Capturing Our Democracy

Dark Money’s Dark Magic

How the wealthy play sleight-of-hand with our democratic institutions

Varsha Midha

August 1, 2024

A crowd of election deniers overrun official chambers during a meeting—they commandeer the floor to declare those in office a product of voter fraud and chant that a “revolution” is underway. This is not just a description of the attacks that marked January 6th, 2021. It’s also what happened over three years later in a Maricopa County board of supervisors meeting. 

What was once unthinkable has become the norm. Election officials are receiving death threats and being harassed almost daily, more Americans currently question whether Biden was legitimately elected than they did three years ago, and states across the country have passed an unprecedented volume of restrictive voting and election laws. As the 2024 election approaches, the wreckage of the 2020 election looms large in the rearview. Our democracy is in danger like never before—and that’s no accident. 

A litany of election-focused nonprofits has cropped up over the last few years, suddenly devoting immense resources to amplifying conspiracy theories about our democracy and pushing for concerning reforms in the name of election “integrity” or “security.” Let’s take a closer look at one such organization: the Honest Elections Project (HEP), which was founded in February 2020. 

“As the 2024 election approaches, the wreckage of the 2020 election looms large in the rearview. Our democracy is in danger like never before—and that’s no accident.”

With only months to go until the presidential election, HEP wasted no time: it publicly stoked fears about voter fraud via ad campaigns, threatened lawsuits in multiple states to purge voter rolls, supported restrictive voting laws across the country, and even brought suit against counting mail-in ballots in just the first nine months of its existence. In the years since, HEP has only increased its influence. It partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-backed nonprofit that promotes conservative policies at the state level, to provide “model” legislation on election reform, host election “academies” to sell state lawmakers on that legislation, and then testify in support of those bills in state legislatures. These efforts have contributed to antidemocratic policies in over ten states

At first glance, HEP and similar organizations appear to stem from a groundswell of conservative backlash against the last presidential election. But this isn’t an organic, grassroots response to the issues of 2020. It’s political astroturfing—an attempt to legitimate the highly-coordinated agenda of wealthy special interests by disguising it as grassroots advocacy. This phenomenon isn’t new, but in recent years, wealthy interests have increasingly diverted resources to promote their ideological vision for hot-button issues (judicial nominations, reproductive rights, and climate change, to name a few). Ultrawealthy individuals and corporations are flooding our political institutions with billions of dollars, and the legal system offers them an array of options to deceive the public and shield their activities. Average Americans have no idea who’s really pulling the strings—and even more troublingly, they have no way of finding out.

Dark money: the billionaire’s invisibility cloak 

Imagine yourself as an incredibly wealthy individual or corporation. You want to realize your own political vision of the United States, and you’ve got millions, perhaps billions, in capital to devote to the issue of your choosing. But you don’t want anyone to know who’s behind the curtain. The tax code has an invisibility cloak for you at the ready: dark money organizations.