BREAKING: Is this Leftist Group Registering Non-Citizens to Vote in New Mexico?

Newly acquired emails show the Voter Participation Center is boosting Democrat turnout in New Mexico ahead of the November presidential election—with little accountability

A Democrat-aligned get-out-the-vote group may be working to swell the non-citizen vote in New Mexico and other states in 2024, according to newly obtained emails shared with Restoration News. 

The Voter Participation Center and its “sister,” the Center for Voter Information, are D.C.-based tax-exempt nonprofits that mail out millions of voter registration and absentee ballot application forms each year to likely Democratic constituencies: “Young people, people of color, and unmarried women,” whom left-wing strategists collectively dub the “New American Majority.” In other words, a permanent Democrat majority.

IRS law strictly forbids tax-exempt 501(c)(3) groups from carrying out biased or partisan voter registration drives. Yet Democratic strategists routinely classify “New American Majority” voters as “central to progressive long-term success,” mentioning the term at least 41 times in a confidential Democracy Alliance strategy document for winning the 2020 election.

VPC sent out a stunning 85.5 million voter registration applications in 2022 specifically targeting “people of color, young people, and married women”—and no one else.

VPC’s forms are partially pre-filled and made to mimic government documents, confusing voters and leading to widespread complaints in Virginia, Wisconsin, and Connecticut in just the past few elections.

Restoration News was the first to expose this partisan vote-getting drive targeting Virginia’s two most hotly contested congressional seats this year, enabled by at least $9.3 million from Chinese tech billionaire Yongping Duan routed through a California-based “philanthropy.”

Now emails obtained by the Election Integrity Network from the New Mexico secretary of state’s office show the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and its “sister” group mass-mailing similar forms to 59,089 individuals in 2024, beginning in February.

Its goal: Boost mail-in ballots and register new voters using a federal form that does not require documented proof of citizenship.

(RELATED: How a Chinese-Funded Charity is Registering Democrats to Flip Virginia in 2024)

The Existential Threat of Non-Citizen Voting

According to a March 5 email, VPC’s mailers are addressed to “Current Resident” rather than a specific voter or eligible-but-unregistered individual. (Notably, the return address is a Santa Fe P.O. box, VPC’s m.o. in every state it targets.)

Though the group claims it “use[s] the best technology available to ensure” it only targets those who are “eligible to vote,” these mailings will very likely reach non-citizens who are not—with dire consequences for the 2024 election.

That’s because VPC inexplicably mails the national voter registration application, which unlike the state forms most Americans are familiar with does not require applicants to include documented proof of citizenship. Applicants instead must tick a box affirming they are U.S. citizens age 18 years or older, which is verified by state (not federal) authorities.

If an individual submits a state registration form but his U.S. citizenship cannot be verified and he neglects to provide documented proof of citizenship, he isn’t registered at all. But if he submits the same using a federal registration form, he’s registered as a “federal-only” voter entitled to vote in federal races, including the next presidential election.

This is exactly what happened in neighboring Arizona. In December, Democrat Sec. of State Adrian Fontes introduced new procedures authorizing individuals who fail to prove their U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections—using the national form, not Arizona’s form, which requires documented proof of citizenship.

That loophole opened the door for non-citizens, including illegal aliens, to meddle in the 2024 election.

Restoration News spoke with Ned Jones, director of the Election Integrity Network’s Citizens Election Research Center, which discovered the emails.

“I’m very concerned,” he told me. “The National Mail Voter Registration Form that VPC used here does not require proof of citizenship, yet must be accepted by New Mexico state election officials when registering new voters.”

That creates unnecessary opportunities for non-citizens to submit voter registration applications and end up on the state voter rolls, something VPC is surely aware of—or should be.

“Why didn’t VPC use the New Mexico voter registration form instead?” Jones wonders. Why indeed?

While the Left has downplayed the threat of non-citizen voting, calling it a “far-right myth,” the numbers show it wouldn’t take many non-citizen voters to swing a close election to the Democrats.

JustFacts, a nonpartisan research site, has reported that 10–27 percent of non-citizen adults— between 2 and 5 million people—are illegally registered to vote, based on Census Bureau statistics and a survey in which 14.8 percent of non-citizens admitted they were registered to vote.

82 percent of non-citizens who admitted they voted in 2008 cast their ballot for Barack Obama; just 18 percent voted for his Republican opponent, John McCain. Non-citizens broke for Obama at higher rates than Hispanics (67–3%), Asians (62–35%), homosexuals (70–27%), moderates (60–39%), women (56–43%), youth (66–32%), and union members (59–39%). Only black voters voted for Obama in higher numbers.

In short, illegal non-citizen voters are one of the Democrats’ most reliable constituencies. And this pattern holds in surveys  as recent as 2022.

“Republicans are proposing to fix that situation, while Democrats and the media are telling people it doesn’t exist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” JustFacts concludes from the data. But why should Democrats admit it’s a real problem?

There are some 50 million non-citizens—legal and illegal—living in the United States, 19 million of whom are adults. Close to 155 million ballots were cast in the 2020 presidential election, which was decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of battleground states—in Arizona, just 10,457 votes (0.3 percent).

With 2024 shaping up to be as fiercely competitive as the 2020 election, illegal non-citizen voting could prove a kingmaker for Joe Biden.

(GOOD NEWS: The Growing Red Wave Against Non-Citizen Voting)

Partisan & Unfair

Another email from Dec. 2023 indicates VPC is targeting “people who are turning 18 and newly eligible to register to vote”:

We will also continue to include a QR code to encourage people who receive our mail to register online; in 2022, close to 50% of the young people who received our mail chose to register this way, while most older recipients continued to mail in the paper forms [emphasis added].

That mirrors a March 2024 email from VPC to Virginia’s elections director that “our voter registration mailing will be targeted to reach unregistered young people.”

VPC was one of a handful of leftist groups secretly lobbying the Biden administration to enact policies that would drive out the youth vote, according to emails recently obtained by the Daily Signal. That includes automatically registering to vote students who apply for federal college loans.

It’s no secret why—70 percent of college students said they planned to vote for Joe Biden in Sept. 2020 compared with just 18 percent who planned to vote for President Trump. Pundits widely credit young voters for boosting Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. And a March 2024 poll suggests Biden retains a 23-point lead over Trump among this ultraliberal bloc.

Then there’s VPC’s director of research bragging to Cornell University earlier this month of just how effective her group’s get-out-the-vote efforts are with youth voters:

We want to find what types of messages and tactics are most effective at helping and motivating who we refer to as the New American Majority (young people, people of color and unmarried women) to register and turnout to vote.

The most inspiring thing about the work I do is seeing both our standard (and oftentimes, new) messaging strategies and tactics work when we look at impact evaluations after an election . . . [emphasis added]

For VPC, youth voters are just one “underrepresented” demographic it targets for getting-out-the-vote. NPR accused the group—then called “Women’s Voices Women Vote”—of suppressing black voters to help Hillary Clinton defeat Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary.

And driving voter turnout is why VPC engages in “vote-shaming,” sending mailers that compare Americans’ turnout record to their neighbors to embarrass them into returning the filled-in ballot.

In his 2012 book The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, liberal journalist Sasha Issenberg described VPC’s activities as an end-run around the IRS prohibition:

Even though the [Voter Participation Center] was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats [emphasis added].

Led by Lying Leftists

The New Mexico emails come from Sarah Simmons (“Sarah Mitchell” in her emails, who helpfully provides her pronouns), the Voter Participation Center’s deputy director of partnerships and outreach. Simmons previously headed get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D), was a field organizer for the Florida Democratic Party, and led student voting at Campus Vote Project, a front for the far-left Fair Elections Center.

The Campus Vote Project was created in part to lobby for the Democrats’ “Youth Voting Rights Act” introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–MA) to pre-register 16-year-olds to vote, fund youth voter registration with taxpayer money, and force colleges to provide voter registration services at public expense. The project similarly endorsed Democrats’ extreme “For the People Act” in 2021, which dramatically expands mail-in voting, devastates voter ID laws, and federalize elections.

And VPC itself is led by Tom Lopach, a veteran Democratic strategist with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee responsible for electing Democrats. The New York Times credits Lopach, a “former Democratic strategist,” for helping to “defeat Donald Trump” by “register[ing] and mobiliz[ing] voters . . . that tend to lean Democrat” in 2020.

Imagine the Left’s head-exploding reaction to a counter-scenario: A defiantly populist group headed by hyperpolitical conservatives with unimpeachable MAGA bona fides. It receives millions of dollars from America’s top right-wing donors plus bundles from Russian oligarchs aligned with Vladimir Putin. The group strictly targets massive voter registration campaigns at the “American Greatness Majority,” which it defines as “whites, males, seniors, avid churchgoers, gun owners, and homeschool families.” This “nonpartisan” group says these “underrepresented” demographics have the numbers to create an unstoppable electoral majority.

Now imagine that group boasts about registering and getting 6 million of them to the polls, lobbies a Republican president to use federal agencies to register these voters, endorses legislation to dramatically transform our election processes to boost their turnout, and publicly accuses its opponents of creating an “existential crisis” for American democracy.

This is the Voter Participation Center, and it’s poisoning our elections. When will conservatives learn to fight fire with fire?

(READ MORE: The Left Has Billions to Register New Democrat Voters. When Will Conservatives Get Serious?)