Eighty-three tax-exempt organizations spent $638 million in 2024 on voter mobilization — a 30 percent increase over 2020 — while traditional PAC spending actually declined by roughly 20 percent after inflation. The money didn't go to soup kitchens. It went to getting Democrats elected.
The difference is that PAC donors get disclosed. "Charity" donors don't.
A new report from the Capital Research Center traces the full architecture of this operation. Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, put it plainly: "Americans deserve to know whether tax-deductible charitable contributions are being illicitly used to subsidize partisan political operations." The report follows a money trail that starts with billionaire donors and ends with canvassers knocking on doors in battleground districts.
The blueprint goes back to 2015, when Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss sent leaked emails to Democratic operative John Podesta — who later chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign — outlining a $100 million voter registration plan using 501(c)(3) foundations. The plan specifically calculated "total non-white" votes across eight battleground states. That's not civic engagement. That's demographic targeting with a partisan objective, laundered through the tax code.
The infrastructure that emerged is staggering. The Everybody Votes Campaign raised $75 million in 2024 alone — up from roughly $50 million in 2020 — and distributed it to other nonprofits and canvassing operations. The Voter Registration Project and its Education Fund arm funneled $4.6 million to a single canvassing firm called Field+Media Corps for "voter registration support." Seven Field+Media Corps employees were subsequently charged by Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday with forgery and tampering with public records after submitting thousands of allegedly fraudulent voter-registration forms in battleground districts.
The Arabella Advisors network — which manages the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund — emerged as the left's central dark-money clearinghouse. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's Democracy Fund feeds into the same ecosystem alongside the Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Funders Committee for Civic Participation. A 2020 memo from the Democratic-aligned super PAC Mind the Gap described this nonprofit voter mobilization model as "4 to 10 times more cost effective than the next best alternative" at "netting additional Democratic votes."
That's not a charity describing its mission. That's a political operation describing its ROI.
Stacey Abrams's New Georgia Project offers a case study. The organization was founded explicitly for voter mobilization, then the Georgia State Ethics Commission found campaign-finance violations tied to Abrams's unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial campaign. The New Georgia Project paid a $300,000 penalty and subsequently dissolved. But the model it pioneered didn't dissolve — it scaled.
The Voter Participation Center's targeting methodology tells you everything about the "nonpartisan" label. The organization filtered its digital ads to exclude users interested in NASCAR, Duck Dynasty, and golf. A September 2025 analysis found that turnout among VPC's "underrepresented" constituencies — Black, Latino, and Asian voters, those under 35, and unmarried women — increased by 200,000 votes, or 6.8 percent, in Georgia between 2020 and 2024. Turnout outside those categories fell by 180,000.
The report also documents how this network spent $118 million influencing the 2020 Census — up from $38 million in 2010. The result: six states were undercounted, eight were overcounted, and an independent analysis found that two congressional seats would have shifted from Democratic-leaning Minnesota and Rhode Island to Republican-friendly Florida under an accurate count.
The same donors surfaced in April 2026, when $66 million funded a Virginia redistricting ballot measure that would have shifted the state's congressional delegation from 6-5 Democratic to 10-1 Democratic. Funding was traced to George Soros-affiliated committees, SEIU, and former Arabella network entities. The Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the map two weeks after voter approval over procedural violations.
Meanwhile, the same infrastructure is pushing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would require participating states to award their electoral votes to the nationwide popular vote winner regardless of how their own citizens voted. The compact currently has 222 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate.
Voters rejected ranked-choice voting ballot measures in at least five states in 2024, and 19 states have enacted outright prohibitions. The democratic process keeps saying no. So the money found another route — one that's tax-deductible, barely disclosed, and worth $638 million in a single cycle.