The Left’s voter registration grift thrived in 2024 

Most people would be astonished to learn how much of the “money in politics” that they love to hate lives, at least nominally, outside of politics. Everyone knows about Super PACs and “dark money” groups, but for years now tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organizations have been one of the biggest centers of political power and money in the country. Not through public policy think tanks or civil rights litigation groups like the Heritage Foundation or the ACLU, but through a rapidly growing industry of “nonpartisan” voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups that abuse a combination of loopholes and lax enforcement to leave the policy consulting sidelines behind and get their hands dirty in the world of winning elections. 

Recently released batches of tax forms show that this tax-exempt vote machine grew bigger than ever in 2024. Our research, based on a selection of more than 80 of the largest 501(c)(3) voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups, shows that these industry leaders consumed around $638 million in total expenses during 2024. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a ten percent increase from 2020, meaning that nonprofit electioneering became an even larger force in American politics during the last election, even as traditional PAC spending experienced a modest decline. 

The growth of this tax-exempt vote machine is bad for the charitable sector, bad for American politics, and dangerous to election integrity. It is well past time for the relevant authorities to give the get-out-the-vote industry a closer look. 

The history of the vote machine 

The best explanation of the tax-exempt vote machine comes from the leaked emails of John Podesta. One such email, sent to Podesta in 2015 by the president of Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss’s private foundation, contains an extremely detailed plan for using 501(c)(3)s to fund and execute a $100 million plot to register millions of voters.  

But not all voters. 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 and nonpartisan language about “voter participation” being added only as an afterthought. In other words, 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. It was an obvious scheme, but the IRS has allowed left-leaning organizations to abuse this loophole freely because they pay lip service to nonpartisanship with fig-leaf words like “voter participation” and “civic engagement.” 

This plan, as the Capital Research Center was the first to expose, later became the Everybody Votes Campaign, the largest and most partisan voter registration scheme in American history, and it played a pivotal role in helping President Biden win the 2020 election. A leaked memo from Democratic Super PAC Mind the Gap called groups such as the Everybody Votes Campaign and the Voter Participation Center “4 to 10 times more cost effective than the next best alternative” at “netting additional democratic votes” and Democratic mega donors lined up to fund them. Some donors, including the San Francisco Foundation, the Black Dog Private Foundation, and the David E. Reese Family Foundation were even foolhardy enough to write out the name of the Super PAC in the description of their charitable grantmaking, without receiving so much as a second look from the IRS. 

All by April 

The tax-exempt vote machine was riding high on its 2020 successes as 2024 approached. Off-cycle budgets remained high, much higher than in the past, since donors had learned that “registering in the off year is just as — or even more — effective than registering during the on year” because it kept the vote machine running smoothly. With election season approaching, Mind the Gap once again advised its donors that 501(c)(3) voter registration would be the key to a Democratic victory in 2024, while some two dozen new organizations had been added to the industry’s ranks since 2020.  

Another initiative, All by April, was launched by Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund specifically to urge donors to distribute their “election-related grants” to 501(c)(3) groups early, by April of 2024, giving the vote machine plenty of time and money to get back into full gear before November. 174 donors signed the pledge, making a combined “$79 million in new 501(c)(3) grants for election-related work and moving up $61 million in scheduled grant payments so that grantees would have access to funds earlier in the year.” In total the campaign estimates it mobilized $155 million, getting generous funding to many electioneering 501(c)(3)s earlier than ever before. All by April even conducted a detailed survey to verify it. 

Things were looking very good. 

A fly in the “nonpartisan” ointment 

Then, just as the All by April money arrived, Democratic strategists and donors foresaw a problem: “nonpartisan” voter registration might not be partisan enough. The whisperings and worries coalesced in January, when Aaron Strauss, a prominent left-leaning data expert, sent an urgent memo to numerous Democratic megadonors urging them to pull the plug on voter 501(c)(3) voter registration immediately because demographic trends had shifted and the “nonpartisan” voter registration groups might now actually be helping Republicans. 

The memo caused quite a ruckus. 

Writing about the memo in April the Washington Post reported that Strauss and other Democrats were concerned that nonpartisan voter registration groups wouldn’t be able to “avoid signing up likely Republicans” in 2024. The main reason for this concern was “a marked shift among the roughly 1 in 5 citizens of voting age who are unregistered toward Republicans,” and several polls “[showing] Biden polling below 2020 levels among Black and Latino voters.” Suddenly, the façade of altruistic concern for the voices of “underrepresented communities” and “civic participation” had dropped. “Indeed, if we were to blindly register nonvoters and get them on the rolls, we would be distinctly aiding Trump’s quest for a personal dictatorship,” Strauss wrote. The memo also admits that the Democratic Party and its donors have outsourced its voter mobilization work to the nonprofit sector, saying, “For too long, many funders have relegated the work of mobilizing base constituencies, especially voters of color and young people, to nonpartisan programs.”  

Leaders within the vote machine were not pleased. Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, told the Washington Post that “Strauss was overestimating the amount that young voters and voters of color are shifting to the right,” and that she was afraid that the memo would “create a disinvestment” in her organization’s work. 

As it turns out, she had no reason to be worried. 

By the numbers 

The 2024 batch of IRS Form 990s shows that Aaron Strauss’s memo was probably ignored, and that groups like the Mind the Gap and All by April were very successful at directing more money into the tax-exempt vote machine.  

Using a service called Impala, which aggregates nonprofit financial data for research and fundraising purposes, our researchers gathered financial information for 83 of the leading voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups in 2024. Groups were selected judiciously to avoid counting large organizations for whom voter registration and mobilization was only a small part of their overall work. Only 501(c)(3) organizations were included, and for each group total revenues and expenses from both 2020 and 2024 were recorded (when applicable) in order to estimate the rough size of the nonprofit voter registration and mobilization industry. Totals were automatically rounded by Impala to the nearest 100,000 or the nearest 100 if the value was below 1 million.  

A digital copy of the data can be found here. 

The results showed very impressive growth: 

• In 2020 the groups raised $541.7 million and spent $491.5 million.  

• In 2024 the groups raised $633.3 million and spent $638.7 million. 

Using expenses as the measuring stick to avoid counting organizations receiving large multi-year endowments, the sample of 501(c)(3)s saw a 30% increase in spending from one election cycle to the next. Additionally, our research found that 23 of the top voter registration groups in 2024 didn’t even exist in 2020, while no strictly voter registration and mobilization organizations could be identified that existed in 2020 but not in 2024. 

Now, some concessions and explanations must be made regarding this data.  

First, there is a non-negligible amount of double-counting in the totals, since many of the organizations made large grants to one or more of the other organizations on the list, so the total size of the industry is at least slightly inflated by those grants. For the purposes of comparing the industry’s year-over-year size, though, this double-counting does not pose as much of a problem, since relative size, not total size, is most important.  

Second, there was a staggering amount of inflation between 2020 and 2024, 20 percent by most estimates, so the real growth in expenses from 2020 to 2024 is about 10 percent – still sizeable, but not as impressive as the 30 percent nominal growth. Ten percent growth is still a remarkable feat since, according to Open Secrets, inflation-adjusted total spending on elections through traditional PACs in 2024 was about twenty percent less than in 2020. At a time when total spending on politics was declining dramatically (relative to the last presidential election cycle), the voter registration industry actually seems to have surged.  

The Everybody Votes campaign 

So, with their funding unhindered by concerns that they would not be partisan enough, what did the left’s voter registration groups do with all that money in 2024? 

One of the biggest players in the industry, as mentioned earlier, is the Everybody Votes Campaign (EVC), which serves as the name for three organizations; the Voter Registration Project, the Voter Registration Project Education Fund, and Register America, which is a 501(c)(4) not included in the data above. EVC once again received the endorsement of Mind the Gap in 2024 and raised a combined total of just over $75 million, substantially more than the $50 million raised in 2020, sending almost all of it out to other left-leaning nonprofits and for-profit canvassing firms. These grantees and canvassing firms landed them in a world of scandal. 

For example, in 2024, the Voter Registration Project’s 990 shows it paid a canvassing firm called Field+Media Corps $4.6 million for “voter registration support” in 2024. In October 2025, seven employees of Field+Media Corps were charged by Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday with numerous crimes, including forgery and tampering with public records, related to their work on behalf of the EVC after thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms were submitted in bulk across multiple key swing districts just before the 2024 election. Clearly, the $9.1 million the Voter Registration Project paid for voter-registration “quality control services” to another canvassing firm, The Outreach Team, was not well spent.  

One of the EVC’s grantees, New Georgia Project, was also fined $300,000 for illegal partisan activity by the Georgia ethics commission in January 2025 and was ultimately permanently dissolved. Another grantee, the Voter Formation Project, reported record-high revenues and 50,000 voter registrations after spending millions on digital ads in 2024, but the group was also suddenly closed in 2025 with no explanation given.  

While the EVC is probably the biggest source of money in the vote machine, the Voter Participation Center and State Voices are responsible for a huge portion of the groundwork. 

Voter Participation Center 

The Voter Participation Center (VPC), for its part, did not have a good year compared to 2020. VPC’s yearly expenses were just $66.5 million, far less than the $100.3 million it spent in 2020, and revenues were similarly disappointing. The VPC made ambitious use of its diminished budget, though, and found itself at the center of a number of scandals and controversies. 

In March the VPC’s misleading mailers caused so much confusion that the Mississippi and Alabama secretaries of state each had to issue statements clarifying that they were not official government communications.  

In September VPC was caught filtering its digital voter registration ads so that they wouldn’t be shown to people interested in things like NASCAR, Duck Dynasty, or golf. This scandal resulted in a demand from Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R-NY) that the IRS investigate the VPC’s tax status compliance.  

In October, the VPC’s misleading mailers again caused so much confusion in Mississippi that the Secretary of State issued a statement.  

In November, the VPC was sent a cease and desist by the Attorney General of Maryland over intimidating mailers that they sent, threatening to tell the recipient’s neighbors if the recipient didn’t vote that year.  

The VPC also continued its controversial relationship with a consulting firm called the “Pivot Group,” paying the firm nearly $15 million for mailing services, despite the Pivot Group’s long description of itself as “committed to electing Democrats up and down the ballot.” 

State Voices 

State Voices is probably the leading organizing and training hub for the Left’s vast network of smaller get-out-the-vote groups. They provide technical training, data tools, and other assistance through their “state tables” which often work with and fund a dozen or more local groups.  

State Voices raised nearly $20 million in 2024 and spent nearly $25 million, a significant decrease from 2020. But that shrinkage might be partially explained by “state tables” within the State Voices network spinning off and obtaining independent tax status, meaning their revenues and expenses would no longer appear on the State Voices books. Despite diminished revenues and expenses, State Voices still reported that its network made more than 179 million voter contacts and registered 840,000 voters during 2024. In 2020, the group reported only 124 million voter contacts but 2.1 million voter registrations, so voter registration numbers were cut dramatically while voter contact numbers improved. Perhaps Aaron Strauss’s memo did make an impact? 

State Voices is an extremely useful organization for understanding the scale and activity of the tax-exempt vote machine because they train and funds so many organizations across so many states that are below it in the food chain. In their 2024 annual report State Voices provided a map of their voter contact numbers broken down state-by-state. Looking at the states highlighted with red stars, indicating where the most voter contacts were performed, a clear pattern emerges: 

Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada combined form a near-perfect list of the most important swing states in 2024. Additionally, in Nebraska, where both a paid family leave ballot measure and at least one electoral college swing vote hung in the balance, State Voices reported a staggering 6 million voter contacts, which is more than three contacts per resident and six contacts for every person that voted in 2024. In Georgia, perhaps the most hotly contested swing state, the network’s 32.6 million contacts were likewise equivalent to roughly three per resident and six per voter. 

Enough is enough 

These numbers staggering numbers show that the tax-exempt voter registration and get-out-the-vote industry grew even larger in 2024 while most political spending shrank. Clearly, large left-leaning donors are growing fonder of, and more comfortable with, using the tax-exempt sector to do the dirty work of their partisan political allies. This is bad for several reasons.  

First, it means that the charitable sector is becoming increasingly politicized and straying away from its purpose. Second, it gives foreign bad actors an easy method to manipulate our elections because, unlike PACs, 501(c)(3) organizations are allowed to accept unlimited funding from foreign sources. And third, it encourages tribal identity politics and encourages politicians to create division between demographics by specifically pandering to one or the other in order to keep abusing the register-by-demographic loophole that the IRS has benevolently neglected to close with even the slightest enforcement action.  

There are several possible solutions. Any amount of IRS enforcement, a congressional hearing or investigation, or even a simple piece of legislation that amends the tax code so that voter registration and get-out-the-vote work are no longer tax deductible would all be huge steps in the right direction. It’s time to stop this partisan vote machine pretending to be a charity.  

Post-script: the 501(c)(3) “blood bags” 

While the tax-exempt vote machine grew larger than ever before, a concerning parallel development was also emerging. During 2024 multiple 501(c)(3) groups emerged from out of nowhere with massive budgets making enormous grants to an affiliated 501(c)(4) and doing nothing else. Inspired by the dystopian film Mad Max, wherein prisoners are kept alive for the sole purpose of providing blood transfusions, we have dubbed this arrangement the 501(c)(3) “blood bag” because these nonprofits seem to have been intended as parasitized feeder-organs for their partisan affiliates from the very beginning. 

The practice of using a 501(c)(3) to fund the IRS-required charitable 51 percent of a 501(c)(4)’s activities is nothing new. Usually a 501(c)(3) will contribute a large grant to its affiliate 501(c)(4), earmarked for the charitable portion of the 501(c)(4)’s work, of course, but it will spend most of its money on supplies, salaries, grants to other 501(c)(3)s, and performing its own tax-exempt function.  

The 501(c)(3) “blood bags” are totally different. Rather than performing their tax-exempt function themselves, they quietly spent upwards of 95 percent of their budgets on grants to their 501(c)(4) affiliates, outsourcing their charitable functions entirely to groups that routinely donated to Super PACs. 

America Votes Education Fund: 

In 2023, the America Votes Education Fund, the legally affiliated 501(c)(3) wing of America Votes, didn’t exist. In 2024, it spent $20.7 million. Of that, $532 was allocated for office expenses, $274 for fundraising expenses, and $20,748,002 granted to America Votes. Perhaps they used that $532 to buy a checkbook, some “AV Education Fund” letterhead, and a plaque for an empty office door while the tax-exempt work it was nominally created to do was outsourced entirely to the bullpen of partisan operatives down the hall?  

Outside of that, the America Votes Education Fund has done nothing of its own. Its three board members, Greg Speed, Heidi Schloesser, and Brandon Boswell, serve as the president, COO, and treasurer of America Votes; it reported zero accounting or legal fees; it had zero paid employees or volunteers. The only reason for its “charitable” existence is taking in tax-deductible donations and delivering them to the group next door, whose statement on the 2024 election brags: “Our program also contributed to Democrats’ Senate wins in Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and likely Arizona, as well as major state-level victories in North Carolina, including the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General races.” 

Even more troubling, almost all of America Votes Education Fund’s revenue came from a $19.25 million grant from Future Forward USA Action, a 501(c)(4) that the New York Times called the “dark-money group of the main super PAC backing Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala Harris.” It seems likely that Future Forward USA Action counted this contribution to America Votes Education Fund towards its own 51 percent charitable activity threshold that the IRS requires them to meet, but the money was simply passed along to another 501(c)(4) whose own “charitable” activities are limited to supposedly nonpartisan get-out-the-vote operations run by the exact same operatives who admittedly “contributed to Democrats’ Senate wins” in 2024. 

Other large donors to the group include the Arabella Advisors-led New Venture Fund, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Linda and Lenny Bell Foundation, and the Wallace H. Coulter Trust; all of which are 501(c)(3)s. Each should probably be asked if they knew that every cent of their money was going to be rerouted to a group that openly boasts that it works to elect Democrats. 

Guarantee Our Votes Project 

The Guarantee Our Votes Project, a 501(c)(3) affiliate of the Democratic Governors Association, stretched the limits of 501(c)(3) status even further.  

The group spent $13,919,873 in 2024, with $39,873, or 0.2 percent, spent on legal, accounting, and office expenses. The other 99.8 percent was spent on grants to America Works USA ($13.85 million) and New Hampshire Youth Movement Project ($30,000). America Works USA is one of the Democratic Governors Association’s affiliated 501(c)(4)s and has historically spent most of its money on Democratic PAC contributions.  

The group’s May to April financial calendar means it is not possible to see the group’s finances for most of 2024 yet. But PAC spending records show that the group gave over $6 million to the Democratic Governors Association in 2024. The organization’s only donors in 2024 were the Vanguard Charitable Endowment, which gave $9.9 million, and the Foundation for the Carolinas, which gave the other $4 million. Both donors operate donor advised funds (DAFs) which are traditionally not allowed to contribute directly to a 501(c)(4) organization, but the Guarantee Our Votes Project seems to have been conjured into being just to solve that problem, and on behalf of an arm of the Democratic party, no less. 

Democracy Matters Foundation 

The Democracy Matters Foundation (DMF), formerly the Franklin Education Forum, spent $34.7 million in 2024, with $31.38 million granted to the affiliated Democracy Matters and $1.86 million granted to Onyx Impact. Both of the latter were newly created 501(c)(4) groups.  

That means nearly 96 percent of all Democracy Matters Foundation expenses went towards grants to 501(c)(4) groups. DMF is run by Bradley Beychok, a long time affiliate of Democratic political operative David Brock. The group’s biggest donors in 2024 were the American Independent Foundation ($10 million) and the Voter Participation Center ($5 million). The Voter Participation Center, as explained above, is one of the worst partisan offenders in the tax-exempt vote machine, and apparently, its largest grant in 2024 went to nothing more than a façade for a 501(c)(4). 

Bright Futures Fund 

The last 501(c)(3) “blood bag” is not in the mold of the others. As mentioned above, DAFs, especially large commercial DAFs, don’t traditionally make grants to 501(c)(4) groups. But many DAFs overcame this hurdle in 2024 with the invention of the “blood bag.”  

Fidelity Charitable Investments Gift Fund, one of America’s largest commercial DAFs, went straight for the jugular and made, what seems to be, its first ever grant to a 501(c)(4), rendering itself, or at least one of its accounts, the “blood bag.” And what a 501(c)(4) it was.  

Fidelity granted $37.5 million directly to a 501(c)(4) named Bright Futures Fund in 2024. According to Gabe Kamisnky at The Free Press, the Bright Futures Fund was incorporated in late 2023 by an associate of Democratic super lawyer Marc Elias and spent $182 million in 2024 with tens of millions going to pro-Kamala Harris and Biden super PACs and other Democrat-aligned organizations. Unlike the groups above, however, Bright Futures Fund then granted a combined $37.5 million to 12 different 501(c)(3) groups, suggesting a little more regard for IRS rules than the other “blood bags.”  

Fidelity, for its part, seems to have forgotten it gave to a 501(c)(4) group at all, telling the IRS on its form 990 that it only gave grants to 501(c)(3) groups.  

Only time will tell whether this is the first of many commercial DAF grants to 501(c)(4) groups or a one-off. But if this is the start of an industry-wide trend, it will mean huge changes for the charitable, “dark money,” and PAC industries. 

The “blood bag” tax-exempt vote machine 

The “blood bag” arrangement is something new. Groups on the Left have long used the 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) pairing, but not like this, and this new tactic is concerning. If funding the charitable half of a 501(c)(4) is henceforth to be considered a sufficient tax-exempt function for an entire 501(c)(3), then it will not be long before groups like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations are granting carte blanche to an entire array of “blood bags” in order to underwrite as much dark money Super PAC giving as the Democratic Party can handle.  

Worse yet, as you can see from the grantors and grantees above, the “blood bags” are almost all tied to leading members of the tax-exempt vote machine in some way, suggesting that this is the industry’s latest creation in a year where they were already pushing the envelope further than ever before. The vote machine has entire think tanks dedicated to sharing successful strategies, so it’s a near certainty that, by the end of the 2026 cycle, the “blood bag” arrangement will have been replicated by numerous funders all over the country.  

And it won’t even be noticed until 2028 when the 2026 Form 990s finally come out. 

Sidebar: Government funding of voter registration 

The explosion of the tax-exempt voter registration industry from 2020 to 2024 was not solely a function of private donors. The industry has received a generous amount of government funding as well, thanks to the Biden administration’s frequent grants to openly left-wing political activist groups. Thanks to policies like “Bidenbucks,” which tried to turn government agencies into GOTV (get out the vote) machines, government-funded nonprofits started seeking out advice on running voter registration drives like never before.  

In 2021, NonprofitVOTE, a group whose sole purpose is to encourage more nonprofits to do GOTV work, published a Federal Funds and Voter Registration guide explaining how nonprofits can circumvent rules that restrict voter registration drives by government-funded entities. The guide explains that nonprofits receiving Community Service Block Grants (CSBG) can’t use CSBG funds “to pay for staff or materials to conduct voter registration” or “provide rides to the polls,” but can “use CSBG or other funds to do any other kinds of nonpartisan voter engagement activities” as long as the nonprofit’s work in “limited” in such a way that it avoids creating a “public perception” that it is “involved in partisan politics.” The guide gives similar directions for recipients of Head Start early education funding and AmeriCorps volunteer funding.  

Essentially, nonprofits are being encouraged to play a simple shell game with grant funds, doing voter registration alongside their federally funded work without actually using federal dollars. It’s not a hard scheme to see through since everyone knows that money is fungible, but it satisfies the minimal restrictions of the law and provides enormous utility for politicians who can direct other people’s money towards organizations that they know will contribute, in a big or small way, to friendlier electoral margins. 

This report focuses on groups whose sole or main activity is GOTV work, so the groups mentioned (for the most part) have not received government funds. Most government-funded nonprofits doing voter registration work are doing it only on the side. 

But even when it’s not the bulk of the work, many nonprofits engaged in a substantial amount of voter registration and GOTV work while receiving government funding. 

Examples include: 

• The National Urban League – The Biden Administration awarded the National Urban League, a veteran left-wing advocacy group, more than $10.4 million in new grants from 2021 to 2024. In 2024, according to their 2024 Form 990, government grants accounted for $35.9 million, or 41 percent, of the League’s annual revenue. During the 2024 election, the League’s president spoke on stage at the Democratic National Convention, the League spent $17.2 million on “civic engagement and leadership empowerment program”, and its “Reclaim Your Vote” program made 1.3 million voter contacts, knocked on 248,000 doors, sent over 1 million texts, and held 143 events.  

• UnidosUS – UnidosUS was awarded more than $12 million in new grants by the Biden administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) alone. In the lead-up to the 2024 election UnidosUS invited President Biden to speak at the group’s annual conference and UnidosUS Action Fund, their 501(c)(4) affiliate, endorsed Kamala Harris after Biden withdrew. That year UnidosUS registered 126,796 voters through “digital and canvassing efforts in states including AZ, CA, FL, NV, NY, PA, and TX.” The group also runs a “Hispanic Electorate Data Hub” that tracks polling data, demographic trends, and turnout statistics. 

• Hispanic Federation – the Hispanic Federation, which received more than $95 million in new grants from the Biden Administration for programs such as teaching migrant workers how to obtain welfare, and offering “energy resiliency education” in Puerto Rico, also runs a massive civic engagement program and bragged about “[mobilizing] millions of Latino voters” in 2024 and working with 52 partner organizations to “communicate directly with 2.6 million Latino voters to participate in the 2024 election.” The Hispanic Federation claims it has registered 160,000 and mobilized 3 million Latino voters since 2016. 

These are far from the only organizations with substantial federal funding that have engaged in voter registration and GOTV work, but they are the largest and most notable examples. Other notable federally funded groups such as the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) have gone even further than GOTV work and directly funded ballot measure campaigns or organized protests against law enforcement that turned into violent riots.  

A huge number of smaller federally funded nonprofits, such as food banks, community centers, and schools, also do tiny chunks of voter registration work that are impossible to track and add up greatly over time. One of the best examples of this was a since-repealed federal policy that allowed work-study programs on college campuses to pay students to conduct voter registration, sometimes even while working directly for partisan campaigns. 

As this report makes clear, even privately funded nonprofits find it almost impossible to avoid partisan electioneering in their “civic engagement” work, and there is no indication that publicly funded nonprofits are behaving much better. In fact, since their funding is controlled by politicians whose reelection might determine whether funding continues, government-funded nonprofits have even stronger incentives to cross the line into partisan electioneering. 

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-lefts-voter-registration-grift-thrived-in-2024-2/