With little fanfare or attention, a conservative-leaning Nevada dark money group is pushing to change the state’s voter registration balance ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

Secure Nevada’s Future, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, has quietly been engaging in voter registration, hiring staff and at times getting involved in hot-button local and state issues since it was founded last year. Such “social welfare” groups aren’t required to disclose their donors but have limits on the amount of direct political activity they can engage in.

The Nevada-focused group is led by Chris Young, a former national field director for the Republican National Committee who became the group’s executive director last year. He declined to say how many staff the group has, but it has placed multiple online job postings for field representatives and community organizers in the past months.

Although the group received some coverage for its efforts to oppose a 2017 bill that would have required the state to raise its renewable energy production standards, it has since expanded its efforts to launch a website, run ads on Google for voter registration purposes and began hiring staff to engage in a statewide voter registration campaign.

Young said that many similar 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups were focused on targeting unregistered voters with a likely more left-leaning point of view, such as single women, and he said his group believed there was ample opportunity to register voters who might be more conservative-leaning.

“Even after a decade of aggressive voter registration efforts by both liberal & conservative organizations, Nevada still lags behind national averages when it comes to overall voter registration & participation,” he said in an email. “Our community organizers are engaging residents across the state to improve conservative voter registration and ensure a more equal representation.”

As of June 2018, the state had more than 1.4 million registered voters, but with an eligible voting population likely higher than 2.2 million. Democrats currently hold a 65,694 advantage over Republicans in the number of registered voters statewide.

The group’s website includes a video rife with headlines referencing the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and to sign a petition “in support of President Trump’s conservative agenda.”

The rest of the website contains various vague conservative policies, including to “End ObamaCare,” “Reform the Tax Code” and “Create Quality Jobs.”

Outside of voter registration, its most public effort to-date has been as part of the opposition to a proposed indoor smoking ban in Mesquite. The group set up a “Decline to Sign” webpage aimed at getting residents to oppose the proposed ballot measure and ran ads on Facebook promoting the effort.

Funding for the nonprofit remains opaque — Young declined to name any contributors, but said donations, largely corporate, ranged from the hundreds of dollars to the seven-figure range.

Some of the group’s funding has been revealed from other sources — Republican Sen. Dean Heller’s leadership PAC, HellerHighwater, reported giving the group $25,000 in April. It also received nearly $9,000 from a PAC formed to oppose a 2016 ballot question legalizing recreational use and sale of marijuana. The PAC, “Protecting Nevada’s Children,” was almost entirely funded by Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson, who gave the group more than $3.7 million.

Young also said the group has an affiliated super PAC, called “Our Founding Principles,” which can be used as a supplementary vehicle for any direct political purpose that the nonprofit would be barred from engaging in under IRS rules. The PAC’s lone donor is Wynn Resorts, which gave it $125,000 in January, and it reported spending around $96,000 on polling and data expenses that same month.

Disclosure: Wynn Resorts has donated to The Nevada Independent. You can see a full list of donors here.