BREAKING: How a Chinese-Funded Charity is Registering Democrats to Flip Virginia
New data shows exactly which congressional districts the partisan Voter Participation Center is aiming to conquer in 2024 under the guise of helping people vote
New emails obtained by Restoration News detail a far-left group’s plans to dramatically boost Democratic turnout in two Virginia congressional races this November, helping secure the state for Joe Biden and potentially flipping the U.S. House of Representatives to Democrats.
An email to Virginia Election Commissioner Susan Beals dated March 5, 2024, from the Voter Participation Center and its “sister” group, Center for Voter Information, reveals nearly 82,000 voter registration forms mailed to “young people, people of color, and unmarried women” in Virginia’s hotly contested 2nd and 7th Congressional Districts—with plans to send 2 more batches later this year. The emails were originally obtained via FOIA by Ned Jones, director of the Citizens Election Research Center at the Election Integrity Network.
“VPC and CVI . . . work to engage underrepresented populations in the American electorate . . . particularly focus[ing] on registering and engaging the New American Majority – including young people, people of color, and unmarried women,” the group’s outreach director, Sarah Mitchell, boasts (while also providing her pronouns).
Restoration News has written extensively on the Voter Participation Center’s left-wing partisanship and was the first to expose the $9.3 million it’s raked in from the California-based Enlight Foundation since 2018, itself founded and heavily funded by Chinese tech billionaire Yongping Duan. The foundation’s other co-founder is Xin Liu, a Chinese “inequality” journalist who previously reported for the Communist Party’s China Youth Daily newspaper.
The Voter Participation Center’s campaigns are undoubtedly biased—specifically targeting demographics that overwhelmingly vote for Democrats with the specific goal of building what it terms a “New American Majority.” In other words, establishing a permanent Democratic electoral majority while feigning nonpartisanship.
A 2019 secret donor memo admits as much, noting that “nonpartisan voter registration focused on underrepresented groups” (i.e. Democratic demographics) is as much as 10 times more effective at “netting additional Democratic votes” than traditional party registration drives.
Naturally, the memo advises donors give heavily to the two groups doing the best work at this: the Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information. They’re only nonpartisan for tax-exempt purposes, wrote liberal journalist Sascha Issenberg in 2012, but the “goal of all [their] efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats.”
In the 2022 midterms, the group mailed out 85.5 million forms targeting these potential Democratic voters. In 2020, that figure was a stunning 360 million mailers. And it has access to tens of millions of dollars from “philanthropic” foundations to do so.
This isn’t about persuading people to vote for left-leaning candidates but rather a cynical gambit to boost Democrat political power by adding millions of tuned-out, low-propensity, easily manipulated voters to the rolls. They don’t want all voters to cast a ballot—just the ones easily harvested by the Democratic National Committee.
This is what “progressives” mean by protecting “democracy” from Republicans. And it could mean the difference between victory and defeat in 2024.
EIN.CRP_.CVI_.VA_.Response.4.4.24Naked Partisanship
Of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts, all are firmly Republican or Democratic—except for the two targeted by the Voter Participation Center. It’s no mystery why.
Few expect Republican nominee Donald Trump to win Virginia (though recent polling places him within 4 points of Biden), so the center isn’t wasting resources registering Democrats in heavily blue districts. Instead, it’s microtargeting in swing districts Democrats are desperate to flip this November.
CD-07, which covers most of the locales between Richmond and Northern Virginia (including Fredericksburg), was narrowly flipped in 2018 by fewer than 7,000 votes by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) from Rep. Dave Brat (R), and held in 2022 by just 13,000 votes. With Spanberger now running for governor next year, Cook Political Report has shifted the seat from “likely Democrat” to “leans Democrat” in 2024—and Democrats are alarmed.
The center aims to register 41,000 new Democrats there.
In contrast, Cook rates CD-02—centered on Virginia Beach and the commonwealth’s Eastern Shore—as “leans Republican.” Rep. Jen Kiggans (R), who’s seeking reelection this year, narrowly flipped the district in 2022 from Rep. Elaine Luria (D) by just 10,000 votes.
Likewise, the center aims to register an additional 40,000 Democrats there… and apparently nowhere else.
Note that Joe Biden won both districts in the 2020 presidential election—yet Republican Glenn Youngkin handily won both districts in his 2021 governor’s race. In other words, these are the most hotly contested districts in Virginia, throwing shade on the Voter Participation Center’s claim to “nonpartisanship.”
“Voter registration is the responsibility of state election administration, not nonprofits,” Ned Jones told Restoration News via email. “Every eligible U.S. citizen who wants to vote should have the opportunity to register to vote. But these groups’ mass mailing of pre-populated forms to specific demographics in targeted jurisdictions should not be allowed in any state.”
Jones pointed out that, because many of the mailings are addressed to “current resident” and don’t list the potential voter’s name, “anyone can complete the form—including non-citizens.”
It’s Politics, Jim, But Not as We Know It
For decades, registering people to vote was seen as inherently political and left to political parties—or private citizens to handle themselves. Then the Left discovered it could weaponize 501(c)(3) nonprofits, the same part of the tax code as your local church or the Salvation Army, to dramatically boost Democratic turnout.
Restoration News estimates that the Left spent $1.3 billion in just 2021 registering new Democrats with groups like the Voter Participation Center. Conservatives, in contrast, spend perhaps just 1 percent of this registering new Republicans. Is that fair?
(See our work recently featured in RealClear Investigations: “How Taxpayers Will Heavily Subsidize Democrat Boots on the Ground This Election”)
Worse, the Voter Participation Center also frequently mucks elections up for everyone. In 2021, the group flooded Virginia with 2 million mailers meant to boost turnout for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the governor’s race. 419,000 of them went to bright blue Fairfax County, which voted 70 percent for Joe Biden in 2020. Except VPC erroneously mixed its forms to voters in Fairfax City with those in neighboring Fairfax County, forcing the state to step in and clean up the group’s mess.
The center similarly botched its registration drive in Wisconsin’s April 2023 Supreme Court race, forcing the Wisconsin Elections Commission to issue a warning about the group’s “misleading mailers” to confused and upset voters.
When I pointed out this disastrous and unfair track record last year, CEO Tom Lopach—a veteran Democratic strategist with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, responsible for, you know, electing Democrats—accused me personally of “demoniz[ing] . . . nonpartisan voter registration groups” for “political purposes,” while admitting they’re precisely as biased as I’ve pointed out.
Take it from the New York Times, which credits Lopach’s groups for “defeat[ing] Donald Trump and win[ning” power in Washington” for Democrats under that “nonpartisan” fig leaf:
Two other groups, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, spent a combined $147.5 million in 2020 to register and mobilize voters. They described their targets as “young people, people of color and unmarried women” — demographics that tend to lean Democratic — and said they registered 1.5 million voters in 2020.
Tom Lopach, a former Democratic strategist who now runs both groups, said their work was apolitical and “an extension of civil rights efforts” [emphasis added].
You can bet Lopach brags to his donors about that… in private. This sort of B.S. only passes the smell test if you’ve got the nose of Swamp-dweller.
Fortunately, Congress has taken notice of this incredibly important and underreported threat to our elections, something we’re proud to support, with House Republicans investigating these groups’ abuse of clear IRS rules banning partisan or biased voter registration campaigns.
Let’s get elections back to a level playing field.
(Read our letter to Congress on politicized “charity” here)
