Another Democrat has been caught engaging in an activity the party says ‘rarely happens.’
A Democratic political organization in Texas has fired one of its organizers after an undercover video showed him describing a paid voter-outreach program as a “roundabout way of paying people for their votes.”
The video, first published by conservative outlet Townhall, identified the speaker as Sky McAdams, an organizing manager for Texas Majority PAC, a group working to increase Democratic turnout in Texas ahead of the November elections.
In the recording, McAdams said participants received $25 to attend a one-hour online class focused on voting and politics.
“We are paying people $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom class,” McAdams said before characterizing the arrangement as a “roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially.”
McAdams also acknowledged in the video that directly paying someone to vote for a particular candidate would be illegal.
“You can’t pay someone to vote for someone,” he said, describing the payment instead as compensation for attending the class.
He referred to the arrangement as “a little gray” and said Republicans would likely object to it.
Texas Majority PAC disputed McAdams’ description of the program and said he was immediately fired.
“Participants in the program are being paid for grassroots organizing work,” a PAC spokesperson told Texas Scorecard. “The way it was described by one rogue employee is factually incorrect, not how we operate, and they were immediately fired.”
The program is operated with Relentless, a political organizing company that specializes in what it calls “paid relational organizing.”
Rather than assigning organizers lists of strangers to contact, relational organizing encourages participants to communicate with friends, relatives and other people they already know.
EXCLUSIVE: TALARICO SUPER PAC CAUGHT PAYING VOTERS!
“We are paying people $25…a roundabout way of paying people for their votes.”
Video obtained by Townhall catches Sky McAdams, organizing manager for Texas Majority PAC, on undercover video explaining the scheme to elect… pic.twitter.com/FKK5nEfb5B
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 16, 2026
Relentless says it recruits low-propensity voters and compensates them for the time they spend reaching, persuading and encouraging people in their personal networks to participate in elections.
The company explicitly states that compensation is for organizing work and is not tied to whether a person ultimately votes.
“Is the compensation tied to votes? No. That’s illegal,” Relentless says on its website.
Campaign-finance reporting cited by multiple outlets shows Texas Majority PAC paid Relentless $500,000 in July for a “relational organizing program.”
Relentless says it used similar programs during the 2024 elections in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The company claims those efforts mobilized more than 30,000 low-propensity voters to contact more than 1.2 million friends and family members and produced a net gain of 47,533 Democratic votes.
The Texas program has drawn heightened attention because of the competitive U.S. Senate race involving Democratic nominee James Talarico and state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).
Texas Majority PAC has supported Democratic turnout efforts, but the publicly available video does not establish that Talarico personally directed the program or that his campaign directly paid anyone to cast a ballot.
The controversy centers on the distinction between legally paying political organizers for campaign work and illegally providing money or something of value in exchange for voting.
Federal law prohibits paying or offering to pay someone to register to vote or to vote in a federal election. Political campaigns and organizations, however, routinely pay employees and contractors to conduct voter outreach, canvassing, and organizing.
Texas Majority PAC maintains that its program falls into the latter category and that McAdams inaccurately described how it operates. Relentless similarly says participants are compensated for their time and organizing work rather than for casting ballots.
The undercover footage nevertheless has brought new scrutiny to paid relational-organizing programs and how political groups structure compensation while trying to reach voters who rarely participate in elections.
Meanwhile, Republican outside groups are pouring tens of millions of dollars into Texas to support Paxton after months in which Talarico held a major financial and advertising advantage.
The sudden influx marks a dramatic change in a race where national Republican organizations initially stayed largely on the sidelines despite increasing attention to the traditionally Republican state.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
