Testimony on the Nonprofit Voter Registration Industry
Michigan House of Representatives, Election Integrity Committee
Parker Thayer’s Testimony
Oral Testimony: HTML and Video
Speaker Smit’s letter to AG Bondi
Oral Testimony
before
Michigan House of Representatives
Election Integrity Committee
Speaker Pro Tempore Rachelle Smit, Chair
Parker Thayer
March 18, 2025
Good afternoon. I’d like to begin by offering a heartful thank you to the committee members for inviting me to testify today. Briefly about myself: my name is Parker Thayer, and I’m a researcher at the Capital Research Center, a nonpartisan organization that specializes in researching the flows of money behind special interest groups seeking to influence policy making and elections. I was born and raised here in Michigan, attended Hillsdale College, and now reside in Monroe County with my wife, and soon, a baby girl. It is an honor to testify before the legislature of the state that I hope to always call home.
The topic that brings me here today is the nonprofit voter registration industry. It might not sound like a particularly exciting or important topic, and in an ideal world it wouldn’t be either, but unfortunately, it’s both, and particularly in Michigan. Indeed, it was Michigan that first started the corruption of the nonprofit voter registration industry back when the Ford Foundation whose funding of partisan voter registration drives in 1967 outraged congressional Democrats so much that they passed the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which created many of the electioneering restrictions on the charitable sector that we still have today. As you’ll see later, many groups are still openly circumventing those rules.
Just before the 2020 election, and well afterwords as well, headlines around the state and the nation were grabbed by the story of thousands of suspicious voter registration forms being submitted in Muskegon by employees of GBI Strategies, a Tennessee-based canvassing and voter registration firm. The forms were immediately recognized as suspicious due to the inordinate number of them along with the signatures, dates of birth, and addresses not matching up on many of the forms, and the police and even, eventually, the FBI were quickly brought in to investigate. It was all very exciting, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. What I’m here to tell you about is who was paying GBI to register voters in the first place.
During the 2020 election, GBI Strategies had several large PAC clients, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and Biden for President, that paid them lots of money for canvassing, phone banking, and voter outreach, but only one client reported paying GBI Strategies for voter registration work. It wasn’t a PAC at all, it was a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit by the name of “Voter Registration Project” which reported paying GBI Strategies over $2.5 million for “Voter Registration Consulting” on their 2020 IRS Form 990. But why would a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, legally barred from any and all partisan electioneering activities by IRS rules attached to their tax-exempt status, be paying millions of dollars to a Democratic political canvassing and phone banking company?
The answer to that question takes us back to 2016, when the Voter Registration Project (VRP) was first created, and it doesn’t make them look very good. The VRP apparently got its start in the bowels of a Democratic consulting firm by the name of Corridor Partners, which created a very sophisticated plan for a “nonpartisan” voter registration scheme that would take 5 years and $105 million to generate 2.4 million additional voters in those states by the start of the 2020 election. The plan was initially emailed to Molly McUsic, the president of the Wyss Foundation, the private foundation of Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who has poured tens of millions of dollars into American “dark money” groups to meddle in our elections despite not being an American citizen. The details of this plan were ultimately leaked because McUsic inexplicably forwarded the plan to the then-presumptive head of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, John Podesta, whose emails were later obtained by Wikileaks. The blueprints for this plan had been edited, according to the consultants that had created it, to be more appropriate, meaning “less partisan” than a previous version of the plan, but by happy chance the consultants left the “track changes” function on, meaning the original version of the plan is still available for all to see.
How was the plan changed from a highly partisan operation into a “charitable” project permissible for a 501(c)(3) organization? Well, it wasn’t, really. The complex potential voter numbers, states, proposed methods, and dollar amounts were all the same, the only thing that changed was how they were described. For example, where before the plan had said it would change the “outcome of an election” it now said it would change the “competitiveness of an election” and at one point three entire paragraphs were just deleted entirely because they featured detailed calculations of the ways in which this plan, had it been enacted earlier would have swung the results of past elections from a Republican to a Democrat. It’s partisan stuff, just described differently, and it would become the basis of the same Voter Registration Project that was paying GBI Strategies in 2020.
Months later, blueprints for a nearly identical voter registration scheme appeared again in Podesta’s emails, but this time with a name: The Everybody Votes Campaign. This would become the public facing name of the Voter Registration Project and its network, though the VRP did everything in its power to hide its existence from the public until my reporting forced them into the light in 2023.
With a catchy name decided upon, the Everybody Votes Campaign started hiring staff, registering voters, and raking in the money from the leading left-wing political donors and “dark money” groups in America. One of their biggest scores was the secret endorsement of a Democrat Super PAC called “Mind the Gap” that was created and led by Barabara Fried, mother of crypto-fraudster and Democrat mega-donor Sam Bankman-Fried. Vox obtained a leaked copy of a memo Mind the Gap sent donors, advising them that the best way to help Democrats win in 2020 was donating to the Everybody Votes Campaign and another organization called the Voter Participation Center. That’s right, a Democrat Super PAC was advising its donors to send their money elsewhere because a “nonpartisan” group was so much better than them at being partisan. The memo also vigorously instructs donors to keep the name of the Everybody Votes Campaign a secret from the media and Republicans, because if their identity were to become public somebody might try to stop or investigate them.
To answer my earlier question: Why was a “nonpartisan” charity paying millions of dollars to a Democrat political consulting firm like GBI Strategies that was submitting thousands of fraudulent registrations? Because the nonprofit was designed with partisan intent from the very beginning. If you want further proof, look no further than the current executive director of the Everybody Votes Campaign, Nellie Sires. Her previous job? Executive Director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.
GBI Strategies isn’t even the only recipient of Everybody Votes Campaign funds that has been embroiled in a scandal. At least three other Everybody Votes Campaign consultants and grantees have been the subject of major scandals surrounding illicit partisanship or fraudulent voter registrations.
First, this past election, stories emerged from York County Pennsylvania of another Democrat canvassing firm, Field+Media Corps, that had submitted thousands of voter registration forms on behalf of the Everybody Votes Campaign. According to the county, less than half of the forms were found to be legitimate, and voter registration forms submitted by Field+Media Corps in Monroe County Pennsylvania, Navajo County Arizona, and Mohave County Arizona were also found to be suspicious or fraudulent.
Second, in January the New Georgia Project, the nonprofit created by Stacey Abrams was fined $300,000 for illicit partisan electioneering on Abrams’s behalf during her 2018 gubernatorial campaign. It’s the largest fine in the history of the Georgia State Ethics Commission, and the Georgia State Senate has now launched its own investigation. The New Georgia project has received nearly $3 million for voter registration work from the Everybody Votes Campaign, and during the year of the campaign finance violations, a $1 million grant from the Everybody Votes Campaign accounted for over half of the New Georgia Project’s revenues.
Finally, in the lead up to the 2020 election, the Everybody Votes Campaign granted over $10 million the Voter Participation Center, the second largest nonprofit voter registration group in the nation (after the Everybody Votes Campaign). The Voter Participation Center, you might remember, was the other group named in the Mind the Gap memo as the “most cost effective” group for “netting additional democratic votes.” The Voter Participation Center is active in dozens of states including Michigan, estimating in a 2020 election impact report that they generated a net of 16,000 votes here. The group was most recently in the news when reporters at the Washington Free Beacon unearthed that the Voter Participation Center was using filters to exclude certain audiences from its “nonpartisan” voter registration ads on Facebook and Instagram. Data from the Facebook Transparency Ad Library showed that VPC went out of its way to use “exclude” filters so that users with interests like “PGA Tour,” “Indianapolis 500,” “Daytona 500,” “Tom Clancy,” “Modified Jeeps,” “Duck Dynasty,” and others were NOT shown ads reminding them to register to vote. Meanwhile, VPC used “include” filters to target users interested in “African-American Literature,” “Jordan Peele,” “Taylor Swift,” “Patagonia,” and “hot yoga.” It’s painfully obvious that the purpose of these filters was to exclude possible Republican voters from a “nonpartisan” voter registration effort while targeting likely Democrat voters. Some people’s civic participation apparently matters more than others, in their view, and I’d love to see the data that VPC used to determine that “Duck Dynasty” enjoyers didn’t need to be registered to vote as much as “Taylor Swift” enjoyers. Voter Participation Center, like Everybody Votes has also paid enormous sums of money to Democrat political consulting firms. Over the last several years $17.8 million to Mission Control, a canvassing firm that advertises itself as “the most successful direct mail firm working in Democratic politics today.” It has also paid nearly $40 million to the Pivot Group, another powerful Democrat consulting firm that boasts about “winning races from the municipal level to Congress and from the Statehouse to the Statewide office.”
There is a pattern here, if you haven’t noticed yet. All over the country, everywhere the Everybody Votes campaign sends its money problems seem to arise that corrupt the American charitable sector and harm the public’s trust in our elections. There is simply no reason to allow this to continue. The evidence of partisan rot in the nonprofit voter registration industry is overwhelming, it’s harming the country and it’s harming Michigan.
Everybody Votes Campaign should be made to explain what they’re going to do to stop the scandals that seem to follow them everywhere from happening again. Their grantees and contactors have been caught crossing the line at least four times now, they deserve no more second chances.
