Through litigation, policy analysis and public education, CLC works as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization to protect and strengthen the U.S. democratic process across all levels of government.
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Political groups with names like Keep Kentucky Great and Texas Forever sound innocuous and homegrown, but are largely — and secretly — financed by prominent D.C.-based funding organizations, according to a campaign finance watchdog organization.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center on Thursday filed a 50-page complaint with the Federal Election Commission against 18 of these seemingly local super PACs for allegedly violating federal law by not disclosing their affiliations, and therefore "denying voters the right to know who is spending big money to influence their vote."
Between 2017 and 2020, the 18 super PACs collectively spent more than $200 million to influence voters in competitive federal elections. And nearly all their funding came from five national groups, including the Republican Senate Leadership Fund and the Democratic Senate Majority PAC, the Campaign Legal Center found.
Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence federal elections, but unlike traditional political action committees they cannot give directly to political candidates. Instead, they can use their enormous funds on advertising overtly advocating for or against candidates. Super PACs are also mandated by federal law to disclose their donors and affiliations.
The fact that the 18 super PACs in question received most of their funding from established political groups in Washington "clearly demonstrates" an affiliation that qualifies for disclosure, the Campaign Legal Center argues.
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For example, the Senate Leadership Fund provided all or nearly all the funding to Peachtree PAC (Georgia), Plains PAC (Iowa and Kansas), Keep Kentucky Great, The Maine Way PAC, Faith and Power PAC (North Carolina), American Crossroads (national), DefendArizona and Mountain Families PAC (West Virginia) in the 2018 or 2020 elections. Similarly, the Senate Majority PAC provided all or the significant majority of the funding for Sunflower State PAC (Kansas), Carolina Blue (North Carolina), Texas Forever, Highway 31 (Alabama) and Red and Gold (Arizona) during those same elections.
In both instances, the super PACs spent millions on congressional elections in key states without disclosing their affiliations to the major fundraising arms of Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress.
A number of the political groups named in the complaint are also considered "pop-up" super PACs because they were created in the final weeks of an election to spend big on one or a handful of congressional races. These super PACs often "strategically timed their spending such that the public did not learn the true source of the mystery group's communications until after the election," the complaint says.
"Senior leaders of both parties have been steering money from wealthy special interests to front groups specifically designed to trick voters," said Adav Noti, the nonprofit's senior director of trial litigation and chief of staff. "Voters have a right to know when big money is flowing into their elections from D.C.-based groups hiding their agendas and funding behind fake names."
The Campaign Legal Center hopes their complaint into the super PACs' misconduct prompts "swift investigation and a firm crackdown by the FEC."
The Fulcrum has reached out to all 18 super PACs named in the complaint. Highway 31 offered no comment and others have yet to respond. The Fulcrum will update this article as necessary.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is managing the For the People Act, has circulated changes to the bill that would help election officials.
Democrats, seeking to shore up support for their expansive election reform legislation, have made some modifications to the bill -- but the changes appear unlikely to help get the legislation through the Senate.
Responding to the concerns of election officials who questioned whether they would have the time and resources to meet all of the requirements laid out in the For the People Act, Sen. Amy Klobuchar has drafted changes and circulated them among her fellow Senators, according to The Washington Post.
While the modifications offer waivers and later deadlines to ease states' path to implementing vote-by-mail systems, early voting and election equipment standards, they do not address the major complaints from Republican lawmakers, who claim the bill is an appropriation federalization of elections.
The legislation was passed by the House (where it is known as HR 1) in March without any Republican support. Now the bill faces a difficult, perhaps insurmountable, barrier in the Senate (as S 1).
As long as the filibuster remains intact, Democratic leaders need to keep all their members in line and pick up 10 Republican votes to advance the bill. Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia has called for bipartisan efforts to reform elections, indicating he might not support the bill since it has not received Republican support so far. And Manchin is one of at least two Democrats who oppose changing the rules to abolish the legislative filibuster.
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The nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which engages in advocacy and litigation to support ballot access, praised the changes but warned against further modifications.
"The Senate is incorporating recommendations from key stakeholders, adding flexibility to the timeline for implementing changes that will modernize and improve access to voting systems," said CLC President Trevor Potter, a one-time GOP member of the Federal Election Commission. " As the Senate moves forward with the markup, it must hold firm to the principle of national election standards which will ensure Americans can freely cast ballots and that everyday voters have a say, not just special interests. Failure to pass these important protections is not an option."
Similarly, the good-governance advocates at RepresetUs, were in favor of the changes.
"As expected, most changes proposed by the amendment grant flexibility for administration of some of the more costly and/or involved aspects of the For the People Act," said Damon Effingham, director of the federal reform. "We commend Senate leaders for continuing to improve the legislation by listening to election administrators."
Polling has found the For the People Act to have popular support, regardless of party affiliation. The bill would make it easier to register to vote and cast a ballot, establish fundamental changes to campaign financing, ban partisan gerrymandering, set election security requirements and institute new ethics rules.
Demonstrators protest legislation placing new restrictions on voting in Georgia.
The public's access to electoral democracy may be about to dangerously contract — or else expand dramatically.
So far, the movement to restrict access to the ballot box has gotten by far the most play. The Georgia law enacted to national headlines last week goes way beyond barring water deliveries at polling places, in part by setting a disturbing precedent in stripping administrative power from nonpartisan election officials and placing it in the hands of politicians. Broad new curbs on voting in Iowa, enacted three week ago, include criminal charges for local officials who skirt the new rules. Six other states are considering similar moves to take power from nonpartisan election administrators.
Less noticed, meanwhile, has been a parallel movement to expand voter access in states literally from coast to coast.
The most widely cited statistic in this year's voting rights debate is that, as of a month ago, 253 bills to restrict access to the polls had been proposed in 43 states. Many take aim at early and absentee voting, automatic voter registration, ballot drop boxes and other practices that helped fuel last fall's record turnout.
But the same progressive think tank that made that calculation, the Brennan Center for Justice, has also tallied 704 bills that set out to expand voting access — also in 43 states. These include Washington's recent move to restore voting rights to felons as soon as they're released from prison, a Kentucky measure to make permanent the early and mail-in voting rules rolled out last year in response to the pandemic, and bills in Vermont and Virginia that similarly institutionalize ballot drop boxes and prepaid postage on absentee envelopes.
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Republicans driving the restrictive legislation say the curbs are needed to restore voter confidence and combat fraud, despite zero evidence of the widespread cheating claimed by former President Donald Trump. Democrats from President Biden on down cast the GOP campaign as a return to Jim Crow and an assault on democracy. Voting rights groups have raised alarms that the Republican statehouse crusade is not only a deliberate effort to disenfranchise Black voters but also would threaten the principle of independent election administration that's long been a democratic norm.
The GOP-led push, moreover, has lit a fire under Democrats mobilizing behind the sweeping package of democracy reforms passed by the House under the label HR 1 and pending in the Senate as S 1. That legislation would significantly expand access to the polls by mandating nationally the easy registration, absentee ballot application and early in-person voting rules that vary significantly among the states.
But it would also do much more, from prohibiting partisan gerrymandering to imposing broad new campaign financing and government ethics rules. Republicans are uniformly opposed and have cast the measure as a partisan power grab, while deep-pocketed conservative groups have turned the campaign to defeat the bill into a GOP rallying cry.
But recent polling concludes the measure, known as the For the People Act, is "one of the most popular legislative items in recent history, across party lines, demographic groups, and geographies." Almost three-quarters (74 percent) of Republicans support the bill, according to a survey this month by Global Strategy Group and ALG Research, as do 73 percent of independents and 96 percent of Democrats.
Senate support for the bill, which recently secured crucial albeit only partial backing from the most conservative Democratic senator, West Virginia's Joe Manchin, is also strengthening Democrats' determination to eliminate or substantially weaken the filibuster. The showdown over the future of what amounts to a 60-vote requirement for most policy changes, however, seems to be months away.
If enacted, the bill would invalidate much of the new wave of GOP voting restrictions and create broad new federal mandates for automatic and same-day voter registration, voting machines with paper trails and post-prison felon enfranchisement, among other provisions.
This, despite the fact that many of the voting practices that GOP state legislators have set out to scrap or curtail — most notably lengthy periods for early in-person voting and easy rules for voting absentee or by mail — are broadly popular with Republican voters. Close to half of all votes (46 percent) were cast absentee or by mail in the presidential election last year, more than double the share in 2016. No-excuse voting by mail is permitted in 29 states, many of them deep Republican red. Last year, several GOP governors and election officials moved to expand voting by mail, even as Trump assailed it as an invitation to massive cheating (and then casting his own ballot using Florida's permissive system.)
Several provisions in HR 1 originated as bipartisan initiatives, according to a white paper released by the Campaign Legal Center, including modernizing registration and early voting, and putting the drawing of all House districts in the hands of 50 independent commissions.
The nonprofit, which promotes easier voting and stricter money-in-politics rules, is working with state and local partners to educate voters about how their franchise might be curtailed if many of the Republican statehouse bills get enacted.
"These are unpopular provisions," says Jonathan Diaz, the Campaign Legal Center's legal counsel for voting rights. "They run contrary to the security of our democracy."
Republican-aligned activist groups, from Heritage Action to Tea Party Nation, are raising and spending big money in the fight over voter access. But beyond fundraising, it's not clear that restricting voting will turn out to be a winning strategy for the GOP. Trump actually got more support in 2020 than in 2016 from Black and Latino voters — the very groups that many of the looming restrictions risk disenfranchising.
"What's surprising is how seemingly short-sighted they might be," Elise Wirkus, legislative affairs manager for the democracy reform advocacy group Issue One, said of the GOP-proposed voting curbs. "What I don't think we know yet is how limiting early voting or vote by mail could hurt Republican voter access down the line."
Issue One (which started but remains journalistically independent from The Fulcrum) has convened a bipartisan National Council on Election Integrity in hopes of finding common ground on election integrity. The group will host a forum next week on "How State Voting Proposals Could Impact How Millions of Americans Vote."
Among the issues that could bring Republicans and Democrats together, says Wirkus, is the need to increase funding for election administration. Some democracy advocates joined Republicans in raising questions about the private funding from executives at Facebook and elsewhere that helped underwrite 2020 election administration and voting infrastructure. At the same time, some big businesses — including Coca-Cola and Home Depot, both headquartered in Atlanta — have expressed opposition to Georgia's new voter restrictions.
The more aggressively Republicans have moved to restrict ballot access, in other words, the more Democrats have stepped up their campaign to expand it. At the state level, the outcome may be a patchwork of laws that make it much easier to participate in democracy in some states but much harder in others. On Capitol Hill, the high-stakes fight over HR 1 has brought the voting wars to a crucial turning point.
Carney is a contributing writer.
The staff at the Campaign Legal Center will be working to revise the Electoral Count Act.
This is the second installment of an ongoing Q&A series.
As Democrats take power in Washington, if only tenuously, many democracy reform groups see a potential path toward making the American political system work better. In this installment, Corey Goldstone, communications manager for the Campaign Legal Center, answers our questions about 2020 accomplishments and plans for the year ahead. His organization works to achieve voting, campaign finance and redistricting reforms through litigation. Goldstone's responses have been edited for clarity and length.
The Campaign Legal Center successfully advocated for nonpartisan voting reforms to encourage broader participation and a more inclusive democracy. As a result, America turned out to vote in record numbers in 2020. Braving the dual challenges of a viral pandemic and civil unrest, hardworking election officials stood shoulder to shoulder to finish the vote count and certify the results, despite intense pressure from Donald Trump to circumvent election procedures.
Major legal victories in our voting rights litigation paved the way for safe and secure access to absentee voting and a higher degree of confidence that states would not reject ballots for arbitrary reasons like handwriting in voter signatures.
CLC also played a leading role — along with our partners in the National Task Force on Election Crises — in educating lawmakers, the media and the public about the limited role of state legislatures and the vice president in the vote certification process.
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Trump was an existential threat to democracy in 2020. He used his megaphone in 2020 to convince many of his supporters that the election was stolen, despite all evidence to the contrary. In the final weeks before the election, only 37 percent of Americans expressed confidence that the election would be held fairly. Countering cynicism and conspiracy theories with facts has become increasingly challenging.
While it's a relief that a violent attempt to prevent the counting of the Electoral College votes in our presidential election failed, the fact it was encouraged by the president and attempted by the crowds he summoned to Washington reflects a deeper decay in public confidence in our democracy.
We have a resilient system of safeguards in place in which ballots are validated and counted. Our elections are highly decentralized and election administrators are qualified officials who take their jobs seriously. We have a duty as Americans to accept the results of elections, even if the candidate we supported does not win. Many officials in key positions resisted pressure from Trump and recognized their obligation to the country.
We need to advance voting rights, strengthen ethics laws, curtail partisan gerrymandering and decrease the influence of wealthy special interests in our political system. These are reforms that an overwhelming majority of Americans — across the political spectrum — view as popular.
The vote certification process was abused by bad-faith partisans to the point where the country narrowly avoided a constitutional crisis. The Electoral Count Act should be substantially revised to provide constraints on the permissible grounds for objecting to a state's appointment of presidential electors or the votes cast by those electors.
If passed, HR 1 would enact one of the most comprehensive improvements our democracy has seen in decades.
The splintering of American media consumption makes it challenging to educate the public about election mechanics to foster trust in the process. We need to make sure we are talking to voters that distrust mainstream media.
be more transparent, inclusive and accountable to the people.
