Even as the momentum to protect American elections from foreign influence continues to move forward in 2025, more action is needed, an election integrity watchdog warned in a Wednesday report first shared with The Daily Wire.
The report from the Honest Elections Project documents how eight states have moved in the last year to close a loophole that allows foreign nationals to fund state-level ballot measure campaigns. These campaigns can range from battles over abortion and marijuana to proposals governing how elections are conducted.
“Foreign nationals are prohibited from funding candidate campaigns and PACs, but most states lack similar protections for ballot measure campaigns,” the report says. “As a result, foreign nationals and foreign-funded entities are free to fund and influence campaigns that change state constitutions or even rewrite the rules of the very elections that foreigners are forbidden to influence.”
States that moved to ban foreign funding for ballot initiatives included Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Wyoming.
Honest Election Project
Efforts to ban foreign funding have failed in some conservative states like Texas, where Democrats used a procedural move to hold up the proposal. The report was critical of a bill in Montana on foreign spending, arguing that it had no legislative teeth.
“Despite these setbacks, states across the country made extraordinary progress towards closing the foreign funding loophole in 2025—most on a bipartisan basis,” the report said. “That bipartisanship only goes so far, however: few of the measures that ultimately passed had Democratic co-sponsors, and none were advanced in Democrat-controlled legislatures.”
The reports point to the influence of Hansjörg Wyss, a leftist Swiss billionaire, who has reportedly donated over $280 million to the leftist Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Sixteen Thirty Fund has, in turn, spent around $130 million on state and local ballot initiatives since 2014.
According to Americans for Public Trust, the funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund for ballot initiatives included about $33.5 million in Michigan, $20.7 million in Ohio, $17 million in Florida, $13 million in Missouri, and $10.9 million in Colorado.
Honest Elections Project argued that the spending in Michigan “drove ballot measures on redistricting and election rules that fundamentally reshaped the democratic process for partisan advantage.”
When asked about the increase in states looking to ban foreign spending on elections, a spokesman for Sixteen Thirty Fund said it backed the DISCLOSE Act, legislation backed by Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that would expand “the prohibition on campaign spending by foreign nationals,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
“Sixteen Thirty Fund is compliant with all applicable laws and regulations, including those governing state and local ballot elections,” the spokesman said. “Our organization has publicly advocated for the passing of the DISCLOSE Act, which would increase campaign finance transparency and accountability.”
In response to this funding, the report called for lawmakers in Michigan, Florida, and other states to take action.
The ballot initiative loophole makes American elections vulnerable to the influence of foreign nationals from countries like China, Russia, and Iran, the report said.
Leftist lawyer Marc Elias lost a case over the summer attempting to block the enactment of the law blocking foreign funding of ballot campaigns in Kansas. He previously lost a similar lawsuit in Ohio.
The report also highlighted the passage of laws in several states banning ranked-choice voting, a system where ballots are counted in rounds and the person who starts with the most votes doesn’t necessarily win based on how other voters rank them.
Ranked choice voting “replaces the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ with a complicated process in which voters rank numerous candidates in each race and winners are computed by eliminating poor-performing candidates, redistributing votes, and eliminating exhausted ballots,” the report said.
In 2025, Arkansas, West Virginia, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, and Wyoming all banned ranked choice voting. The previous year, ballot efforts to introduce ranked choice voting failed in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and Colorado.
Honest Elections Project
The Honest Elections Project called for Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas to all take steps to proactively ban ranked choice voting.
“In 2025, states across the country took extraordinary steps to ban the foreign funding of ballot issue campaigns and ranked-choice voting, two of the biggest threats to election integrity and voter confidence facing the nation, and they did so in record numbers,” Jason Snead, Executive Director of the Honest Elections Project, told The Daily Wire. “While there is still much work to be done in 2026 and beyond, this was a banner year for election integrity.”