Did Democrats’ ‘Nonpartisan’ Voter Outreach Violate IRS Rules?

In a stunning analysis of the rapid decline in registered Democrat voters, The New York Times let slip a dirty secret about the cynical and legally dubious machinations the party has used to try and game the political system and win elections in recent cycles.

“For years, the left has relied on a sprawling network of nonprofits — which solicit donations from people whose identities they need not disclose,” the Times reported, “to register Black, Latino and younger voters.”

“Though the groups are technically nonpartisan, the underlying assumption has been that most new voters registering would vote Democratic,” the report added, matter-of-factly.

Set aside that Democrats’ funneling of money into 501(c)(3)s to turn out voters solely based on identity reflects a dismal view that people’s politics can be reduced to their skin color, sex, or age. And set aside the key follow-on takeaway: That Donald Trump proved this assumption flawed in winning re-election by garnering growing support from the minorities and younger voters that the left had targeted and whose votes it had taken for granted.

The Times has now said the quiet part out loud: Putatively nonpartisan charitable voter registration and mobilization organizations are thinly veiled Democrat vote-generation vehicles — or at least understood to be Democrat vote-generation vehicles — ones that as the report details, fat cats have funded to skirt political contribution limits while getting a nice big tax break.

Why is that such a big deal?

First, it suggests that such organizations may have violated IRS rules. That’s because tax-exempt nonprofits may not engage in voter registration or get-out-the-vote activities “in a biased manner that favors (or opposes) one or more candidates.” Yet the Times make clear that the left in effect sought to use such organizations to support Democrat candidates. Why target those you assume to be Democrat voters if not to get them to vote for Democrats? Their supporters evidently seemed to think the point was to elect Democrats. Minimally, it would appear such organizations circumvented the IRS’s strictures in spirit.

Disingenuous Charities

Second, and relatedly, the Times report suggests that the implicated charitable organizations have acted disingenuously — operating under color of euphemistic language designed to camouflage partisan activity. In an April 2024 report on this very issue for RealClearInvestigations, I noted that progressive-oriented entities had raked in hundreds of millions of dollars annually in recent years under the guise of support for neutral voter mobilization efforts and democracy promotion.

Among the leading such Democrat-backed organizations is the Voter Participation Center, which had previously solicited millions of ballot applications in key swing states — many prefilled for respondents — during the 2020 election. The “nonpartisan” organization seeks to help a “New American Majority” of “young people, people of color and unmarried women” register and vote. When questioned on whether the organization’s work was partisan, its CEO, longtime Democrat operative Tom Lopach, challenged my questions as biased, while emphasizing his outfit’s focus on targeting “underrepresented voting-eligible Americans.”

Another prominent Democrat-backed vehicle is the Everybody Votes Campaign, which has collected and distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to “expand access to our democracy for people in communities of color” to “close the voter registration gap.”

It does so by funding and training dozens of community groups to register voters to close “the voter registration gap in communities of color,” which it attributes to “modern forms of Jim Crow laws” such as voter ID requirements, the group’s executive director, Nellie Sires, said in a January 2024 interview.

One recipient of funds from the campaign was Mi Familia Vota, whose president and chief executive, Héctor Sánchez Barba, the Times quoted in its report. His group’s stated mission is to “mobilize Latino power” in support of a long list of left-wing agenda items.

Perhaps unintentionally corroborating the political nature of organizations like his own, Barba indicated that Democrats need to do a better job of selling their party to the Latinos his group seeks to register. He said it would be a “major mistake,” if, in the Times’ telling, “progressive donors cut off organizations like his.”

Political Contributions

This brings us to the third revealing aspect of the Times’ article: That using charitable organizations to turn out Democrat voters represents a tax-advantaged way for wealthy donors and charitable foundations to evade limits on political contributions.

The Times wrote that “politically minded donors … reap tax breaks from their gifts to some groups that register voters on a nonpartisan basis and that are considered charities. The donors would not get such tax breaks if they gave to traditional PACs.”

A 2020 analysis by one Silicon Valley-based Democrat Super PAC found that “501(c)(3) voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in the electorate” would be the “single most effective tactic for ensuring Democratic victories” — “4 to 10 times more cost-effective” on an after-tax basis at “garnering additional Democratic votes” relative to alternatives like “broadcast media and digital buys.”

Accordingly, the Everybody Votes Campaign collected over $190 million from major Democratic Party donors, unions, and environmental activists from 2016 to 2021. Donors included the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund; the New Venture and Hopewell Funds, managed by for-profit consulting firm Arabella Advisors; and the George Soros-funded Foundation to Promote Open Society — all 501(c)(3) public charities or private foundations forbidden from supporting “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias.”

Conversely, for myriad reasons, including, some claim, the chill cast over conservative entities as a result of the Obama IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups, the right has had no comparable effort to exploit these apparent loopholes, let alone test the IRS’s limits.

How Democrats will utilize voter registration and mobilization nonprofit organizations going forward, in light of the headwinds they have faced, remains an open question. As does whether authorities will scrutinize putatively nonpartisan organizations to assess whether they have operated in violation of the requirements to retain their tax-exempt statuses.

But what is clear is that the mask is off. Democrats have side-stepped federal rules and regulations to unlock massive pools of money in a bid to elect favored candidates via supposedly nonpartisan charities.

That scandal is now hiding in plain sight.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.