Leftist nonprofits are using pass-through organizations to boost voter registration for demographics most likely to vote for Democrats, a new report alleges.

The report, titled “The ‘Charities’ influencing elections: 2024 and beyond,” written by the Capital Research Center (CRC), found that multiple left-leaning 501(c)(3)s, which are prohibited from engaging in any political campaign for or against a candidate and whose donations are tax deductible, acted as conduits for 501(c)(4)s, which are permitted to engage in direct partisan politics. 

Those tax-exempt organizations spent $638 million during the 2024 election cycle, according to the report, to register voters most likely to vote for Democrats.

Three 501(c)(3)s – America Votes Education Fund (AVEF), Guarantee Our Votes Project (GOVP) and Democracy Matters Foundation – effectively routed their entire annual expenditure to affiliated 501(c)(4) organizations while conducting almost no independent program activity. 

America Votes Education Fund: AVEF reported on its most recent IRS Form 990s that it gave $20,748,002 in grants to its 501(c)(4) affiliate America Votes while spending just $532 in office expenses and $274 in fundraising expenses in 2024, and paid no employees. 

Further, three 501(c)(3) board members are also the president, chief operating officer, and treasurer of the 501(c)(4). America Votes, whose donations are not tax-deductible, says that its mission is to “create a fairer, more representative democracy by increasing voter participation across the country. Our coalition carries out non-partisan, education-focused programs to engage voters, particularly newly eligible and infrequent voters.”

Guarantee Our Votes Project: GOVP spent just 0.2% of its $13,919,873 expenditures in 2024 on legal and office expenses; the remainder went to grants, including $13.85 million to America Works USA and $30,0000 to the New Hampshire Youth Movement project. The amounts represent a massive increase in spending from the previous year, when GOVP gave out just $166,016 in grants.

America Works USA’s website is just one page, describing its mission as finding “unique and creative ways to promote progressive policy, strengthen our democracy, and build powerful infrastructure in states.”

Democracy Matters Foundation: DMF provided 96% of its 2024 expenditures to grants, according to its 990s, giving $31.38 million to its affiliated 501(c)(4), Democracy Matters, which says it exists to “connect and build a community of pro-democracy donors.”

None of the nonprofits listed above responded to a Just the News inquiry prior to press time.

Scott Walter, president of CRC, who was recently interviewed on “Just the News, No Noise,” detailed two other organizations that follow the same pattern.

“If you want to win elections, what do you need to do? You have to register voters, and then you have to get them to vote,” he said. 

“Well, that's what this machinery is focused on. And you have groups like the Voter Participation Center and the Voter Registration Project that claim they just are help – you know they're helping people do their civic duty.

“But they micro-target their efforts to where they will turn out the most Democratic votes, and they claim that this is still charitable. But you know, you look at Voter Participation Center in an election year. They may spend two-thirds of their money that year on for-profit Democratic Party micro-targeting firms. Now, do you think: 'Does that sound like nonpartisan charity work to you?'"

What the money funds

CRC alleges that the money spent on voter registration by the 501(c)(4)s goes only to demographics historically inclined to vote for Democrats.

Such a scheme can be traced back to at least 2015, during Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, when campaign Chairman John Podesta clicked on a phishing email, allowing hackers access to the entire campaign’s emails. One email, from the president of Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss’s private foundation, laid out a detailed plan to use 501(c)(3)s to register voters, even though 501(c)(3)s cannot engage in such partisan politics.

“But not all voters,” wrote CRC authors Parker Thayer, Robert Stilson and Fred Lucas. “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.”

The machine really started moving by 2020, but ramped up in 2024, spending $638 million during the last presidential election. The $638 million figure is CRC’s own estimate of expenditures from 83 leading 501(c)(3) voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups, and using the same calculations, the organization found that those organizations spent $491.5 million in 2020 – a 30% increase.

What the nonprofits are doing is not illegal, and everything is reported on their 990s. But last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Just the News that his department was looking into large 501(c)(3)s with attached (c)(4)s to review “how the money moves back and forth between those entities” and whether they have “gone over the line.”

Not alone

Just the News has previously reported on a similar situation with the Third Way Institute, which passes nearly all of its tax-deductible donations to its 501(c)(4), Third Way. 

Third Way does not register voters, but it has pledged to campaign against more radical left-wing politicians in order to benefit moderate Democrats.

For comparison, the Heritage Foundation gives just $9 million of its budget away in grants, or less than 1% of its expenditures.