In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, conservatives and moderates alike are crying out for the decimation of hyper-politicized nonprofit organizations and the “NGO complex” that many believe enables and encourages left-wing extremism. The sentiment is correct, but the righteous anger is currently directionless, leading to dubious comments about “hate speech,” vague notions of charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and talk of investigations into Antifa funding, with no real sense of where to strike first. There needs to be a clear target, and it should be one easily hit for maximum effect.
The “charitable” voter registration industry is that target, and this is a uniquely opportune moment to hit it.
Despite IRS rules prohibiting charitable groups from engaging in partisan electioneering, it’s an open secret that a small army of voter registration nonprofits operates as an extension of the Democratic Party. In 2020, a Democrat Super PAC called Mind the Gap sent a memo advising megadonors that the largest of these “charitable” groups, the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and the Everybody Votes Campaign (EVC), were “4 to 10 times more cost-effective than the next best alternative” for “netting additional Democratic votes.”
Everybody Votes Campaign
The EVC is the largest voter registration campaign in history. It has recorded more than 7 million registrations and $200 million in funding since 2015, when it was first conceived for explicitly partisan reasons, as proved by emails between Democrat consultants and John Podesta.
EVC’s canvassers have been repeatedly investigated for submitting thousands of fraudulent registration forms in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. The group is also one of the biggest donors to the New Georgia Project, a Georgia activist group recently fined $300,000 by the Georgia Ethics Commission for engaging in partisan electioneering on behalf of its founder, Stacey Abrams.
Voter Participation Center
The VPC also has quite the “nonpartisan” track record, registering 6.6 million voters while causing more partisan scandals than one can count. As far back as 2012, left-leaning journalist Sasha Issenberg wrote: “Even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats.” In 2024 VPC was caught filtering their Facebook and Instagram voter registration ads so that they specifically weren’t shown to users interested in things like “NASCAR,” “golf,” “Jeeps,” and “Duck Dynasty” but were shown to users interested in “African-American Literature,” “Jordan Peele,” “Taylor Swift,” “Patagonia,” and “hot yoga.”
Left-wing Activism Supply Chain
Dozens of state-level affiliates exist downstream of these national groups as well, and they do more than just register voters. They also organize protests, advocate for policies, and, most importantly, upload the information from every voter registration to massive databases like NGP VAN that are sold exclusively to Democrat PACs for use in mailing lists, fundraising, and canvassing. If all of these groups were suddenly stopped, it would devastate all levels of the left-wing activism supply chain, and it would be very difficult to build replacements fast enough for the scheme to work again in 2026.
The good news is there are already numerous elected officials calling for these fake “nonpartisan” voter registration groups to be stopped or investigated. In the last year alone, the attorney general of Maryland sent the VPC a cease-and-desist leter over its invasive mailers, Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., asked the IRS to investigate the VPC for filtering its Facebook ads, and 21 representatives in Michigan signed a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking her office to investigate the VPC and the EVC.
Left’s Infighting
On the other side of the fence, the left’s donors are now expressing doubts about whether their favorite “nonpartisan” voter registration schemes will continue to work after the dramatic swing towards Republicans within several traditionally Democrat-dominated demographics during the 2024 election. For example, in April 2024, panicked Democratic strategists sent a controversial emergency memo warning donors to stop funding “nonpartisan” voter registration groups because young men and Latino voters were no longer reliably Democratic enough. Last month, The New York Times reported that “a fierce fight is underway over how Democrats should address their sagging voter registration numbers and which groups should receive funding to do the work,” and how these questions are “pitting partisans against philanthropists.”
With pressure already building from above and outside, the Trump administration has the chance to turn it up to eleven and send the entire “charitable” voter registration industry into disarray.
Possible Charges
At a minimum, the worst offenders — the VPC, EVC, and others like them — should have their tax-exempt statuses revoked, and donors to those groups should be sent requests for information and face inquiries about their own tax statuses.
There are stronger options as well. Charges related to tax fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the United States could also be on the table for groups and donors that knowingly claimed a tax deduction for donations to non-exempt partisan work. Then, there’s the nuclear option, in which the administration might also consider legislation or executive orders designating voter registration a non-exempt function, thus returning the work of registering voters to political parties, PACs, and 501(c)(4) groups, where it belongs. This might begin to restore the American charitable sector’s once-stellar reputation.
In short, if the goal is to dismantle the left-wing NGO complex, voter registration groups are the best place to start.