How a Right-Wing Legal Group Uses the Courts To Spread Election Disinformation
Over the past few election cycles, there’s been a steady stream of right-wing groups launching a full-frontal legal assault on voting rights. But PILF is one of the most prolific — and nefarious. Since its founding in 2012, the conservative legal group has become synonymous with suing state and local governments to purge registered voters from their election rolls, barring noncitizens from voting and defending voter suppression laws. But the basis for its legal arguments — like in the Michigan lawsuit — typically pedal disinformation about mass election fraud.
And while PILF’s grand claims of mass voter fraud get dismissed when no evidence turns up, the group succeeds in promoting disinformation in the courts and in the media, sowing doubt in the election process. That’s by design: behind PILF’s attack on voting rights is a well-funded conservative legal machine that gets most of its money from a network of right-wing dark money groups with a rich history of trying to suppress the right to vote.
PILF was founded in 2012 as the ActRight Legal Foundation — a nonprofit law firm with the stated mission to defend the “free exercise of religious belief, First Amendment rights of free speech and association, voting rights, property rights, and other constitutional rights of due process and equal protection,” according to its first tax filing. Since then, however, the group has narrowed its focus to primarily litigating against voting rights and promoting “election integrity,” according to its most recent tax filing.
And PILF is able to fund such lawsuits through a myriad of right-wing dark money groups that annually contribute millions of dollars to the group. According to its nonprofit tax filings, over the years, PILF has received a bulk of its funding from right-wing groups like the Leonard Leo-tied 85 Fund, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and DonorsTrust, the Koch-brothers affiliated group that’s known as the “dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.”
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/how-a-right-wing-legal-group-uses-the-courts-to-spread-election-disinformation/