One Organization’s Efforts May Have Tipped 2020 Election to Democrats, Report Says

Early voting has been under way in Virginia's Nov. 7 General Assembly election since Sept. 22 in polling sites such as this this one in Hillsboro, where voters here are casting their ballots on Nov. 3, 2020. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

A new report from the Capital Research Center has shed light on the Everybody Votes campaign, also known as the Voter Registration Project, projecting that the endeavor registered enough Democratic swing state voters that it “may have decided the 2020 presidential election and could decide 2024.”

“The Everybody Votes campaign used the guise of civic-minded charity to selectively register millions of ‘non-white’ swing-state voters in the hopes of getting out the Democratic vote for a 2020 presidential win. It worked,” Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer said in an article outlining his investigation.

The full report can be read here (pdf).

“Democrats used truckloads of money from private foundations and public charities to give their donors enormous tax breaks and pad their electoral margins in 2020, even though charities and foundations are strictly forbidden by law to operate with the effect, much less the intent, of benefiting a political party,” Mr. Thayer’s article states.

The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) website notes that “all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”

Yet it also states that voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts “would not be prohibited political campaign activity if conducted in a non-partisan manner.”

In his report, Mr. Thayer argued that the Everybody Votes campaign targeted groups that skew somewhat or heavily Democratic, making it partisan in all but name.

He suggested Republicans may be averse to similar tactics because they worry about targeting from the IRS as in 2012. In the words of The Washington Post, by no means a conservative periodical, the agency in 2013 “admit[ted to] targeting conservatives for tax scrutiny” during that election cycle.

The Epoch Times contacted the IRS regarding the Capital Research Center’s claims about the Voter Registration Project, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

An IRS spokesperson told The Epoch Times that IRS Section 6103 prevents them from confirming or denying correspondence with the agency or commenting on individual taxpayers.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s Mother and John Podesta

Mr. Thayer’s report cites a 2015 email on Wikileaks addressed to John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016.

An attachment to the email details a $106 million campaign with the potential to “surpass electoral margin goals” in eight key states—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.

Mr. Thayer’s report says that Barbara Fried, Stanford law school professor and mother of alleged cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, helped author a leaked 2018 memo with colleagues from the Democrat-aligned Super PAC “Mind the Gap,” which she co-founded.

The document outlined what she and her colleagues called “the single most effective tactic for ensuring Democratic victories–501(c)(3) voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in the electorate.”

“Provided that such efforts are well-designed and executed, on a pre-tax basis they are 2 to 5 times more cost-effective at netting additional democratic votes than the tactics that campaigns will invest in (chiefly, broadcast media and digital buys),” the PAC’s memo states.

Ms. Fried and her co-authors advised donors to direct their money to Everybody Votes and two other groups, noting that all three “have stellar track records.”

Capital Research Center reported that the 2015 Everybody Votes campaign plan was similar to one sent to Mr. Podesta earlier that year. The previous plan was developed by Corridor Partners, a for-profit investment strategy company now focused on climate and energy.

Mr. Podesta received that prior plan from the president of the Wyss Foundation, associated with the Swiss billionaire and left-wing donor Hansjörg Wyss, according to the report.

The report also documents a Word file containing the Corridor Partners’ plan with “Track Changes” left on, revealing a greater level of explicit partisanship in an earlier draft.

“At one point, three entire paragraphs were completely removed because they described Republican-won elections that might have been flipped to Democrats if only more ‘non-white’ voters had been registered,” Mr. Thayer’s report notes.

“A reference to changing the ‘outcome of an election’—something forbidden to charities and private foundations—was switched to changing the ‘competitiveness of an election,’” the report adds.

The Corridor Partners memo, with changes tracked, can be read here (pdf).

‘Who’s-Who of Left-Leaning Megadonors’

The Capital Research Center’s report lists some major funders of the Voter Registration Project and its sister organizations, describing them as “a who’s-who of left-leaning megadonors.”

One consistent funding source has been George Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Societies.

Money has also come from the Democracy Fund, an organization associated with left-leaning eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

The report “identified $154.4 million in giving to the VRP network from 2016 to 2021.”

Mr. Thayer also documented millions in consulting fees to firms with close ties to the Democrats, including $6.4 million in 2020 to Fieldworks LLC.

“The firms that VRP [Voter Registration Project] paid for ‘nonpartisan’ voter registration work are fiercely partisan operations, and these firms’ coffers are where most of VRP’s own spending went in the critical election year of 2020,” Mr. Thayer wrote.

His report estimates that the targeted registration efforts netted Joe Biden “between 1 million and 2.7 million votes,” all in key swing states.

“Another way to estimate VRP’s partisan success would be to look at expected new votes in the plan’s target states. If those state projections held true in 2020 and assuming the new voters only voted 60 percent for Democrats, VRP produced more Democratic votes than the party’s margin of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania,” Mr. Thayer wrote.

He cites job listings on Everybody Votes’ website to argue that it’s gearing up to target swing states that will be key during the 2024 cycle.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Voter Registration Project, Mind the Gap, Ms. Fried, and Mr. Podesta.