Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma
Here’s one way Trump and his allies could disrupt and even overturn the 2024 election: It starts with stoking rumors that noncitizens voted. The Trump campaign and its allies go to court to stop certification or throw out ballots in certain precincts and counties, backed by the observations of GOP-backing poll-watchers who claim they saw non-citizens vote. Judges are now contemplating whether to count certain votes—decisions that could decide the outcome of the election.
The lie comes from the same people who tried and failed to overturn the 2020 election.
So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him. The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. And there’s evidence the plot is already succeeding: Polling suggests about half of Americans, including most Republicans, are concerned about non-citizens voting, despite no credible evidence to substantiate it.
The report, from the pro-democracy non-profit Issue One, zeroes in on the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a new group of more than 80 organizations propagating the lie that non-citizens are compromising American elections. Though IRS filing deadlines make it hard to track recent donations, Issue One catalogued more than $590 million that flowed to these groups since 2020. While there’s no way to know how much of this money has gone to pushing the non-citizen voting myth, its sources demonstrate the groups pushing the false claim are swimming in the same pool of money that has been used to fund other pieces of the far right’s agenda, from installing rightwing judges to drafting Project 2025, the plan to transform the federal government into an instrument of authoritarian rule and oligarchic plunder under a second Donald Trump term.
The lie of non-citizen voting is being deployed by the same people who tried and failed to overturn the results of the 2020 election—perhaps most notably, election lawyer and election denier Cleta Mitchell, who launched the Only Citizens Vote Coalition and is tightly bound up in the GOP ecosystem. In January 2021, she was on the notorious phone call in which Trump tried to blackmail Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger into “finding 11,780 votes.” The grand jury investigating the effort to overturn Georgia’s election results recommended indicting Mitchell, but she was never charged. In 2022, her Election Integrity Network began recruiting poll watchers to try to sow chaos and doubt over the midterm elections.
Most of the hundreds of millions flowing to the coalition’s member groups comes from anonymous donor advised funds, which allow rich individuals to give anonymous, tax-deductible gifts. The largest donor to the groups since 2020, at $328 million, is a single anonymous donor advised fund. The second biggest, at $80 million, is another donor advised fund called Donors’ Trust, the so-called “dark-money ATM” of the conservative movement. The third largest donor was the Bradley Impact Fund, whose own funding, a Mother Jones investigation recently revealed, also largely comes from anonymous donor-advised funds. There’s a twisted irony to the fact that the same groups bellowing about the threat of mysterious illegal voters are almost entirely funded by anonymous donors themselves. If it’s such a noble cause, why not put your name on it?
“I don’t think I quite realized going into this what a prominent role donor-advised funds were playing in so much issue advocacy that could serve as pretext to undermine the legitimate results of the November election,” says Michael Beckel, research direct at Issue One and an author of the report.
The donors’ anonymity helps obscure conflicts created by their activism. For example, the report highlights that several groups involved in funding the Only Citizens Vote Coalition have also helped to appoint conservative judges and Supreme Court justices—the same people they hope will issue decisions tipping the election to Trump if he does not win outright. Take the Concord Fund, which has sent $24 million to coalition members since 2020. It’s run by Carrie Severino, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and a close ally to Leonard Leo, the longtime architect of the conservative judicial movement who controls more than a billion dollars in dark money. Severino’s group spent tens of millions to secure the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as reshape state and federal courts.
Another example is the 85 Fund, which figures so deeply into Leo’s orbit that it is reportedly part of the DC attorney general’s investigation into whether Leo is illegally using his dark money web to enrich himself. The 85 Fund, of which Severino is a director, has donated $2.5 million to three coalition members since 2020.
The fund also runs the Honest Elections Project, an Orwellian-named group involved in the coalition that has advocated for radical changes to election law before the US Supreme Court. That means the 85 Fund isn’t just a donor to members of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition—it is also, through the Honest Elections Project, the largest recipient by far of the money flowing to these groups: $413 million since 2020. “This is an organization that is led by allies of Leonard Leo, who has played a major role in helping shape the Supreme Court’s current majority,” says Beckel. That makes the 85 Fund an example of playing both sides: fear-mongering over noncitizen voting while also part of the effort to install far-right judges. If the justices get to rule on this issue, the conservative majority will be weighing a pet project put forward by their own friends and financial backers.
The Only Citizens Vote Coalition’s members have significant overlap with Project 2025, with roughly a quarter of the coalition involved in advising or drafting the 922-page plan, according to the report. Those include the 85 Fund and Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation. It’s not surprising, but it is another indication of the fact that the groups pushing the lie about illegal voting have a significant stake in the outcome of the election, with his return to power being an essential step in their plan to remake the federal government and the presidency.
“I’ve known for years that there are a number of opaque ways that wealthy Americans are trying to influence elections and policy,” Beckel says. Now, those resources are being used to “to lend credibility to a myth that could ultimately serve as the pretext for undermining the legitimate results of the November election.”
