Five Ways a Dark Money Group Is Trying to Rig Our Elections

Highlights from the leaked video showing Heritage Action’s efforts to rewrite voting laws.

Last week, Mother Jones and the watchdog group Documented broke the story of a top conservative dark money group boasting to donors about writing laws restricting access to the ballot in key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, and Texas.

“In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

Mother Jones released a three-minute excerpt of the most explosive moments from the leaked video, detailing a massive right-wing effort to draft and pass model bills restricting voting access, which Anderson said was intended to “right the wrongs of November.”

Now we’re bringing you an in-depth video featuring five extended highlights from our investigation, exposing Heritage Action’s $24 million campaign over the next two years to roll back access to the ballot and block congressional Democrats’ sweeping democracy reform bill, the For the People Act. This video takes you inside the strategy Heritage is using to weaponize Trump’s Big Lie and rewrite the country’s voting laws to the GOP’s benefit—from creating “echo chambers” with 20,000 ground troops to sneakily passing bills that “nobody noticed” to claiming to write the legislation themselves.

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Owned by no one—except you.

We just keep seeing it happen: Newsrooms owned by billionaires and corporations are spinning their own narratives, overwriting the truth, following only stories that keep them in the pocket of those with even more power.

Not here. We’re not owned by anyone. We’re not part of any cult that demands our allegiance to a bottom line. We’ve spoken up and spoken out while other newsrooms changed their stories—or cut them altogether—to keep the C suite happy.

Our mission is to find the truth and amplify it. That’s why we’re independent, nonprofit, and, crucially, funded by readers. The investigations on our website will always be free to read, watch, and listen to, but our newsroom is powered by readers who pitch in what they can so we can keep asking the hard questions.

Can you chip in today?

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