded state capitols this year includes hundreds of proposals seeking to restrict access to voting—361 in 47 states as of March 24, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 

Those proposals, which President Joe Biden has condemned as the latest incarnation of racist voter suppression in the U.S., are up against renewed efforts to expand the franchise, most significantly in the form of S. 1 or H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Currently under consideration in Congress, the passage of that bill would mark the most expansive federal action on voting rights since 1965’s Voting Rights Act, plugging up enforcement holes and mandating policies like automatic voter registration, vote by mail, and early voting. 

Standing in the way of the For the People Act is a Republican establishment whose opposition to voting rights measures comes in the form, time and again, of warnings about voter fraud. The history of those claims is equally long and convoluted; the way they factored into the 2020 election’s aftermath and former President Donald Trump’s departure from office is just the latest instance. The “big lie,” as scholars and commentators have dubbed Trump’s false claim of a stolen election, didn’t spring from nowhere. 

On the contrary, claims and concerns about voter fraud—though repeatedly debunked—have been around for a long time, stoked in many cases by organizations that run on philanthropic dollars. The role of 501(c)(3) nonprofits—and c3 donors—in this respect has often been overshadowed by the more blatant activities of 501(c)(4) groups like the ones pushing “Stop the Steal” in the run-up to the Capitol insurrection. But philanthropy-backed nonprofits have been heavily involved in spreading the narrative of widespread voter fraud. And while some groups—and their donors—sit on the fringes, others are mainstay conservative advocacy organizations.

With issues of election security and voting rights in the spotlight, the work of these groups and their often anonymous backers has implications not only for American democracy itself, but also for how the public views the nonprofit sector.

Some funders we know, more we don’t

When it comes to gauging philanthropy’s role in the voter fraud narrative, the devil lies in the data. Or more precisely, the lack of it. Most often, organizations pushing voter fraud claims draw upon 501(c)(4) “dark money,” a font of dollars-for-influence that the anonymous rich use to great effect on both sides of the partisan divide. But even in the c3 space, transparency can be hard to come by given the time delay on 990s and the widespread use of untraceable donor-advised fund (DAF) donations to finance voting-related work. 

Those factors make it difficult to know exactly who’s been funding recent attempts to amplify voter fraud claims, especially around the 2020 election and this year’s raft of restrictive state bills. But it is possible to pinpoint a few of the major players who’ve been involved over the longer term. 

One way to do so is to look at some of the groups receiving this money. One prominent name is the Honest Elections Project, formed in early 2020 by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. Like many organizations working to boost claims of voter fraud, the Honest Elections Project primarily operates via the legal system, filing briefs in support of voting restrictions in the states. Other tactics in its handbook include funding advertisements, sending letters to election officials, and working with research and data—that is, pulling narrative levers as well as legal ones. 

One thing to know about the Honest Elections Project is that it’s actually an outgrowth of an older group, the 85 Fund, which was formerly known as the Judicial Education Project. That group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, has received funding over the years from a number of prominent right-leaning philanthropies like the Bradley Foundation and the John William Pope Foundation. But a large part of its revenue comes from anonymous funders via the conservative DAF sponsor DonorsTrust as well as mainstream DAF sponsors like Fidelity, Vanguard, and the National Philanthropic Trust. 

For a long time, the Judicial Education Project also received funding from the now-shuttered Wellspring Committee, another pass-through organization for conservative “dark money,” not to be confused with the progressive (but also secretive) Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. The Wellspring Committee also funded a c4 counterpart to the Judicial Education Project called the Judicial Crisis Network, which is now known as the Concord Fund.

Another group pushing the voter fraud narrative is the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit formed in 2012. Its founder, J. Christian Adams, served in the U.S. Department of Justice under President George W. Bush. The group frequently pursues legal cases to purge names from voting rolls. A look at its funding tells a similar story—foundations like Bradley, Sarah Scaife and John William Pope show up, in addition to non-transparent funding through DonorsTrust and similar vehicles. 

Project Veritas, the controversial media outlet founded by right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe, ramped up its efforts to fan the flames of anxiety about voter fraud in the lead-up to the 2020 election. According to coverage in the New Republic, the group’s fundraising spiked to over $13 million in 2019, most likely reflecting an influx of small donors, but also potentially increased support from its institutional funders like Dunn’s Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking or the Bradley Impact Fund. As always, DAF sponsors are a big part of Project Veritas’ funding picture as well.

Other nonprofits have played an outsized role in spreading voter fraud claims over the years, including the American Constitutional Rights Union and Judicial Watch. Both draw upon a similar collection of funding sources. 

True the Vote is another 501(c)(3) organization in the mix, emerging from the Tea Party movement in Texas around the same time as the Public Interest Legal Foundation got its start. In addition to many of the usual names—Bradley comes up a lot, as well as DAF sponsors—True the Vote has received a number of smaller grants via the Greater Houston Community Foundation. Considered alongside the channels of DAF support for these groups (the 85 Fund received $10 million from DAF holders at DonorsTrust in 2019), those grants paint a picture of diverse individual and small donor support—as well as foundation funding—for what many on the left see as blatant voter suppression.

The conservative establishment’s deep investment

The partisan intensity around these issues has led to the frequent use of terms like “secretive cabal” or “shadowy billionaires” to describe those backing the voter fraud narrative. (Some of the billionaires, at least, aren’t really all that shadowy). While those descriptors can be apt, and are certainly reciprocated from the right by watchdog groups like the Capital Research Center, they can give the false impression that the Trump-era “big lie” is somehow a product of the peculiarly lurid politics surrounding the 45th president.

Just a cursory look at the funding involved shows that the voter fraud narrative has been a priority for leading conservative foundations for decades. It’s also a priority of mainstream conservative donors who, because they can, have hopped on the DAF express, meaning you and I can’t pinpoint their involvement. Support for conservative think tanks is also often unrestricted, which allows donors to distance themselves from their more controversial campaigns.

In the c3 space, no institution typifies the conservative mainstreaming of the voter fraud narrative better than the Heritage Foundation. To call attention to fraud claims, the storied conservative think tank maintains a database that offers “a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country,” which a Frontline investigation concluded is misleading, having found no credible threat to election integrity. 

The man leading Heritage’s efforts to highlight voter fraud is Hans von Spakovsky, another Bush-era veteran of the Justice Department and FEC. In an email to the Guardian shortly before the 2020 election, von Spakovsky took issue with the notion that “widespread fraud” is “the only criteria worth considering.” In that communication, he called Heritage’s database a demonstration “that there are many ways to engage in election fraud and that it occurs often enough that we should be concerned about it and should try to address it.” For those interested, Dark Money author Jane Mayer took an in-depth look at von Spakovsky’s career-long campaign to amplify the threat of voter fraud in The New Yorker back in 2012. Most of that discussion remains just as relevant today.

Whether it’s at small outfits like the Public Interest Legal Foundation or major think tanks like Heritage, conservative lawyers like von Spakovsky, Adams and others have spent decades boosting claims of voter fraud, and they’ve done it with unrestricted backing from the conservative donor establishment. Although Donald Trump did more than anyone else to magnify fears of voter fraud among the electorate, the post-election push to restrict the franchise relies on precedent, research and argumentation developed by these players—well before Trump came onto the scene. 

A legitimizing role

In a panel discussion hosted by the Philanthropy Roundtable shortly before the 2020 election, several figures relevant to this discussion came together to talk voting and philanthropy. They included DonorsTrust president Lawson Bader, Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and Bradley Smith of the Institute for Free Speech (another Bush-era FEC official). During the panel, participants observed that left-leaning nonprofit funding for civic engagement and election issues is more plentiful than funding on the right. That is true in dollar terms—many of the nonprofits discussed above have fairly lean budgets—but one could also argue that what these conservative groups are seeking is more like targeted “civic disengagement” and thus not quite in the same category.

Wherever one stands on that question, one interesting takeaway from that roundtable discussion was some panelists’ apparent stance that voter fraud warrants investigation and possibly even legislative action on the sole basis that large numbers of Americans believe it’s a problem. 

That line of thinking, which has become a kind of canon in right-wing circles, is quite Trumpian. It’s also why philanthropic funding for this kind of “apolitical” activity deserves scrutiny, and not just on the right. When they do bother to cite an authoritative source, commentators and journalists on either side of the aisle often reflexively grab at information from 501(c)(3) think tanks. I did it at the start of this piece: the Brennan Center relies on support from liberal philanthropies. 

That’s not to say such data is inaccurate or useless—only that by funding the entities that collect basic facts on these issues and make sense of them, ideological philanthropy is setting some of the groundwork for public debate to take place along ideological lines. That’s not to mention c3 funders’ support for legal battles on voting rights currently taking place across the country. 

Philanthropy’s mandated insistence on remaining “apolitical” while funding these issues with obvious political intent would be comical if it wasn’t for the fact that American democracy was just brought to the brink. As they’ve ramped up their democracy funding to confront those threats, liberal grantmakers have also been derided by some for funding in ways that are more politically ideological or aligned with openly political funding streams. One one level, it’s hard to blame those grantmakers for using their full arsenal in the face of unprecedented assaults on democratic norms and institutions. But philanthropy continues to be a channel for the ever-increasing presence of wealth in the political sphere.