Insurrectionist and voter suppression advocate Cleta Mitchell formed a new dark money group in 2023 to channel funds to organizations that promote the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election and spread misinformation about the threat of widespread noncitizen voting.
Housed in the offices of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the Foundation for Accountability Integrity & Research in Elections Fund (FAIR Elections Fund) brought in $3.9 million between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024, and disclosed $2.1 million in expenses, more than three-quarters of which was disbursed in grants to other organizations.
The FAIR Elections Fund has no website as of publication. A Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis of the group’s first tax filing, recently made public, offers the first internal look into Mitchell’s group since she disclosed leading it in biographies and news reports.
The group’s IRS filing says that it made no payments for salaries or other compensation, while claiming Mitchell is working 50 hours per week for the group. This raises the question of who is paying Mitchell for her work.
Mitchell has worked to manufacture a crisis around noncitizens voting and partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to push for model bills and amendments to state constitutions banning it — despite the fact that evidence of noncitizen voting is scarce. “Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center reported in 2024.
A senior legal fellow at CPI, Mitchell launched her previous project, the Election Integrity Network (EIN), with the help of the right-wing group, which was founded and led by former U.S. senator and congressman Jim DeMint and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows (also an insurrectionist). In 2023, EIN moved out of the CPI constellation of nonprofits and is now “administered and managed by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy with Virginia Institute president Lynn Taylor also serving as EIN’s Chairman as Cleta Mitchell retains an active EIN role as its founder,” according to a 2023 booklet obtained by CMD.
EIN’s latest IRS filing shows that as of December 2023 it was still registered at CPI’s office address, with just $213 left in the bank.
Serving on the FAIR Elections Fund board of directors alongside Mitchell, its president, are Vice President Heather Honey, Vice President Daniel Bean, Secretary Don Workman, and Treasurer Pat Corrigan.
Honey, also an executive director at the Election Research Institute, is a close ally of Mitchell who worked with her to sow doubt about the efficacy and trustworthiness of the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which has resulted in many states opting out of this interstate effort to help ensure accurate voter rolls.
A 2024 analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found that conclusions in Honey’s report on ERIC “are false, often based on out-of-context examples, and… are frequently not backed by the data she presents.”
The IRS filing shows that the FAIR Elections Fund paid $121,284 to Honey’s organization Verity Vote LLC for “consulting.”
Vice President Daniel Bean is an attorney who represented Trump advisor Andy Surabian when he was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Secretary Don Workman is a partner at Baker & Hostetler and was a partner at Foley & Lardner, the Washington-based law firm that Mitchell was forced to resign from after she participated in the infamous post-2020 election phone call in which Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to claim victory in that swing state.
Treasurer Pat Corrigan runs Compass Direct LLC, a fundraising company that works for CPI, where his brother Edward is president. Given Corrigan’s role as treasurer, he is likely the one tasked with raising funds for the organization.
$1.6 Million in Grants
The FAIR Elections Fund distributed $1.6 million in grants in 2023-24 to 10 allied groups.
The FDRLST Media Foundation, which publishes the right-wing web magazine The Federalist, received $400,000, the largest grant. In 2020, The Federalist falsely accused Democrats of trying to steal the election in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania during extended vote counting in the days following the presidential election.
The pro-Trump outlet also published a column EIN’s Kerri Toloczko misinforming readers that noncitizen voting is a crisis that needs to be addressed through federal legislation. Since 2019 it has run nine pieces by Mitchell on noncitizen voting, purging voter rolls, and voting by mail.
EIN’s administrator, the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, received the next largest grant of $325,000. The Institute held its fifth Election Integrity Summit on May 16, and holds “infrastructure trainings” twice a month.
The FAIR Elections Fund funneled its third largest grant of $300,000 to the State Freedom Caucus Foundation, the sister organization of the State Freedom Caucus Network (SFCN). CPI incubated SFCN, which Meadows launched in 2021. From the beginning, the group has touted “election integrity” as a priority.
The network has been deployed to ban noncitizens from voting at the federal level as well as at the state level in places like Missouri.
Mitchell also spoke at the 2024 State Freedom Caucus Network Summit, where Wyoming State Freedom Caucus Chair Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R) said she “shared some shocking statistics about American elections and illegal immigration.”
The Immigration Accountability Project (IAP) received $150,000 from the FAIR Elections Fund, the IRS filing shows. IAP President Chris Chmielenski collaborated with Mitchell and Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, to work a room of 150 attendees at ALEC’s 2024 Annual Meeting to approve an Only Citizens Vote Coalition model bill banning noncitizen voting, The Guardian reported.
The FAIR Elections Fund, Immigration Accountability Project, and Election Transparency Initiative are all members of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, with Mitchell serving as a “co-convener.”
Also receiving FAIR Elections Fund grants between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024 were the Tea Party Patriots Foundation ($100,000); Citizen Outreach Foundation ($89,100); John K MacIver Institute for Public Policy ($75,000); Strong Communities Foundation of AZ ($75,000); Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty ($75,000); and Wisconsin Voter Alliance Corp ($25,000).
In November, Wisconsin voters passed a ballot measure to change one word in the state constitution to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state, or federal election. The right-wing MacIver Institute and Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty were proponents of its passage.
Funding is Dark
Despite the new IRS filings, funding information about the FAIR Elections Fund is scarce. The organization is not required to disclose its donors, and a CMD search of the filings only identified a single contribution of $795,000 from CPI, which does not note the original source of the funds. A CMD analysis of CPI’s known funders is available here.
Leave a Reply