An undercover video released by Townhall Investigations shows Sky McAdams, organizing manager for the Texas Majority PAC, describing a program that pays people $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom class about voting — a program McAdams himself calls “a roundabout way of paying people for their votes.”
The Texas Majority PAC supports Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. In the video, McAdams explains the structure of the program, which he refers to as a “paid relational program” operated through a vendor called Relentless using software called Rally.
“We are, um, paying people $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom class, to learn, like, why voting is important, and why the Republicans are causing all these bad things. Um, so, it’s like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes. Actually, which is interesting.”
McAdams goes on to describe the legal reasoning behind the structure:
“It’s called the paid relational program. I think Rally Texas is the official name. You can’t pay someone to vote for someone, and you can’t be like, here’s $25, go vote for me, you can say, um, attend a one-hour class, and you can receive $25 and then the class just talks about like, the importance of it.”
When the person conducting the undercover interview noted it was “a creative way” to get help, McAdams responded:
“Yeah, you know, if I was, like, if I was a Republican, I would be pissed, I would be like, that’s shady as f**k.”
Money and numbers
According to a campaign finance report Texas Majority PAC filed in July, the group paid Relentless $500,000 for a “relational organizing program,” which amounted to roughly 20 percent of all its expenditures reported up to that point. At $25 per person, that sum could cover as many as 20,000 payments.
Townhall’s reporting also notes that Relentless has claimed it ran similar programs in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania during the 2024 election cycle, and says those efforts produced 47,533 Democratic votes.
What happens next
Whether the program is legal has not been determined. Talarico is running against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race, and the video is likely to become a point of attack for Paxton’s campaign heading into November.
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