Media Matters found significant ties between authors, contributors, and partner organizations involved in Project 2025 — an extreme right-wing initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration — and the ongoing right-wing efforts to disenfranchise voters and sow confusion about the 2024 election.
The Heritage Foundation itself is at the center of many of these efforts; The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer identified the conservative think tank as one of the election denial movement’s “leaders” following the 2020 election. Heritage has extensive connections to election denial groups through both direct collaboration on voter suppression policies and the Project 2025 advisory board, which includes more than 110 conservative groups.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “Project 2025 threatens to reverse progress made over the last four years by stripping crucial federal resources from election officials and weaponizing the Department of Justice against officials who make decisions the administration disagrees with.” The Project 2025 policy book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, recommends dismantling the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which plays a key role in protecting American elections. Mandate’s chapter on the Federal Election Commission was written by Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage legal fellow with a decades-long career spreading voter fraud myths.
The Heritage Foundation’s political arm, Heritage Action, is a member of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition — a collection of election denial activists and right-wing groups that voting rights experts say are spreading misinformation about noncitizen voting. Only Citizens Vote was organized by prominent election denier Cleta Mitchell, a Project 2025 contributor, and many of the Heritage plan’s advisory board members are also Only Citizen Vote Coalition partners.
In collaboration with The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, the groups and individuals listed here are at the forefront of efforts to sow chaos and confusion in the 2024 election.