On April 30, the Indiana-based Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a right-wing litigation group, filed a lawsuit in Wisconsin to gain greater access to voter registrations in the state as part of its national campaign to purge voter rolls. The group has filed similar lawsuits in at least eight other states this election cycle.
The Badger Votes site run by the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) allows anyone with an interest to purchase voter records for a base fee of $25 plus $5 for every thousand records requested. WEC caps fees at $12,500 no matter what.
Despite bringing in $2.7 million a year in revenue and being based out of state, PILF believes it should be exempt from paying these fees and wants Wisconsin taxpayers to foot the bill instead. Since the charity registered with the IRS also wants access to voters’ dates of birth — data that isn’t allowed to be included in such requests, according to Wisconsin law — it filed suit.
PILF claims voter rolls need to be purged based on its false claims about widespread noncitizen voting, and has sparked criticism for publishing voter information online and has been sued for engaging in voter intimidation.
The group has been involved in 13 election-related lawsuits this year, according to its website. The group’s most recent is an amicus brief arguing that an election law in Mississippi allowing ballots to be received and counted five days after Election Day violates federal law.
Who is Funding PILF’s Work?
As a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization, PILF is not required to disclose its funding. However, through an analysis of hundreds of IRS filings, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has identified the sources of 73% of its revenue between 2017 and 2022.
Of that, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation and its donor advised fund, the Bradley Impact Fund, contributed over $3 million during the five-year period.
A video obtained by CMD from the Bradley Impact Fund’s 2020 donor conference — which featured voter suppression activists — provides insight into just how significant Bradley’s funding is.
“Your support and the support of Bradley has been so important for us being able to do things like this [research on voter rolls] and to really start to change the narrative of voter fraud,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams told donors in a panel titled, “Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste: Preserving Election Integrity.”
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg, Save Our States Executive Director Trent England, and former Texas Public Policy Foundation CEO Kevin Roberts also spoke during that session.
Roberts is now president of the Heritage Foundation, where he has overseen the development of Project 2025, the right-wing powerhouse’s massive plan for overhauling federal agencies and “institutionalizing Trumpism.” PILF serves on the advisory board for Project 2025.
In a July appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room, Roberts bluntly observed, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
In fall 2020, before the January 6 insurrection, Roberts told Bradley Impact Fund conference attendees, “The Left is in the process of succeeding in stealing this country, not just stealing elections, but stealing the very ideal of what it means to be American.”
Between 2018 and 2022, Bradley funneled $1.45 million to Heritage directly and another $398,421 through its Impact Fund. Part of the Bradley grants are “to support the election law initiative and legal strategy forums,” according to its tax filings.
Among the recipients is Save Our States, an organization initiated by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) to protect the Electoral College system from the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It is now housed within Leonard Leo’s The 85 Fund, where it has shifted its focus to banning ranked choice voting in partnership with another voter suppression group within The 85 Fund: Honest Elections Project.
Bradley gave OCPA $125,000 in 2020 and The 85 Fund $200,000 in 2022 specifically for Save Our States.
PILF’s Strong Ties to Insurrectionists and Voter Suppressionists
PILF’s board of directors is dominated by insurrectionists and voter suppression activists.
Board Chair Cleta Mitchell is the founder and chair of the Foundation for Accountability and Integrity in Elections Fund, and a senior fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute. At CPI she started the Election Integrity Network in 2021 to “reclaim the election processes and systems in America” by establishing state and local task forces to focus on false claims of noncitizen voting, absentee voting, ballot boxes, voter rolls, and tabulation, among other election-related issues.
Mitchell, who also serves as a board member at Bradley, played a central role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including sitting in on the now infamous post-election phone call in which the then-president urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to claim victory in the state. After The Washington Post broke the story about the call, she was forced to resign as a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner.
Also on PILF’s board is Hans Von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Reform Initiative. Spakovsky, who was appointed by Trump to his ill-fated Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, has been a major purveyor of the Right’s voter fraud myth for well over a decade.
Ken Blackwell, another alum of Trump’s election integrity advisory committee, also sits on PILF’s board and chairs the MAGA voter suppression center at America First Policy Institute, CMD first reported, and CNP Action, the political arm of the secretive Christian Right group Council for National Policy (CNP).
CNP is deeply tied to the former Trump administration, #StoptheSteal, and the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, as CMD has reported.
Shortly after the November 2020 election, Blackwell and Mitchell joined Adams and Spakovsky for a CNP panel titled, “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?”
“Action Steps” distributed from that discussion directed attendees to call on state and federal lawmakers to challenge the election results and appoint alternate slates of Trump electors to the Electoral College.
Bradley has sent $325,000 (2018–22) to CNP, and its president, Richard Graber, is a member of the CNP Board of Governors.
Another PILF board member, Clara Belle Wheeler, is a senior fellow for election integrity at the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, where Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network is now housed.
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