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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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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