The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign: Voter Participation Center

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That “Saved the 2020 Election”: Where Are They Now?
The Stars of the Roster | The AFL-CIO and Chamber of Commerce
Norm Eisen and the Voter Protection Program | Voter Participation Center

Voter Participation Center

The Voter Participation Center is credited in the article with sending out 15 million absentee and mail-in ballot applications to voters in key swing states, resulting in 4.6 million applications being returned. At the time it was already widely known that the Voter Participation Center had long been acting as a thinly veiled Democratic get-out-the-vote operation. Today, the organization is behaving no differently. In 2022, the group raised over $37 million and has been busy sending out ballot applications and voter registration forms to millions of eligible voters in swing states across the country. Some of the voter registration forms have become a focal point of controversy since they featured a conspicuous portrait of Michelle Obama on the front, which many interpreted as an underhanded tactic to filter out unregistered voters that favor Republicans. Recent publications on its website show the group is researching new ways to register voters in demographics that just so happen to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Mind the Gap, a Democratic super PAC, once called VPC one of the most cost-effective partisan electioneering weapons in the Democratic Party’s arsenal during the 2020 election. Expect nothing to change in 2024.

New Names and Faces to Watch in 2024

Several other groups and persons named in the Time article are still active in electioneering and elections policy today, but their influence today does not reach the same level as the groups and people discussed above. And several groups and people that aren’t named in the 2020 article have since risen through the ranks and might be worthy of attention as November nears.

The Voter Registration Project

Also known as the Everybody Votes Campaign, the Voter Registration Project is a 501(c)(3) organization whose 2020 activities were kept so secretive that Ms. Ball would never have had the chance to learn about them. The group, first exposed in a Capital Research Center special report, was created in the lead-up to the 2016 election with the specific purpose of raising $100+ million for hand-picked “nonpartisan” voter registration groups with the implicit understanding that these groups would target demographics that would vote for Democrats in the 2020 election. The group initially operated in total secrecy but has since gone public, boasting that it has paid for the registration of over 5 million voters, while its database experts ensured that all these voters were added to voter-contact databases used by the Democratic Party and to state voter rolls.

The project was originally supposed to close its doors after 2020, but it was apparently so successful that its mission was renewed for 2024. The group still operates quietly, but job listings suggest that the group is now targeting Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin with massive voter registration drives in 2024 that could tilt the field of play toward the Democratic Party.

Brian Fallon and Demand Justice

Brian Fallon, the press secretary of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, was not named as a major player in the 2020 election. At the time he was acting as head of Demand Justice, a “dark money” advocacy group that he founded to target the Trump administration’s nominees to the Supreme Court and other federal courts. Demand Justice played a major role in turning the confirmation process of Justice Kavanaugh and others into a media smear circus, and it later hand-picked Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson for the Biden administration.

In 2023, Brian Fallon left Demand Justice to join the Biden campaign as the communications director for Kamala Harris, who was still just the second name on the ticket. The apparent step downward was a confusing move at the time, but Fallon has since found himself promoted to head communications advisor for a presidential campaign with very little time on the clock and an immediate need for communications and messaging wizardry. At the same time, Demand Justice, Fallon’s former group, has announced an ad-blitz of unprecedented size targeting Trump, Republicans, and the Supreme Court. And President Biden announced he would be supporting term limits for the Supreme Court, which would, coincidentally, flip the court’s ideological balance in favor of the Left.

As the Left continues to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, expect Brian Fallon and Demand Justice to play a big role in “election fortification” during 2024, especially on any court rulings on disputes over election results.