Old Dominion News

A group urging Virginians to vote by mail in the upcoming gubernatorial elections claims to be a “nonprofit organization that serves volunteers who want to help fellow Americans vote,” but is actually a “product of the professional left,” writes Hayden Ludwig, senior investigative researcher for the Capital Research Center (CRC).

“Vote Forward” has mailed out handwritten letters to Virginians urging them to register for absentee ballots so they can vote by mail in the Nov. 2 gubernatorial election where former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, is in a tight race with Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin. The race is viewed as a bellwether for next year’s congressional midterms, where Republicans are looking to win back control of at least one chamber of Congress.

The Indianapolis-based CRC describes itself as "broadly right of center."

Ludwig says that the mailers themselves look “innocent enough” but the group sending them out isn’t.

“Vote Forward was formed in 2017 to send ‘please vote’ letters to turn out unlikely voters in swing districts,” he writes. “While the group is officially nonpartisan per IRS requirements, its partner Swing Left certainly isn’t. In 2018, Swing Left provided Vote Forward with data on churning out votes in 78 key districts that Democrats needed to win to seize control of the U.S. House of Representatives. The two groups even share the same Pennsylvania Avenue office space.”

The group’s method of operation is similar to two others, the Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), whose political activities were recently exposed in a series of New York Post reports. The groups, like Vote Forward, present themselves as good government groups helping local officials and voters safely through the COVID-19 pandemic, but were effectively get-out-the-vote organs for the Democratic Party in the 2020 general elections. They, for instance, granted lopsided amounts of money – contributed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan – to heavily Democratic regions. Moreover, CTCL and CEIR are staffed with former Democratic operatives and leftist activists, Ludwig argued. 

Vote Forward is run the same way. 

"The group’s chairman, Marc Elias, is a top lawyer for Democratic politicians,” Ludwig writes. “He was general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and is responsible for pioneering the super PAC model, a kind of political vehicle that can spend unlimited sums and a target of far-left ire.”

Vote Forward, however, doesn’t appear in the IRS nonprofit database.

“It’s listed as a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit – indicating that it was set up to conduct more extensive lobbying and political activities than a 501(c)(3) public charity—in a Form 990 filing for another leftist giant, the Hopewell Fund, which paid a $604,275 grant to Vote Forward in 2019,” Ludwig writes.