Voter Registration Project

The Voter Registration Project, also known as Everybody Votes, is a voter mobilization group which targets African-American, Latino, Native American, low-income, and other voter groups likely to lean left-of-center. The organization claims to be non-partisan, but is run by individuals with long-standing connections to left-of-center non-profits, including the AFL-CIO labor union federation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the State Voices network of liberal state-level advocacy groups. ¹ It also works to promote voting within blocs that tend to support the Democratic Party by giving grants to numerous left-of-center nonprofit groups.

Between 2016 and 2020, the Voter Registration Project and its sister organizations, the Voter Registration Project Education Fund and Register America, distributed over $116 million in grants to state level left-leaning activism organizations, mostly in poltical battleground states, to fund nominally “nonpartisan” voter registration activities.

The organization began as Voting for America in 2009 but was reformed as the Voter Registration Project in 2015.

Everybody Votes Campaign

The Voter Registration Project privately goes by the name of “Everybody Votes,” though the connection between the two names is kept a secret. The name Everybody Votes is derived from the organization’s founding model, the Everybody Votes Campaign, a model for a massive voter registration drive developed by the Democrat-aligned consulting firm, Grassroots Solutions, in 2015. ²

The model for the Everybody Votes Campaign first appeared in the attachments of an email from Stephanie Schriock, then president of EMILY’s List, to John Podesta, then acting as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. Schriock asked Podesta, “Is this the registration program you were hoping for? Can I push it?” ³

The proposal suggested that 501(c)(3) organizations spend $106 million funding micro-targeted voter registration drives in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada between 2016 and 2020. ²

The goal of the program, according to the confidential summary memo, was to “reshape the electorate” by registering 6.3 million “African Americans, Latinos, unmarried women, and young people,” of whom an estimated 2.2 million would ultimately vote. ³ Earlier versions of the plan, created by the Corridor Partners consulting firm, that can also be found in Podesta’s leaked emails show that the campaign was designed with the partisan intent of helping Democratic turnout in 2020. ²

Later leaked memos from the Democratic-aligned super PAC, Mind the Gap, also discussed VRP under the guise of the Everybody Votes name in 2019, saying:

“Everybody Votes is a national organization that funds and trains a consortium of 50+ local community groups across the country that do the actual registration work. It also checks at the back end that every form was filled out in accordance with state requirements, and that every new registrant actually ends up on the voter rolls in advance of election day.” ^{4 5}

The Mind the Gap memo also encouraged donors to give to Everybody Votes for the express purpose of helping Democrats win the 2020 elections. According to the memo:

“The most effective tactic in a Presidential year by a wide margin is nonpartisan voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in our electoral process. Provided that such efforts are well-designed and executed, on a pre-tax basis they are 2 to 5 times more cost-effective at netting additional Democratic votes than the tactics that campaigns will invest in (chiefly, broadcast media and digital buys). Because 90 percent of the contributions we are recommending for voter registration and GOTV efforts will go to 501(c)(3) organizations and hence are tax deductible, on an after-tax basis such programs are closer to 4 to 10 times more cost effective than the next best alternative. They are also eligible recipients of donations from donor-advised funds and private foundations.” ⁴⁶

501(c)(3) organizations, like the Voter Registration Project, are forbidden by IRS rules from engaging in partisan activity or intervening, directly or indirectly, in any poltical campaign.⁷

Leadership

The Voter Registration Project is led by individuals with histories of working for left-of-center advocacy groups.

Nellie Sires

Executive director Nellie Sires assumed the role of executive director at the Voter Registration Project in 2021. Sires is a longtime Democratic operative with experience in field organizing and get-out-the-vote activities. From 2020 to August 2021, Sires worked as the executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Prior to that, Sires worked as vice president at The Management Center, a campaign consulting firm, and as the great lakes area regional field director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ⁸

Ilona Prucha

Current President Ilona Prucha, is a senior program officer at Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and is a co-chair of the Funders Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP). ⁹ Prucha assumed the position of VRP president in 2018.

John Yang

Current treasurer, John C. Yang, is the president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice and was formerly a trade adviser to the Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, during the Obama administration. ¹⁰

Isaiah Castilla

Board member Isaiah Castilla is a managing director at Arabella Advisors, and has previously worked as the general counsel for the Democracy Fund and Bolder Advocacy, a project of the Alliance for Justice. Castilla has also worked as the finance director of several PAC’s supporting Democratic gubernatorial candidates. ¹¹

Matt Singer

Board member Matt Singer is the founder of National Voter Registration Day, a nonprofit organization and civic holiday created to encourage voter registration. Singer is a partner at Impactual, a left-of-center political consulting firm, and has previously worked at left-leaning voter mobilization groups like the Movement Voter Project, the Alliance for Youth Action, and Forward Montana. ¹²

Bill Vandenberg

Secretary Bill Vandenberg has over 20 years of experience working for left-of-center political advocacy organizations. ¹³

In 1996, Vandenberg co-founded the Colorado Progressive Coalition, a state-based left-of-center advocacy group which supports expanded government healthcare provisions and anti-discrimination laws. ¹⁴  Vandenberg was an “award-winning state-based advocate, anti-racism activist, coalition builder, ballot initiative strategist, political organizer,”¹⁵ as he was co-director of the organization until 2008.

Vandenberg left the Colorado Progressive Coalition to serve numerous roles at the Open Society Foundations, the George Soros-backed network of more than 20 nonprofits dedicated to supporting left-of-center causes. Vandenberg works as the director of Special Initiatives and Partnerships at OSF. ¹⁵

Vandenberg also serves on the Advisory Boards for numerous left-of-center voter advocacy groups: the Youth Engagement Fund, Youth Engagement Action Fund,¹⁶ and the State Engagement Initiative. ¹⁷

Former Leadership

Jeff Malachowsky

Former president Jeff Malachowsky has worked for numerous left-of-center nonprofits for over twenty years. ¹⁸¹⁹  He was the co-founder of Oregon Voice, a member of the State Voices Network, a left-of-center community activism organization which rallies grass-root organizations for progressive causes. ²⁰ Malachowski also co-founded the Western States Center, a left-of-center group focused on community organizing to support progressive political goals. ²¹ Additionally he sat on the board of the Oregon Bus Project Foundation (now called Next Up), a Portland-based left-of-center voter advocacy group. ²²

For over seven years until 2018, Malachowsky’s primary job was program director at the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund,²³ a secretive left-of-center grantmaking foundation created by three hedge fund billionaires: Andrew Shechtel, David Gelbaum and C. Frederick Taylor. ²⁴

Along with his work at the president of the Voter Registration Project, Malachowsky worked with other left-of-center nonprofits. ¹⁸ He sits on the Board of Directors of the Penny Family Fund, a grantmaking foundation which supports environmentalist causes. Malachowsky also was a founding co-director of and continues to sit on the board of directors for the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance in state-level campaigns that is funded by numerous major left-of-center nonprofits, including the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. ²⁵

Lauren Groh-Wargo

Lauren Groh-Wargo was Voter Registration Project’s treasurer until 2017, when she was hired by now-former Georgia State Rep. Stacey Abrams (D-Atlanta) to run Abrams’s Georgia gubernatorial campaign. After Abrams lost to Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Groh-Wargo became CEO of Fair Fight Action, a left-of-center voter rights advocacy group founded by Abrams. ²⁶

Katherine Peck

Former board Member Katherine Peck was the Senior Vice President of the left-of-center Civic Participation Action Fund ²⁷ and Chairwoman of the Board of State Voices. Peck is also a board member of the Advancement Project,²⁷ and is on the Advisory Boards of the Latino Engagement Fund and the Latino Action Engagement Fund. ¹⁷

Steve Rosenthal

Board Member Steve Rosenthal is an experienced political consultant who works with labor unions, Democratic candidates, and left-of-center organizations. Rosenthal was the Political Director of the AFL-CIO from 1995-2002, the largest federation of American unions. In 2003, he received $142 million from George Soros to launch a massive voter mobilization campaign against George W. Bush’s presidential reelection efforts through the America Coming Together PAC. Since 2004, Rosenthal has worked for the left-of-center voter mobilization nonprofits, Working for Us Pac and the Atlas Project. ²⁸

In 2015, Rosenthal founded his own for-profit consulting group, The Organizing Group, which leverages his connections with left-wing donors and organizations to mobilize voting for Democratic campaigns. ²⁸

Kimberly Rogers

Campaign director Kimberly Rogers is also the only known employee of the Voter Engagement Fund, a nominally nonpartisan voter advocacy group formed by the New Venture Fund to bolster left-of-center political causes. ²⁹ In 2016, Rogers was a featured speaker at a Funders Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP) seminar on voter registration, though she was listed as a representative of “Everybody Votes.” The Seminar featured State Voices then-president, Roger Vann, and was moderated by VRP secretary Bill Vandenberg. ³⁰

Betsy Lin

Campaign director, Betsy Lin, previously worked as a staffer for multiple Democratic campaign committees. From 2013 to 2018, Lin worked as the Chief of Staff for Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI). Lin has previously worked as a senior staffer for several other Democratic politicians, and as the deputy political director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. ³¹ In March 2020, Lin was a featured speaker at a Funders Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP) webinar concerning voter registration, where she was described as an affiliate of “EVC.” ³²

Funding

Donors to the Voter Registration Project Network

Since 2016 the Voter Registration Project, and its affiliates, Voter Registration Project Education Fund and Register America, have received over $150 million in funding from a variety of left-leaning organizations, private foundations, and. Below is a table detailing known grantors to the Voter Registration Project and its network of sister organizations, source documentation for each grant are recorded in a source document that can be found here.

Grantmaking

The Voter Registration Project gives grants to left-of-center organizations seeking to mobilize voters to support Democratic candidates. ³³

The following is a complete list of grants made by the Voter Registration Project from 2016 to 2020: ^{34 35 36 3738}

Network Grantmaking

From 2016 to 2020, the Voter Registration Project and its affiliate organizations, the Voter Registration Project Education Fund and Register America, distributed a total of $116 million in grants to left-of-center voter mobilization groups, mostly in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia. ^{39 40 41} The following is a complete list of the Voter Registration Project network’s grantmaking from 2016 through 2020.

Grants to the New Georgia Project

The VRP and VRPEF provided a combined $2.2 million in funding to the New Georgia Project, a left-wing voter registration and organizing nonprofit founded by failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

In 2019, a Georgia state ethics commission complaint alleged that the New Georgia Project and the New Georgia Project Action Fund had “illegally canvassed for Democratic candidates including [Stacey] Abrams, used phone bank scripts pushing people to vote Democratic and included “#teamAbrams” in social media posts soliciting donations” during the 2018 election cycle. The complaint claimed that, in total, the New Georgia Project had failed to disclose more than $3 million in illicit electioneering expenses and $4 million in political contributions to state authorities between 2017 and 2019. ⁴²

On August 1, 2022, the state ethics commission decided, in a unanimous decision, that the complaint would move past the preliminary hearing stage, and that the New Georgia Project and its affiliated action fund had violated campaign ethics laws eight times. After the unanimous vote of the ethics commission the case moved forward to the office of state administration where a judge would pass final judgment. ⁴³

During 2018, the year of the New Georgia Project’s alleged violations, a $1 million grant from the VRP accounted for over half of the New Georgia Pr0jects yearly revenue. Despite the ethics commissions complaint, the VRP continued to fund the New Georgia Project, providing another $900,000 grant during 2020. ⁴³