Among the biggest takeaways from November’s midterm elections is that the “red wave” forecasted by pollsters and pundits never materialized, and voters managed to stave off several GOP candidates who ran on election denial. Nonetheless, efforts to intimidate voters, block the certification of election results, and prevent ballots from being counted took center stage across the country, leading to numerous legal challenges to protect citizens’ right to vote.
In Arizona, self-styled election “monitors” — some wearing tactical gear — stood nearby or taunted voters putting ballots in drop-off boxes. A federal court ruling on a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters of Arizona barred defendants from “confronting, photographing, doxing voters, and carrying guns or wearing body armor near drop boxes,” according to a press release on the group’s website.
The midterms were just the latest chapter in an ongoing assault on voting rights. Since the 2020 election, the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, noted that state lawmakers have been “aggressively attempting to limit voting access and roll back gains in turnout.” In 2021, 34 laws restricting access to voting were passed in 19 states, according to the center, more than in any year since it began tracking voting legislation in 2011. This momentum carried into 2022, in which at least seven states enacted laws to make voting more difficult.
In response to these and other threats to democracy, legal battles have become a major front in today’s sprawling fight for free and fair elections, which has nonprofits and their funders working overtime on everything from expanding civic engagement to filing lawsuits. As the attempts to suppress voters have ratcheted up, some funders who traditionally focused on giving in other areas have thrown their hats into the arena of providing grants to organizations that litigate against voter suppression.
The San Francisco-based Stupski Foundation is one such new entrant. The foundation, which intends to spend down all of its assets by 2029, has focused its giving in four areas: early brain development, combating hunger, ensuring that people of color and low-income youth have access to higher education, and careers that yield livable wages and supportive care for people experiencing serious illnesses. Its giving is primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and Hawaii.
This year, however, Stupski gave a $150,000 grant to the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), a national, nonpartisan legal organization that litigates against voter suppression all over the country. “We were really alarmed by the clear intention to suppress votes, to suppress systems, to suppress election access,” says Stupski’s Chief Executive Officer Glen Galaich. The foundation, which Galaich describes as small and progressive, wasn’t planning to create a new funding area, but the entire board and staff backed the CLC funding, he said.
“What's happening today is just another version of what's happened historically in American democracy since its founding,” says Galaich. “To be very direct, it was constructed for white men, and it stayed that way for much of the history of the country. And when white men have been challenged in power, they react, and you can look at it going back to the formation of the country, through Reconstruction and onward.”
Galaich said the foundation took a two-pronged approach. One was to invest long-term in marginalized communities of color that have experienced ongoing repression around voting. In the short term, Galaich said that the Campaign Legal Center was a good fit. “I’ve known [CLC founder] Trevor Potter from previous work and was impressed with their work on campaign finance reform,” Galaich said. “In particular, they put some concentration into states with Indigenous communities that were being intentionally undercounted and prevented from voting.”
Arnold Ventures, headquartered in Houston and founded by Laura and John Arnold, has as its core objective “to maximize opportunity and minimize injustice.” It typically gives grants in four areas, criminal justice, education, health and public finance. But it has also been providing grants to the Campaign Legal Center since 2016. Its initial grants to CLC between 2016 and 2018 totaled $694,872 and were earmarked to help “establish a constitutional standard for adjudicating gerrymandering cases in the United States.”
Arnold funded CLC to represent 12 Wisconsin voters who challenged state assembly district lines as unconstitutional, according to a recent update on the funder’s website. While the Supreme Court has ruled that excessive partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution, there’s no standard for how to identify illegal redistricting. The lawsuit in Wisconsin seems to set such a standard for use in the future.
Notably, between 2019 and for the 2022–2023 giving cycle, Arnold Ventures shifted its grantmaking for CLC to general operating support and ramped up its giving significantly to $4 million.
The Atlanta-based Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, which was formed in 1995 by Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot, is also a relative newbie to the terrain of supporting litigation to fight voter suppression. Its typical funding areas included education, youth development and community redevelopment, as well as parks and green spaces. A statement posted on its website describes why the foundation made a strategic move in 2021 to pour $10 million into a new democracy program.
“In a time when more than half of Americans are dissatisfied with the state of our democracy, the most powerful way to demonstrate and have our voices heard is through the vote. However, many Americans are still being denied access to their vote and their ability to fully participate in our democracy.”
Among the 12 recipients of the foundation’s democracy fund are groups that litigate against voter suppression, such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, which litigates to expand “language access at the polls and ending a discriminatory voter registration policy that impacted thousands of voters of color,” according to the group’s website. Other grant recipients that take legal action on behalf of voters include the ACLU Foundation of Georgia, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Common Cause Education Fund.
The foundation noted that Georgia has been ground zero for all manner of attempts to suppress votes. (As recently as November 5, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against Cobb County election officials for failing to send around 1,000 absentee ballots to eligible voters.) Blank is also backing several Georgia-based grassroots groups, as well as national groups that work year-round to educate and get out the vote, particularly among underrepresented groups. Those grantees include the New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute and the Galileo Latino Community Development Fund.
Explaining why the foundation supports year-round efforts around voting, Arthur Blank told the press in a statement, “Our democracy is made stronger when we hear from all Americans on the issues of our day, whether they be national or local. This must happen more often than the presidential election cycle of every four years, because there’s no offseason for democracy.”
There’s also no offseason for democracy-related court battles, it seems, at least not anytime soon. In addition to the grantees mentioned here, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU are all conducting ongoing litigation against right-wing voter suppression. Just as more funders big and small find themselves getting pulled into the work of GOTV, local organizing, and other politics-adjacent activities, we’re likely to see more taking sides in legal fights that seem to go hand-in-hand with American elections.