LANSING — A proposed constitutional amendment that would require Michiganders to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote is being bankrolled by a conservative nonprofit that has spent years promoting discredited theories of widespread voter fraud across the country.
Restoration of America, a dark money group that is not required to disclose its own donors, this fall gave $3.5 million to Americans for Citizen Voting - Michigan, a ballot committee that is collecting voter signatures in the hope of placing its proposal before voters in the November 2026 election.
A campaign finance report filed Monday lists a Florida address for Restoration of America, but the nonprofit was created by Illinois activist Doug Truax. The group aims to encourage American prosperity by "turning to God and the enforcement of just laws."
“They're big supporters of citizen-only voting,” Paul Jacob, chairman of the national Americans for Citizen Voting, told Bridge Michigan in an interview. “And so I reached out to them and said, ‘Hey, look what, look what's happening in Michigan. Can you help?’”
Jacob said his organization is working in multiple states, including Alaska, to require proof of citizenship throughout the voting process. He called it a “grassroots campaign” but acknowledged the Michigan operation is using paid petition circulators.
Restoration of America also sponsors VoteRef, a nonprofit that has aggregated state-level voter registration data and urged volunteer sleuths to look for evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Unlike candidate campaigns and independent committees, committees created to support or oppose ballot proposals in Michigan have few restraints on where their funding comes from. They are able to accept unlimited donations from any source.
Because of the gradual loosening of federal and state campaign finance laws over the past few decades, it’s become harder to determine the true funding sources for Michigan ballot proposal campaigns – both for and against.
The state has placed some restrictions on how ballot committees can be funded, barring them from being funded exclusively through a single “dark money” organization or using nonprofits to deliberately hide the identity of donors.
In the case of Americans for Citizen Voting Michigan, Restoration of America donations make up 93% of the total fundraising the ballot committee reported through late October. Another $275,000 came from the Liberty Initiative Fund, a nonprofit run by Jacob.
The citizen voting committee was one of multiple Michigan ballot proposal groups to disclose this week they’ve been funded almost exclusively by dark money entities.
Liberal dark money flows
Even a group proposing to bring more transparency to political spending in Michigan by requiring disclosure of “issue ad” donors is so far funded almost entirely by dark money.
Michiganders For Money out of Politics received $115,000 from the California-based Tides Foundation, a clearinghouse for liberal donor-advised funds through which hundreds of millions of dollars pass each year — 97% of their total funding.
The group’s proposal would also bar all political spending by private utilities and state contractors.
The ballot drive has received even more support in the form of in-kind donations, though, largely from members of the coalition supporting the ballot proposal, who are some of the state’s largest liberal dark-money election spenders. Those organizations included Clean Water Action, League of Conservation Voters, Michigan United Action and Voters Not Politicians.
Contributions from the Tides Foundation are also the largest source of funding for the Invest In MI Kids ballot committee, a proposed constitutional amendment that would raise taxes on the very wealthiest Michiganders to boost public school spending.
Invest in MI Kids received $235,000 through the Tides Foundation — and just $1,177 from all other donors since forming.
Like the political spending group, Invest in MI Kids also reported more than $200,000 in donated staff time, primarily through an organization called BOOM, an organization that bills itself as created to “meet the growing needs of social justice and community-based organizations that are focused on multiracial working class power building.”
The group provides back-office services and organization — part of their acronym — for left-leaning organizations in Michigan.
New con-con opposition
In 2026, Michiganders will vote on whether to hold a constitutional convention, deemed a “con-con,” to revise the state’s founding document. The referendum is constitutionally mandated and appears on the ballot once every 16 years.
A new group called Protect MI Constitution from Special Interests is poised to oppose the effort.
The group’s website touts a bipartisan coalition of advocates against a wholesale rewrite of the Michigan Constitution, but it does not include names. A spokesperson for the group told Bridge a formal announcement of their campaign is forthcoming.
Effectively all of the committee’s funding, $150,000, came from a single organization: American Opportunity Action, a nonprofit “dark money” group that is based in Washington, DC and was created less than a year ago.
Christina Reynolds, a spokesperson for the organization, said they advocate “for policies that improve access to health care and reproductive rights, build economic opportunities for women, improve affordability, and create safe and healthy communities for our families.”
American Opportunity Action, she said, believes “those policies are best protected and passed under Michigan’s current state Constitution, not one that is controlled and written by special interests.”
The organization does not have to disclose its donors, but public filings offer some clues about its political affiliations. Incorporation papers filed with the District of Columbia show all the nonprofit’s directors and staff are longtime Democratic operatives.
American Opportunity Action has also given to some other political causes, including $500,000 in September to an anti-gerrymandering effort in Missouri.
This article first appeared on Bridge Michigan and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
