This Anti-Abortion Billionaire Is Trying to Manipulate the Election for the GOP

Right-wing anti-abortion figures with ties to Leonard Leo, the architect of the U.S. Supreme Court capture, have been using special interest groups to attack our elections for years, but with abortion access on 10 different states’ ballots this year, they have been ramping up their efforts.

One anti-abortion ally of Leo is Sean Fieler, a billionaire hedge funder and precious metals miner. Fieler has so far largely evaded public scrutiny despite using his deep pockets to support right-wing groups attacking reproductive freedoms, LGBTQ communities and free elections.

Fieler’s network is linked to Project 2025, which proposes numerous ways a Republican administration could take away reproductive freedoms and safeguards for LGBTQ Americans.

Fieler himself has a long history of funding groups that attack LGBTQ rights and is unabashed in his anti-marriage equality position.

In advance of the 2024 election, Fieler is leading groups that harvest voter data, target voter advertising and organize state by state get out the vote efforts. Given Fieler’s ardent anti-abortion stance, the fact that he continues to sit on the boards for anti-abortion groups, and his ties to anti-abortion powerbrokers like Leo, there’s reason to fear that these voter data companies could also potentially be working in service of Fieler’s anti-abortion agenda.

While Fieler has a history of working with groups that have tried to influence election outcomes before, his recent involvement with two election-focused entities has been unreported: the voter suppression and pro-GOP get out the vote entity, Right Vote Inc., and the election-focused peer-to-peer text platform, RumbleUp.

Both groups are opaque in their election-related efforts and financial ties, as they are not legally required to divulge certain details about their activities. But what is known is that they have been hired by groups that have canvassed, done messaging for and promoted the Republican Party and its top funders or operatives.

Right Vote Inc.

Fieler is listed as a beneficial owner of Right Vote Inc., a 501(c)(4) group that has shared “labor, rent, administrative, and overhead” costs with The Sentinel Action Fund (SAF) PAC, whose largest funder is major Trump donor Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon/Scaife banking and extraction fortune. SAF President Jessica Anderson and VP of Communications Carson Steelman used to work for an arm of the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group responsible for Project 2025. Steelman has also listed Right Vote as her employer. Fieler gave $100,000 to the SAF PAC in 2022, the same year the PAC was registered, and Right Vote Inc. gave the PAC $1 million, according to the latest Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.

The listed treasurer for SAF is John Backiel, who also works for the Heritage Foundation, which Fieler helps steer as a board member. Heritage employs Hans von Spakovsky, who is well-known for peddling claims about “voter fraud” that have been repeatedly debunked and who appears to be helping to spearhead the right-wing voting disinformation campaign this election cycle. Von Spakovsky has long fought to restrict voting rights, with proposals that make it harder for Americans to vote. He also authored the section of Project 2025 on federal election oversight, which describes plans for removing the FEC’s independent litigating authority.

Right Vote claims to be working with “grassroots conservatives” to turn out the vote, activating community leaders to drive voter registration, educate voters on “election integrity” and state laws, and “[t]raining community leaders to collect ballots from voters as legally permissible in that state.” SAF has engaged in the following activities in recent months:

• Knocking on 1.5 million doors in the key battleground state of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana and Nevada;
• Spending approximately $10 million canvassing absentee ballots in D.C., where Right Vote, Inc., is located;
• Spending approximately $1.7 million on get out the vote mailers and text messaging on absentee ballots in Texas.

Right Vote’s X account is where the organization celebrates its state-level efforts. The group has also used the platform to promote the SAVE Act, a policy that would disenfranchise many voters, but especially women. The legislation would require women without passports to produce their birth certificates alongside a current form of identification. The names on both forms of ID would need to be identical in order to vote, potentially making up to 90 percent of married women who take their spouse’s last name ineligible to vote.

RumbleUp, LLC

Fieler is also an equity owner of the election-focused text platform RumbleUp, a limited-liability company that has already received approximately $3.1 million from Republican candidates, political committees and elected officials in 2023-2024.

One of the most heavily funded anti-abortion ballot committees in Arkansas, Stronger Arkansas, has used RumbleUp to advertise opposition to an initiative that would protect access to abortion in the state. This is not the first time a group headed by Fieler has thrown its financial weight to intercede in state abortion ballot initiatives. In 2023, the Knights of Columbus (KOC), where Fieler sat on the board until June, gave $1 million to Protect Women Ohio, the main opposition group to Ohio’s abortion ballot initiative with ties to national anti-abortion power brokers. Years ago, Fieler shut down his Chiaroscuro Foundation and started using KOC as a kind of “donor advised fund” to transfer money to groups he supports — making it harder to trace funding directly to him.

The CEO of RumbleUp tweeted that the texting platform would have its biggest texting day of the year on the day of the Trump/Harris debate in September. That is an alarming fact given how the platform has been implicated in election disinformation in the past, including sending a text message to Democratic voters in Pennsylvania misrepresenting themselves as Democratic volunteers while claiming absurdly — and utterly falsely — that President Joe Biden, then the party’s candidate, “endorsed giving 8 and 10 year old[s] sex change treatments.”

In June 2023, RumbleUp expanded its features to offer right-wing campaigns an “AI assist” that would generate “different writing tones” and “consider unique … individual needs to develop perfect messaging.” As we have already seen this election cycle, artificial intelligence is being deployed to meddle in our elections via synthetic and manipulated images and videos and other engineered content.

IRS tax filings show that American Majority Inc., a 501(c)(4), has contracted with RumbleUp twice — in 2020 and 2022. American Majority is heavily funded by billionaire and 2020 election denialist Richard “Dick” Uihlein, an anti-abortion funder. While it is unknown if Uihlein’s group has contracted with RumbleUp this election cycle, American Majority has held candidate trainings in all 50 states and claims to have trained more than 48,000 candidates through its “campaign school.” American Majority trains right-wing political candidates and activists, claiming 42 of their trainees won local and state elections in 2020. This includes judges, school board members, municipal leaders and more. It worked with Tea Party Patriots to train right-wing candidates for county and municipal elections with workshops in seven states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania — between November 2021 and February 2022, too.

Fieler’s Involvement With Other Election and Data Harvesting Groups

While these are Fieler’s most recently known election-related companies, he has been affiliated with other election-focused groups over the years, including groups that have utilized data to help drive Fieler’s anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ agenda before.

As a major donor to CatholicVote, Fieler helped build up that Leonard Leo-tied group’s database.

In 2021, following the Trump-MAGA failed insurrection, Fieler’s own special interest group, which calls itself the “American Principles Project” (APP), launched an election initiative with the national anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA-PLA) to elect anti-choice candidates. They dubbed this the “Election Transparency Initiative.” SBA-PLA alone has pledged to spend almost $100 million this cycle to elect anti-abortion politicians. Until recently, Fieler was listed as a director for SBA-PLA, according to IRS filings.

APP now has a PAC that, in addition to Fieler’s financial backing, is heavily funded by Dick Uihlein. (Uihlein has also bankrolled SBA-PLA’s PAC, “Women Speak Out.”) Fieler has used this PAC to fund his anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ agenda.

The same year that Fieler’s APP launched its Election Transparency Initiative, he also joined the board and became a trustee for a group called Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal Inc. (CLCR). That group claims to “empower the [Catholic] church to carry out its mission.” In addition to being on the board, Fieler and the Knights of Columbus have given CLCR more than half a million dollars in the past two years, according to unredacted Schedule B IRS filings for CLCR.

The same year that Fieler joined the board of CLCR, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, a prominent priest and head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was outed by a Catholic news site that claimed to have mobile app data showing Burrill used Grindr and frequented gay establishments. As reported by The Washington Post, two people with firsthand knowledge said CLCR was involved in outing Burrill, who resigned from that leadership post. CLCR has reportedly spent millions on mobile app tracking data in order to identify priests who used gay dating apps and then gave that information to bishops across the country.

Fieler has also used apps and the data they provide in service of his anti-abortion zealotry in other ways. For example, he gave approximately $1.8 million in funding to Femm, a popular women’s health and fertility app that was used to help sow doubt about birth control among its estimated 400,000 users. This comes as no surprise given that in his speech at Catholic Information Center, a group run by Opus Dei — a controversial subsect of the Catholic Church that is now being investigated by the Argentine government for human trafficking — Fieler highlighted contraception as a motivating factor of what he claimed to be a “crisis of faith” and “crisis of family” in the United States. His remarks reflect a narrow definition of family that discounts anyone who is not heteronormative, married and has biological children.

Additionally, in an interview with the right-wing group Philanthropy Roundtable, Fieler disclosed that he had used the data collected by New York City on vital statistics to “to calculate abortion rates by zip code, so we could see which communities were most affected.” He used this data to help launch an anti-abortion campaign targeting communities and politicians in those zip codes.

Fieler’s investment in big data and election companies to potentially manipulate electoral outcomes and advance his anti-abortion/anti-LGBTQ agenda is alarming. Initiatives to protect abortion health care access are on multiple state ballots this year. Regressive billionaires imposing their agenda on Americans has proven dangerous and deadly, as reports and personal stories continue to detail the extreme consequences of overturning Roe.

Well beyond these already serious threats, unfettered political spending continues to undermine our democracy by allowing the ultrawealthy to drown others out with their voices and manipulate voters, as they have done in this election and will almost certainly continue to do in future elections, unless reined in by much-needed regulations on political spending. Meanwhile, everyday Americans will continue to pay the greatest price — their rights and freedoms.

Note: True North Research’s Director Lisa Graves and Deputy Director Alyssa Bowen contributed to this article.