Friday, October 25, 2024
Voter Registration and Racially Correlated Charity
It is sometimes logically necessary, and constitutionally appropriate, to direct charitable efforts towards one race if race correlates to a charitable need. In this post, I use a current controversy regarding voter education and Roger Colinvaux's thesis to show why that's true.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Senator Cotton misunderstood the rules regarding exempt organizations’ conduct of voter registration drives. Cotton, and other legislators before him, complained about the Voter Participation Center’s apparent biases in selecting places at which to conduct voter registrations. The complaint is that by only registering voters in what the legislators viewed as blue places, VPC was showing an intolerable partisanship and should have its exemption revoked:
The IRS prohibits 501(c)(3) organizations from conducting partisan voter-education or voter-registration activities. The IRS states that a 501(c)(3) organization may conduct voter registration drive “if they are conducted in a neutral, non-partisan manner.” It further warns that a private foundation is subject to a tax if it uses funds for partisan voter-registration drives.
According to the Washington Free Beacon the Voter Participation Center is targeting likely Democrat voters and excluding likely Republican voters through its voter-registration ads on social media. The Voter Participation Center has instructed Facebook to exclude users from seeing ads if they expressed interest in “John Wayne,” “Redneck Mud Club,” “Daytona 500,” “Duck Dynasty,” and other topics associated with conservatives. On the other hand, the group instructed Facebook to target users interested in “hot yoga,” “Charli XCX” (who is closely associated with Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign), “Pitchfork Media,” and other topics that tend to interest progressives.
I dismissed the complaints. VPC's selectivity does not matter, I said, even if it were enough to assume that redneck boys, good ol’ boys, and boys in the hood are readily identifiable by their media preferences – a dubious assumption because most rap music is consumed by suburban and country white boys. And of course voter registration organizations pick their venues according to political demographics. As long as they don’t otherwise use registration drives as a cover for campaigning, there can be no problem. At least not one that can or should be policed by the Service. But I should have thought it through. I should have assumed for the sake of argument that selective locations can suggest campaign intervention, and than determined whether that selectivity is nevertheless justifiable. It would have been a clarifying thought exercise.
Fortunately, VPC issued a statement in explanation:
The goal of the Voter Participation Center (VPC) as a 501(c)(3) non-profit is to register to vote, and turn out to vote, eligible Americans from underrepresented populations including people of color, young people, and unmarried women.
To reach these underrepresented populations, VPC uses digital ads to identify prospective voters, and incorporate their likely or known interests into our targeting to engage them online. For example, we used digital interest categories on Facebook to include prospective voters interested in “College Football,” “College,” “Fraternities in North America,” “Dorm Life,” and other terms to find likely young voters. We also used other popular interests, including “Taylor Swift,” “I love to Salsa,” “Meet the Browns (TV series),” “Goya Foods,” and “Black History,” to engage with Black and Hispanic would-be voters. We also exclude interest categories like “Luxury Travelers” and “Luxury Shoppers” that are likely to reach people who are likely to be registered to vote already. This is standard procedure in the digital advertising industry used to reach specific demographics. These practices are not partisan and are fully in line with federal tax rules for tax-exempt charitable organizations. Our one and only goal is to make sure that eligible, underrepresented Americans are able to engage in our democracy, regardless of how they choose to vote.
People of color, young people, and unmarried women are underrepresented in our electorate, making up 64% of voting-eligible Americans, but over 70% of unregistered eligible voters. In 2020, only 61% of the voters in these communities turned out to the polls, as opposed to 75% of voters outside their ranks. Since 2003, VPC and our sister organization, the Center for Voter Information (CVI), have helped more than 6.2 million people register to vote through our digital and mail programs. While VPC’s work is focused on these underrepresented communities, we are happy when our ads reach any eligible citizen and they are able to register to vote. Our hope is that all elected officials will support our efforts toward building a representative democracy, instead of misleading and alarming voters about our effective, non-partisan voter registration programs. Elections should be a contest of ideas – not a contest of who gets to vote.
I took the time to blog about this again because it demonstrates a larger point not exclusive to voter registration but broadly applicable to race-based charities. Colinvaux has argued, in defense of DEI nonprofits like Fearless Foundation, that charity is necessarily exclusive. That some people have charitable needs, others do not and for that reason are excluded from a charity's beneficial effect. Nonprofits that try to assist certain demographics defined by charitable need do not violate any constitutional norm of equality merely because beneficiaries are identifiable by race. If I understand Colinvaux's point, charitable efforts necessarily focuses on those with an unmet need, not on a certain race. That a charitable need predominates amongst a certain racial or ethnic population does not mean efforts to address the need violate a constitutional notion of equality.
VPC’s defense of its selective voter drives, though which it excludes locations associated with conservatives, suggests partisanship, let's just be honest. It is to be expected and its silly to insist on a higher degree of unbiased objectivity. But it is better explained as an effort directed at alleviating a charitable need that happens to predominate in a certain demographic. That explanation demonstrates the principle Colinvaux asserts in defense of nonprofit DEI efforts. It's not enough by the way, to say that this only proves that charities can and should focus on charitable needs without using race as a criteria. Race is a criteria for some charitable needs and pretending otherwise only leads to inefficiency. The charity's efforts cannot be precise or surgical by pretending otherwise. If the only denominator common to a certain charitable need is race, it ought to be ok to define and respond to that charitable need by reference to that race.
If voter nonparticipation in 1964 Mississippi correlated to race, for example, it would have been silly to insist that Chaney, Goodwin, and Schwerner should not have used race to determine the direction of their charitable efforts.
darryll k. jones
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/nonprofit/2024/10/voter-registration-and-colinvauxs-defense-of-dei-nonprofits.html