In October 2024, a right-of-center watchdog organization called Americans for Public Trust released a bombshell report claiming that foreigners may have dumped tens of millions of dollars into ballot initiative campaigns ahead of November’s election. Since then, a coalition of right-of-center advocacy groups has worked with grassroots activists and state legislators to block foreign entities from throwing their money into American ballot referendums.
APT pointed to a loophole in many states’ election laws which they claim allowed foreign citizens to donate to 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations and for those organizations to then spend money advocating for or against ballot measures. The concerted push to stop that practice by APT, Heritage Action, and the Honest Elections Project, alongside others, has borne considerable fruit.
During the 2025 legislative session, four states — Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, and Wyoming — have so far passed legislation closing the purported loophole. Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Alabama, and Montana, meanwhile, are currently in varying stages of codifying a bill in that vein.
The Washington Examiner spoke with individuals at the trio of organizations supporting this legislative movement to gain a better understanding of what has thus far made it so successful.
Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss sits at the center of the conservative concern over foreign election influence. Wyss, a Swiss national residing in Wyoming, has poured over $150 million into the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Democrat-aligned dark money group, through his philanthropic empire since 2019.
The Sixteen Thirty Fund, while counting Wyss as one of its top funders, spent roughly $79 million on 33 different state referendums between 2017 and 2023, according to Ballotpedia, a nonprofit election information resource. Sixteen Thirty Fund was successful in nearly 90% of their efforts. Notably, the nonprofit organization spent heavily on supporting abortion-rights initiatives, which Democratic strategists have advocated as an indirect way to increase voter turnout for their party.
“Along with our coalition counterparts and many other concerned legislators and citizens, Americans for Public Trust has testified in state capitols across the country raising the alarm about the foreign influence loophole,” APT Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland told the Washington Examiner. “Most Americans have no idea this alarming loophole exists and is allowing foreign-backed groups like Sixteen Thirty Fund to pour money into state ballot issue campaigns that bypass the traditional lawmaking process and boost leftwing causes and candidates. As soon as the public and lawmakers learn about this loophole, they overwhelmingly support closing it.”
Sutherland’s characterization of the popularity of ballot initiative reform was echoed by others involved in the effort.
Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead and Heritage Action Vice President Janae Stracke both reported relatively little pushback against the reform bills they supported and claimed that grassroots enthusiasm for closing the loophole was palpable.
“For the most part, what we’ve seen actually is that when it comes time to essentially record the final vote, these tend to go down with overwhelming bipartisan support,” Snead said. The exception, Snead said, was in Ohio, where every Democrat in the legislature voted against a bill to close the loophole.
“First and foremost, this is a grassroots effort from the ground up,” Stracke told the Washington Examiner. Stracke shared that Heritage Action has over 20,000 “sentinels,” what it calls its grassroots activists, nationwide. The activists, according to Stracke, are unpaid volunteers whom Heritage Action directs through weekly strategy calls and policy trainings to talk them through how to interface with lawmakers and to explain the Heritage Foundation’s positions.
“Every single one of them comes with a different skill set or talent,” Stracke continued. “Some of them were writing letters to the editor and some of them were testifying at their state capitals and everything else in between.”
Stracke echoed Snead by saying that they “haven’t seen a lot of pushback” in their efforts to ban foreign ballot initiative funding.
“Secure elections are the foundation of our country,” said Stracke. “So our sentinels care about this very, very deeply. And like I said, since 2021, they’ve been leading the charge on making it easier to vote and harder to cheat. There’s a lot of momentum behind election integrity still and I think that credit goes to grassroots like our sentinels for remaining stalwarts on this issue and letting elected officials hear from them”
Though Stracke didn’t disclose a specific dollar amount, she said that Heritage Action didn’t need to spend much money to move the ball forward in this area. To supplement the “organic power” of the group’s grassroots activists, however, Heritage Action employed dedicated lobbyists and ran paid messaging campaigns at times.
The Honest Elections Project relied less on grassroots mobilization and more on interfacing directly with lawmakers.
“We were very glad to see that there were a number of lawmakers that were using model legislation that we developed and put on our website as a template for accomplishing that goal,” Snead told the Washington Examiner. The bill template, available on the organization’s website, requires ballot initiative campaigns to receive affirmation from donors that their funds are not from foreign sources. Under the model legislation, foreign entities are also prohibited from attempting to directly or indirectly steer funds toward ballot measure campaigns, including by trying to convince others to donate.
Snead was quick to point out that every bill designed to counter foreign influence is not created equal, pointing to the recent amendment process concerning legislation in Montana that he said “substantially watered down” its strength.
“We have to address that co-mingling problem where you’ve got foreign money co-mingled in accounts with American money and you can never prove one way or the other what dollar is going into a state campaign,” Snead said. “So, we’ve worked very closely to make these bans as tight as possible and I’m still hopeful that Montana will be able to pass a solid ban that will protect the state against foreign influence of all kinds.”
While conservative activists have worked to close this loophole, the liberal parties implicated have denied wrongdoing.
“The Wyss Foundation and Berger Action Fund support organizations and policies that lower the cost of healthcare, promote economic opportunity, and conserve and expand access to our public lands,” Marneé Banks, a spokeswoman for the Wyss-backed nonprofit groups, previously told the Washington Examiner. “Both organizations comply with laws and rules governing their activities and prohibit grants from being used to support or oppose political candidates or parties.”
Sixteen Thirty Fund, meanwhile, has claimed that work conducted by conservative organizations to advance legislation that would explicitly ban foreign funds from entering ballot initiative campaigns advances the interests of conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, who reportedly has control of over $1 billion in assets he uses to advance right-of-center causes.
“Sixteen Thirty Fund proudly supports local groups organizing around ballot initiatives that expand fundamental rights like access to abortion, the ballot box, and livable wages,” a spokesperson for the organization previously said. “Every contribution we receive is used in strict compliance with all guidelines, regulations, and laws.”
FOREIGN-FUNDED DARK MONEY ORG PUMPED MILLIONS INTO LEFT-WING GROUPS DURING 2024 ELECTIONS
Groups such as APT have faced criticism from left-of-center voices for calling for greater transparency while themselves accepting funding from dark money sources. APT, for instance, receives a considerable portion of its revenue from Donors Trust, a foundation used by wealthy conservatives to anonymously support their favored causes.
Some liberals, however, appear to share a common desire to limit the influence of foreign entities on America’s elections, though with a greater focus on corporate spending.
Montana Environmental Information Center Deputy Director Derf Johnson, in a December 2024 testimony before the House Administration Committee, pointed out that an Australian mining corporation bankrolled opposition to an environmental protection referendum in Montana.
“The citizen-led ballot initiative was submitted not just as a reflection of Montana’s love for rivers and Constitutional obligations to assure their protection, but also more specifically to address concerns related to the Smith River Mine and its potential, high-risk impacts to the cherished waterway,” Johnson said. “Our small population and relatively cheap media market — coupled with a high degree of interest from foreign corporations in accessing Montana’s natural resources — has frequently allowed for local interests to be trammeled by outside interests.”
Federal Election Commission Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, has advanced a similar argument. In Weintraub’s telling, Supreme Court precedent that allows corporations to donate to super PACs creates an opening for foreign-owned corporations to funnel money into American elections and influence their outcomes. A corporation, regardless of who actually owns it, is not considered foreign under current U.S. law as long as it is based in the United States. Weintraub and other liberals see this as a loophole that should be closed.
The commissioner’s concern isn’t merely hypothetical, as a corporation owned by Chinese citizens but based in the United States donated $1.3 million to a super PAC backing Jeb Bush during the lead up to the 2016 election.