I am with you on this one. The definition of a having a non-political mission must mean all but mentioning a candidate's name.
You can transparently see that some 501(c)(3)s are mostly political groups. As this becomes more common I expect politicians will use them to bypass campaign finance election laws.
They will create charities that 'educate' voters about how bad their opponent is without naming that opponent.
Yeah, that's exactly much what I was thinking, that when you take a look at their activities, it's clear that the definition of what's considered political here is fairly narrow.
Re: your hypothesis, after learning about 501c4s from Jeff in this thread and reading about for 10 seconds on Wikipedia, it seems that those actually serve that purpose quite well ("super PACs" are apparently 501c4), so I don't think the 501c3s are highly likely to get used in that way.
Maybe workplaces (and the public in general) should adopt the same rules as to what constitutes political discourse and then we'd stop having threads around "everything is political" statements...
Those organizations (if they are 501(c)(3)) are permitted to discuss politics within the narrow scope of the organization's mission. As I said, the laws are nuanced.
