The real reason the FBI is investigating this red state's voting rights groups

Employees attend an event with U.S. Vice President JD Vance at Pointe Precision in Plover, Wisconsin, U.S., February 26, 2026. Matt Rourke/Pool via REUTERS

Federal officials have served a subpoena on one of the nation’s leading nonprofit voter outreach groups, which has financially supported the Ohio election advocacy group at the center of a deepening investigation by the Trump administration, according to a source familiar with the probe.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The FBI served the subpoena on America Votes, a Washington-based organization founded by prominent Democratic leaders that works to turn out voters nationwide, the sources said.

America Votes, which has given the Ohio Organizing Collaborative at least $500,000 in recent years, according to its tax filings, issued a statement Wednesday confirming it had received a subpoena “asking for basic records related to funding of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. We have been informed America Votes is not a target of the investigation.”

The subpoena signals a broader FBI investigation into the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a statewide nonprofit group founded in 2007 that works on voting rights efforts. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s sister organization, Ohio Organizing Campaign, said it registered nearly 160,000 Ohio voters in 2024, describing the effort as the largest independent voter registration program in the country.

Prentiss Haney, an Ohio Organizing Collaborative board member and former director of the group, said the FBI appeared to be seeking information from America Votes and other voting rights groups that worked with his organization.

“This is very far reaching,” he said. “They seem to be fishing for any- and everything related to civil rights and voting rights infrastructure.”

The FBI and Justice Department did not respond to emails seeking comment. Last week, FBI special agents searched the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s offices and questioned staff members and volunteers about potential voter registration fraud, according to Haney and others familiar with the investigation.

Haney said he did not know the full extent of the FBI investigation.

The FBI probe comes amid rising concerns ahead of the November midterm election about Trump administration efforts to question the legitimacy of voting in America. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that voter fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Most recently, he accused Democrats, again without evidence, of rigging results in the California primary earlier this month.

FBI agents have seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia, and secured election records in Maricopa County, Arizona.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, has been at the forefront of efforts among elections officials to scrutinize potential voter fraud. Last year, LaRose referred more than 1,200 cases to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, largely related to alleged unlawful voter registration of voting activity. LaRose said he found more than 1,000 noncitizens who had registered to vote, including 167 noncitizens who appeared to have voted in federal elections between 2018 and 2024.

But the figures represent allegations, not yet proven cases. Previous batches of LaRose voter-fraud referrals have produced few prosecutions: AP reported that of 621 criminal referrals sent to Ohio’s attorney general, prosecutors secured indictments against only nine people for voting as noncitizens over a decade.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare across the country and studies, audits, and court cases have found no evidence that it occurs at anything close to the scale needed to alter modern statewide or federal election outcomes except in very unusual cases.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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