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An influential left-of-center donor’s charity has launched an initiative compelling other philanthropies to pour money into voter-mobilization efforts for this fall’s elections.
Democracy Fund, founded and funded by liberal philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, has rallied 174 organizations and individuals pledging to expedite disbursement of grants related to get-out-the-vote operations and other efforts.
The pledge called on signatories either to make the bulk of their election-related donations by the end of April, to “move up” disbursements scheduled for later in the year, or to streamline grant approval processes.
Alex Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the liberal dark money giant Arabella Advisors, Tides, and Democrat megadonor Susan Pritzker are among the major left-of-center philanthropic players to sign the pledge.
Omidyar, who founded eBay and has become a prolific investor, is worth over $10.9 billion, according to Bloomberg. Omidyar gave roughly $1.2 billion through various charitable arms to an array of primarily left-of-center causes between 2004 and 2020, according to a Capital Research Center report.
In 2020, Omidyar gave the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a sprawling Democrat-aligned political outfit, $45 million to support its Civic Action Fund project, a now-defunct voter-turnout initiative that focused on “empower[ing] those typically underrepresented in our democratic process” by ensuring they voted in 2020. The group collaborated with liberal politicians and activists to organize local get-out-the-vote efforts targeting low-propensity voters, according to Influence Watch.
In explaining his donation to Civic Action Fund, Omidyar cited the importance of “supporting local voter outreach and engagement of young people and people of color.” Young people and minority voters favor the Democratic Party by considerable margins, with voters 18 to 29 and all nonwhite constituencies favoring President Joe Biden by double digits in 2020, according to a CNN exit poll.
Civic Action Fund was active in 14 states, including the key states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, during the 2020 election season, according to its website. The group had staffers with ties to notable Democrats such as former President Barack Obama and former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, according to Influence Watch.
Many of the signatories of Democracy Fund’s “All by April” pledge have clear ideological slants.
Alex Soros, son of influential liberal financier George Soros, has described himself as “more political” than his father.
Arabella manages a network of nonprofits that pours tens of millions into liberal causes every year.
Tides comprises a variety of organizational arms, including one of the largest pass-through organizations for liberal philanthropists. And Pritzker has donated millions to Democratic and otherwise left-of-center political committees.
Arabella’s nonprofit network and the Soros family’s philanthropic ventures have dropped large sums on election spending.
Arabella’s nonprofits spent more than $62 million on voter registration and mobilization efforts during 2022, a midterm election year.
Much of the Arabella network’s spending also focused on getting Democrat-friendly demographics to the polls. New Venture Fund, one of Arabella’s arms, gave millions to the Voter Registration Project, a group “commissioned” by veteran Democratic operative John Podesta that, according to Influence Watch, “targets African-American, Latino, Native American, low-income, and other voter groups likely to lean left-of-center.”
The Soros philanthropic empire also gave millions to the Voter Registration Project between 2016 and 2022. The project’s efforts in 2020 netted Biden between 1 million and 2.7 million votes, according to a Capital Research Center report.
Open Society Policy Center, part of the broader Soros network, gave $1.4 million to the Voto Latino Action Fund in 2022. The organization focuses on registering Latino voters and loosening voting laws, according to its website.
High voter turnout among Latinos was among the reasons Democrats outperformed expectations during the 2022 midterm elections, according to Politico.
“Voter registration nonprofits are nothing more than a cost-effective way to achieve partisan electioneering results for Democrats while keeping the donors totally anonymous and giving them a tax write-off for their troubles,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Democracy Fund, Arabella, Tides, and Open Society Foundations did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post This Liberal Donor Pushes Left-Leaning Groups to Fund Efforts to Turn Out Voters appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Years before the prosecution called the former porn star to testify Tuesday in Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial in Manhattan, Democrats viewed Stormy Daniels as an avenue for impeaching Trump when he was president.
My 2020 book “Abuse of Power” details the origins of Left’s lawfare against Trump, which began immediately after his 2016 election to the presidency.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, led the first criminal case against Trump, followed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia and two federal prosecutions by special counsel Jack Smith.
Indicted in four separate criminal cases for a total of 91 counts, Trump got some good news Tuesday when a federal judge in Florida postponed indefinitely his trial in the classified documents case, one of Smith’s.
Below is an adapted excerpt from “Abuse of Power”:
It’s funny how “legal experts” who would pop up working for Democrats were talking and writing about Trump’s demise for other reasons months earlier.
Two lawyers whom the House Judiciary Committee hired for impeachment, Norman Eisen and Barry Berke, wrote a New York Times opinion piece along with Noah Bookbinder, also a lawyer, with the headline: “Is This the Beginning of the End for Trump?”
The lawyers suggested Trump could be taken down for a possible campaign finance violation tied to alleged flings with former porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Or, as the lawyers characterized it in their Times piece, federal prosecutors determined that “Mr. Trump, the Trump Organization, and the campaign were all directly involved in an illegal scheme to silence two women who claimed they had affairs with Mr. Trump.”
The lawyers’ op-ed in the Times further says Trump “could be named as an unindicted co-conspirator” or “charged if he leaves office before the statute of limitations runs out (most likely in 2022).”
Still, regarding the hush money [for Daniels and McDougal], even House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi had said after the news of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s planned guilty plea that it wasn’t grounds for impeachment, even as some of her members were pushing for that.
“Impeachment has to spring from something else. If and when the information emerges about that, we’ll see,” Pelosi said in 2018. “It’s not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward.”
But impeachment was a priority for members of the House Democratic Caucus, which she led.
In December 2018, when Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation for paying hush money to Daniels, the plea agreement referred to “Individual 1” as directing him to do so. It was clear that this individual was Trump.
Cohen also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other financial crimes and was sentenced to three years in prison. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In late 2019, with Democrats in control of the House, many of the hardliners in Pelosi’s caucus were pushing the speaker to go beyond Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as grounds for impeachment.
Democrats in the House Progressive Caucus wanted to include the ambiguous obstruction arguments from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the discredited Trump-Russia claims, the campaign finance allegation in the Stormy Daniels case, the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and potentially other matters. By this point, the House had launched 12 separate investigations into Trump.
But after initial resistance, Pelosi had already caved once to the members demanding Trump’s impeachment on the Ukrainian phone call. The other matters would only prolong the process.
Trump admitted he and Zelenskyy talked about Joe Biden. Now, Democrats just had to turn it into an impeachable case.
Nevertheless, keeping swing district House Democrats in the loop was one reason why, early in the process, leadership had considered progressives’ demands for a “kitchen sink” impeachment involving Russia, Stormy Daniels, emoluments, and anything else they could think of.
This would allow moderate Democrats to go home and say they had voted against some articles of impeachment while still voting to oust Trump in order to appease the base and avoid a potential primary challenger from the left. In the age of MAGA and #Resistance voters, primary challenges are a forefront concern for incumbents on both sides.
During the impeachment hearing, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee called former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to testify.
As with other witnesses, Yovanovitch’s legal counsel was steeped in Democratic politics. Lawrence S. Robbins represented both Republican and Democrat clients.
But in a December 2018 op-ed for Politico, Robbins called for either impeaching or prosecuting Trump for campaign finance violation regarding the Daniels hush money.
Robbins wrote: “The Department of Justice’s description of the role of Individual 1—the president himself—leaves no doubt that career Justice Department prosecutors regard Trump as a full blown co-conspirator. And most serious-minded criminal lawyers agree that, if these allegations are true, the president, but for his day job, would have been sitting in the dock with his long-time fixer.”
Robbins further wrote that Trump would use his office as president to shield himself from prosecution, so “Congress would surely have no choice but to hold him accountable in the way prescribed by the Constitution.”
That way, of course, was impeachment.
The post How the Left Tried to Use Stormy Daniels to Impeach Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Wisconsin is one of the most fiercely contested battleground states in this election cycle, but it lacks federal transparency requirements for voter registration imposed on most states, according to a lawsuit by an election watchdog.
Minnesota, generally a solidly blue state although it saw a razor-thin margin in the results of the 2016 presidential race, also doesn’t make its voter rolls available to the public, the lawsuit contends.
Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election integrity advocacy organization, announced the litigation last week, alleging that the exemption of six states from a provision in the National Voter Registration Act violates the principle of equal state sovereignty.
“No state should be exempt from transparency,” J. Christian Adams, president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, said in a written statement. “All states should be treated equally under the law and no exemption should allow certain election officials to hide documents relating to voter list maintenance activities.”
In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “Motor Voter Law,” which allows Americans to register to vote when they get a driver’s license.
The federal law also requires states to update voter registration lists to ensure that dead people or those who have left a jurisdiction no longer are listed.
For accountability, the law says that states must “make available for public inspection and, where available photocopying at a reasonable cost, all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters.”
However, Congress carved out an exception to the transparency requirement for seven states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Idaho, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine, and Wyoming.
The reason was that the seven states offered same-day voter registration or, in the case of North Dakota, didn’t require voter registration.
After briefly stopping same-day voter registration, Maine lost its exemption from the disclosure provision of the federal law.
The new complaints, filed in two federal courts, contend that the exemptions from U.S. law violate the principle of equal state sovereignty by treating the remaining states differently.
Public Interest Legal Foundation is suing Minnesota and Wisconsin first.
“This lawsuit is the first step to bringing the National Voter Registration Act’s transparency requirements to all 50 states,” Adams said.
The Wisconsin lawsuit names Wisconsin Election Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe as the defendant. The Minnesota litigation names Secretary of State Steve Simon as the defendant.
A Wisconsin Election Commission spokesperson declined comment for this report, but pointed to the applicable portion of state law, which says the commission and local governments can decide the cost of obtaining voter information.
“The commission shall establish by rule the fee for obtaining a copy of the official registration list, or a portion of the list. … The amount of the fee shall be set, after consultation with county and municipal election officials,” a portion of the law says.
The Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.
The litigation cites the Supreme Court case of Shelby County v. Holder, in which the high court reaffirmed that all states enjoy equal sovereignty and determined that if Congress treats states differently, it must be “sufficiently related to the problem [the statute] targets” and must “make sense in light of current conditions.”
Public Interest Legal Foundation’s complaints argue that Minnesota and Wisconsin grant and remove voting rights through voter registration and maintenance of that voter list. So, they argue, Congress’ goal of making the process transparent should apply to both states.
Thirteen of the 20 states that offer same-day voter registration are still subject to the federal transparency requirements, the litigation notes.
The post These States Withhold Voter Registration From Public That Most States Are Federally Mandated to Disclose appeared first on The Daily Signal.
As the veepstakes speculation grows, Donald Trump—Republicans’ presumptive nominee for president for the third straight time—has had plenty to say about the group of contenders for the second spot on the ticket.
Axios reported over the weekend on an audio recording obtained from a gathering at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in which the former president comments on numerous contenders for his choice to be vice president.
Those possible Trump choices include three fellow Floridians who are in Congress: Sen. Marco Rubio and Reps. Byron Donalds and Michael Waltz. Trump also talked about two former 2024 primary opponents, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
The names of three more senators also were in the mix: Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Mike Lee of Utah, and JD Vance of Ohio. And Trump commented on the often-mentioned chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, Elise Stefanik of New York.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican who made the news last week for telling a story in her new memoir about shooting and killing a 14-month-old farm dog, was among those that Trump commented on. (For her part, Noem said the dog posed a danger to her family and other animals after killing chickens.)
“Somebody that I love,” Trump says of Noem in the audio recording released by Axios. “She’s been with me, a supporter of mine, and I’ve been a supporter of hers for a long time.”
Axios reported that Trump’s “most prominent surrogates” went to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday to “audition for vice president.” At a private luncheon, Trump commented on the potential running mates, the outlet said.
In the recording,Trump doesn’t seem to resent by name any former opponents in the 2024 Republican primaries who reportedly have been in the running for his nod to be vice president. (However, he doesn’t mention Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, who didn’t drop out until March 6.)
As for North Dakota’s Burgum, governor of a state next door to Noem’s, Trump says: “I didn’t know this: He was a supporter of my two campaigns. He’s a very rich man.”
On Scott, the South Carolina senator, Trump says: “As a candidate, he did a good job, but as a surrogate, he’s unbelievable.”
In a press release Monday, BetOnline announced that it was updating its betting odds after the Mar-a-Lago meeting, giving Scott and Burgum the best odds at 4-1. Vance, once seen as a longshot, rose to 5-1. Rubio is 8-1.
Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a Democrat in Congress who became an independent after leaving office, is at 9-1. Gabbard’s name, however, doesn’t come up in the Trump audio leaked to Axios.
Interestingly, none of the possible contenders mentioned by Trump were from battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.
Trump notes that Vance wasn’t always on board, according to the audio, but calls the junior senator from Ohio “great,” Axios reported.
“He wasn’t a supporter of mine at the very beginning [and] was saying things like ‘the guy’s a total disaster’… Anyways, I got to know him a little bit,” Trump says of Vance. “As a non-politician, he’s become one of the great senators.”
In the 2016 Republican primary cycle, Trump mocked Florida’s Rubio as “Little Marco.” Rubio at one point referred to Trump’s small hands.
In the audio, Trump only says of Rubio: “His name is coming up a lot for vice president.”
Significant news coverage has shown Trump gaining support among black men. Beyond Scott of South Carolina, Trump mentions two other possible black running mates in the audio recording.
Of Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas, Trump says: “Another friend of mine … makes the best commercials … beautiful family.”
Of a potential choice that would create a team of Donalds, Trump says of Donalds, the Florida congressman: “Somebody who’s created something very special politically. … I like diversity. Diversité, as you would say. I like diversité. [Donors] worth millions of dollars … all want a piece of Byron.”
There has also been plenty of speculation about Trump picking a woman to close the gender gap.
Regarding Blackburn of Tennessee, Trump says “she was like the Energizer Bunny” in 2018, when she successfully campaigned to leave the House for the Senate. “She would go from stop to stop to stop.”
Of Stefanik, Trump says in the audio: “A very smart person. She was in upstate New York when I met her. … little did we realize she would be such a big factor.”
Trump is a former resident of New York City, where he built much of his real estate empire. He is now a resident of Florida.
There is some debate about whether the 12th Amendment allows a president and vice president to be from the same state, and that debate could come into play if Trump wanted to select Stefanik, Rubio, Donalds, or Waltz.
Of Waltz, Trump says in the recording: “A man that knows more about the military. When I want to know about the military, I call him.”
Lee is a one-time critic of Trump who supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the 2016 presidential primaries for the GOP nomination, when Lee also sported more hair.
In the audio, Lee gains some praise from the former president, who says of him: “I love your haircut” before adding: “And he’s a good man too.”
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
The post Do Trump’s Words on These Contenders Hint at His VP Pick? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A White House official told the Agriculture Department to include left-leaning groups, including the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the League of United Latin American Citizens, among “stakeholders” to help implement President Joe Biden’s executive order aimed at turning out the vote.
At the same time, records obtained by The Daily Signal show that USDA brass had extensive discussions with the Raben Group, a Democrat-aligned lobbying group managed by former officials of the Clinton and Obama administration.
The Raben Group represented the left-wing advocacy group Demos, which has pushed the so-called Green New Deal and labor unions’ policy goals. As The Daily Signal previously reported, Demos worked with the USDA on “best practices” to boost voting.
The United Food and Commercial Workers, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the Raben Group were not on a previously reported list of more than four dozen left-leaning organizations that participated in a “listening session” with White House officials on July 12, 2021, under six months after Biden became president.
Two days before that “listening session” via Zoom between White House officials and the left-wing groups, Raben Group associate Dylan Tureff wrote on behalf of Demos to DeWayne Goldman, USDA’s senior adviser for racial equality to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Tureff’s goal: to set up a meeting with Goldman to “discuss how your office can play an essential role in protecting and expanding democracy.”
Biden signed the executive order in March 2021, directing federal agencies to partner with private organizations to increase voter registration and participation in elections.
Since that time, records emerged through Freedom of Information Act requests from multiple agencies showing that the Biden administration’s bureaucracy has enlisted an army of left-leaning nonprofits to mobilize voters.
Critics of Biden’s order have called it “BidenBucks.”
They also say Biden’s Executive Order 14019 weaponized taxpayer-funded agencies to advance his reelection effort—and those of Democrats.
Demos long has been associated with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
“Demos and its organizational partners have identified the below-stated agency systems and programs as areas of great opportunity for the implementation of this vital executive order,” Tureff told USDA’s Goldman in his July 2021 message.
Writing on behalf of Demos, Tureff said get-out-the-vote efforts for Agriculture Department offices could include online portals; “direct interaction programs”; grant programs “for both state and private actors” grants for governments and authorities; and programs focused on tribal services and support.
Goldman wrote to colleagues July 27: “Do we have any activities around this EO [executive order] on Voting Access? I have a meeting request from Demos to engage with USDA, but could use some help understanding the prioritization. Do you have any knowledge of this group?”
In response, Lynn Overmann, USDA senior adviser for data and technology, seemed to raise some concerns in the email thread under the subject line “Demos Meeting Request on Voting Rights EO.”
Overmann wrote to Goldman and others: “Has USDA supported voting rights efforts in the past? Given our footprint in communities, I could imagine offering voter registration information at in-person locations or sharing information broadly across our communications channels, but think there would be privacy/consent issues around sharing data.”
The Biden executive order directed all federal agencies to develop a strategic plan for increasing voting by September 2021.
The Agriculture Department’s first interim response to a records request by The Daily Signal didn’t include the department’s strategic plan, but did include emails discussing what its key priorities likely would be.
Kumar Chandran, acting undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services, sent an email to colleagues on May 29, 2021, that said an attached draft strategic plan contained the “top 5 suggestions.”
The email released to The Daily Signal, in which several redactions were made, summarizes the top five recommendations as including voter registration at “Voter Registration & Information at Food and Nutrition Service Program Sites Though WIC and SNAP sites.”
WIC is an Agriculture Department food program for “women, infants and children.” SNAP, better known to Americans as food stamps, is an acronym for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Critics of Biden’s executive order allege that government agencies could give a false impression to the public that benefits of social programs are tied to voting.
The USDA also listed “Rural Development” as the second of the top five suggestions. Details were redacted.
Third on the list was “voter registration and information through production and conservation,” but again details were missing.
Fourth was ensuring that the Agriculture Department’s 100,000 employees were registered to vote and had leave time to vote.
The fifth and last suggestion for implementing Biden’s order pertained to social media and communication about voter information using Twitter and other such platforms.
An email dated April 7, 2021, from Paul Zeiss with the White House scheduling office sent a list of “stakeholders” on voting issues to Akhil Rakam, then a USDA official.
The mail included the mentions of the United Food and Commercial Workers, or UFCW, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC.
UFCW, the sixth-largest labor union in the United States, represents workers in the food production, retail, and chemical industries.
LULAC, an advocate for Hispanic Americans, sued Texas in 2006 over the state’s redistricting, alleging that the new election districts violated the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld the districting plan, but found some districts needed to be revised.
In 2021, the League of United Latin American Citizens served subpoenas on several Republican state legislators in Texas in connection with a lawsuit over the state’s election reforms.
Other “stakeholders” the White House identified for USDA are more directly related to agriculture and not overtly political.
These groups include the Intertribal Agriculture Council, the National Black Farmers Association, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, the National Association of Counties, the Rebuild Rural Coalition, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the American Public Human Services Association, and Rural Organizing.
A USDA spokesperson didn’t respond to The Daily Signa’s request for comment on this report.
Demos, the Raben Group, UFCW, and LULAC also didn’t respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Harvesting Voters? These Left-Wing Groups Are Teaming With USDA appeared first on The Daily Signal.
There are many reasons why legal experts are questioning the legitimacy of the criminal prosecution of former President Donald Trump. But the major reason is that the main claim in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case—that Trump’s $130,000 settlement payment of a potential claim by Stormy Daniels was a campaign-related expense—is totally bogus.
Here’s a quick tutorial on why Bragg doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on—call it “Federal Campaign Finance Law for Dummies 101”—an apropos title, given what’s going on.
Daniels claims that she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, fully 10 years before the 2016 presidential election, which Trump denies. For the payment, Daniels agreed to sign a nondisclosure agreement, which is a standard provision in many settlement agreements of personal injury cases and other claims.
Bragg contends that Trump falsified business records, a misdemeanor, when this payment was listed as legal expenses instead of a campaign expense.
Supposedly, according to Bragg, that converted the misdemeanors into felonies because Trump was concealing another crime. That other crime, according to prosecutors, is a violation of Section 17-152 of New York law, which makes it a misdemeanor to “promote … the election of any person to public office by unlawful means.”
Besides the fact that it’s very strange to allege that the commission of a misdemeanor for the purpose of covering up the commission of another misdemeanor is enough to allege a felony, the only plausible theory that Bragg is pushing for the alleged “unlawful means” was a violation of federal law by concealing a campaign-related payment.
With me so far?
But Trump was running for president. The raising and spending of money for campaigns for president and Congress is governed by federal law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, not state law. Any wrongdoing related to federal campaign financing falls under the enforcement authority of federal officials, not a local prosecutor like Bragg.
In fact, the Federal Election Commission, on which I served as a commissioner, has civil enforcement authority and the U.S. Department of Justice has criminal enforcement authority over violations of this law.
For the nuisance-value settlement payment to Daniels to fit within Bragg’s rickety legal structure, it would have to be a crime under federal law. In other words, it would have to be considered a campaign-related expense that was falsely reported under the Federal Election Campaign Act.
If you want an example of such a violation, just look at the $113,000 civil penalty the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay in 2022. They listed the payments for the opposition research that formed the basis for the infamous Steele dossier, which fabricated the entire Trump-Russia collusion hoax, as legal expenses instead of opposition research.
But opposition research on the opposing candidate is obviously a campaign-related expense under applicable federal law, so the FEC had authority to investigate and enforce the law against this deception.
That’s not the case with the Daniels’ payment. For starters, the incident in question that led to the payment is alleged to have happened 10 years before the 2016 campaign. More importantly, the payment fails the test the FEC applies to determine whether an expense is campaign-related.
Under federal law and corresponding regulations, the FEC applies the “irrespective test” to “differentiate legitimate campaign and officeholder expenses from personal expenses.” As the FEC explains on its website, under the irrespective test, “personal use is any use of funds … to fulfill a commitment, obligation, or expense of any person that would exist, irrespective of the candidates’ campaign.”
In other words, if the expense would exist even if the individual were not a candidate, then it’s personal and not a campaign expense.
The payment to Daniels clearly fails that test. Trump was a celebrity long before he ran for office, and celebrities get these kinds of nuisance claims all the time. In fact, the prosecution’s first witness in the New York case, David Pecker, said he had helped settle similar claims to avoid legal costs and embarrassment by suppressing stories for numerous other celebrities, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods.
The easiest way to understand this test is to take the example of a personal injury claim.
Candidate A has a car accident several years before he runs for Congress that injures another driver. After the campaign has started, the candidate decides to settle the personal injury claim made by the other driver by paying that driver $130,000 in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement.
Settling and paying the claim may help the candidate in his campaign by avoiding personal embarrassment. But that doesn’t make it a campaign expense. It’s a claim that would exist even if the candidate were not running for office and is thus considered a personal expense under federal law.
Daniels’ claim is also a personal claim that existed long before Trump ran for the presidency and, given his celebrity status, would have continued to exist even if he never ran for president.
That’s no doubt why neither the FEC nor the Justice Department ever filed an enforcement action against the Trump campaign or Trump personally over the payment; specifically, because it was not a campaign-related expense.
You know what would have led to enforcement actions? If Trump had actually claimed this was a campaign-related expense and had used campaign funds to make the payment, I have no doubt he would have been prosecuted by the feds for the illegal use of campaign funds to pay a personal expense.
That’s what former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., went to prison for after he pleaded guilty in 2013 to spending $750,000 on personal expenses.
Keep in mind that Bragg’s entire manufactured case of 34 counts of falsifying business records depends entirely on the legitimacy of his contention that the settlement payment should have been listed as a campaign-related expense.
It shouldn’t because it wasn’t.
And all of the other testimony from the prosecution’s witnesses about this payment and other settlement payments that are obviously intended to blacken the character of the former president and prejudice the jury doesn’t change the fact that none of these payments were campaign-related expenses. Period. End of story—or at least it should be.
The post Trump’s NY Prosecution Is a Bogus Case by a Bogus Prosecutor appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The left-wing Arabella Advisors network has raked in more money than either of the two major political parties and affects almost every element of public policy and elections, argues Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a Washington-based investigative think tank.
Walter’s new book “Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America” shows that in the 2020 election cycle, Arabella Advisors’ nonprofits took in $2.4 billion. That’s $1 billion more than the combined fundraising of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.
That amount rose to $3 billion in the 2022 election cycle, Walter says. Moreover, he adds, nothing on the Right comes close to competing.
“Arabella does not discriminate. It is working on arcane regulatory issues … but it also is running Facebook ads, attacking certain congressional candidates and boosting others. It plays in environmental issues. It plays in abortion issues. It plays in election policy,” Walter says on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Walter is set to testify Tuesday before the House Natural Resources Committee about what he calls “left-wing dark money [used] to influence environmental policy.”
“Arabella also continues to be very active in the environmental policy area in all sorts of ways,” he adds.
Arabella-backed organizations have been involved in battles over abortion and Supreme Court nominations and advocated that biological males compete in women’s sports.
Walter’s book details how two Arabella-aligned groups, the Center for Secure and Modern Elections and the Institute for Responsive Government, are involved in shaping election policy at the local level.
He notes that an Arabella-sponsored group funded by billionaire financier George Soros helped formulate the Biden administration’s recent change in Title IX policy to make it easier for biological males to compete in girls’ scholastic sports.
“That was plotted through a highly secretive group in the Arabella network, funded entirely with Soros money,” Walter said. “Governing for Impact, which they started in 2019, two years before the Biden administration was even sworn in. And they worked with Harvard Law School folks to do very sophisticated legal strategy memos of how to overturn dozens of regulations in the federal government, the most famous being Title IX.”
What’s differentiates Arabella from other major donors on the Left is the level of secrecy, Walter says. The network is more secretive than most nonprofits financed by Soros and his family, he says.
“We have tracked the institutional donors, and we can tell you that for almost all of the Arabella nonprofits, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which provides donor-advised funds to wealthy people, is the largest,” Walter said. He added, “Other really big donors to the Arabella network have [included Microsoft co-founder] Bill Gates. He is one of the largest, mostly through his foundation. [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg has given tens of millions, mostly for criminal justice reform—quote unquote—[that results in] letting criminals back on the streets.”
A spokesperson for Arabella Advisors didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
Listen to Walter outline Arabella’s reach in a discussion of his book in the podcast below:
The post Arabella Network’s Leftist ‘Dark Money’ Influence Expanding, Author Reveals appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The only two states that apportion Electoral College votes in presidential races by congressional district are poised to scrap what makes them unique.
In these systems, presidential candidates get one electoral vote for each congressional district they win in the state. Unlike in other states, the Democratic, Republican, and other party candidates could end up splitting a state’s electoral votes among them.
The usually blue Maine and generally red Nebraska each had one battleground congressional district that would sometimes draw presidential candidates.
But the Maine Legislature moved to give its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote—regardless of who carries the state.
Nebraska lawmakers are considering becoming like 48 other states with winner-take-all elections, meaning the candidate who captures the majority of the state’s popular vote takes all of the state’s electoral votes. Nebraska’s change—if adopted—would affect the 2024 presidential election, while the Maine change likely wouldn’t.
Last week, Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills announced she would let a bill making Maine the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact become law without her signature after it narrowly passed the state Legislature.
Maine Joins National Popular Vote Compact https://t.co/e6tvfYRH6H via @democracynow
— NationalPopularVote (@NatlPopularVote) April 21, 2024
Under the multistate compact, Maine agrees to give its four electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote. The states that make up the compact thus far represent a combined 209 electoral votes. Those votes will only activate when the compact reaches the required 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president.
Meanwhile, Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen is considering calling a special session of the state Legislature, which already adjourned on April 18, to adopt a winner-take-all system for the state’s five electoral votes.
Pillen said he would only call a special session “when there is sufficient support in the Legislature to pass it.”
Prominent conservative commentators such as Charlie Kirk and Mark Levin have supported the change in Nebraska.
JUST IN—The Great One, Mark Levin, gets behind turning Nebraska into a winner-take-all electoral college state.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 9, 2024
The coalition is growing. Listen to @marklevinshow break down why this is critical ahead of November? pic.twitter.com/97PbsKAp3P
Maine enacted its rule to divide its electoral votes by congressional district ahead of the 1972 election. It took another 20 years for Nebraska to follow suit, which it did ahead of the 1992 election.
However, split votes have been rare.
The first time Nebraska had a split came when Democrat Barack Obama won the swing Nebraska district in the Omaha area in the 2008 election, the first time since 1964 that a Democrat won an electoral vote in the state.
In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes most of the state outside of Portland or Augusta, netting one electoral vote from the state. He was the first Republican since 1988 to win a Maine electoral vote.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden captured Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District and its electoral vote.
The post These 2 States Are Poised to Scrap Fractured Electoral College System—in Different Ways appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Standing next to former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced legislation to require proof of citizenship to vote.
Non-U.S. citizens are already banned from voting in federal elections now. However, the National Voter Registration Act—better known as the Motor Voter Law—doesn’t allow states to check because the federal forms already contain a check box.
Johnson said that polling showed 78% of Americans supported requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote. He suggested he would put the bill straight to the full House for a vote, bypassing the committee process.
“When we put this bill on the floor, you’re going to see a recorded vote by Republicans and Democrats. You’ll see that Republicans stand for election integrity,” Johnson said. “We’ll be able to ask this very important question of the Democrats. They are going to have to go on record. Do you believe that Americans and Americans alone should be the ones who vote in American elections? We are about to find out.”
Since Biden took office, more than 7.2 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border.
During his opening remarks, Trump addressed both issues.
“We have a border that’s open. We have a lot of problems in our country. We have an election problem and that’s really what we’re here to talk about today,” Trump said. “I would like to demand that our border be closed because we have millions of people coming into our country, millions and millions of people at levels that nobody is reporting, nobody is going to talk about.”
Johnson said the legislation will require states to remove noncitizens from their existing voter rolls, with help by allowing states access to databases from the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.
My book “The Myth of Voter Suppression” details how several watchdog groups found voter registration rolls filled with ineligible foreign citizens, dead people, and people who have long moved out of a state despite the National Voter Registration requirement to update voting lists.
Johnson referred to the border crisis resulting from dozens of executive actions from President Joe Biden. He says he constantly gets questions about why it’s happening.
“Why would they do this? It’s chaos. Why the violence?” Johnson said, before answering his own question. “Because they want to turn these people into voters. Right now the administration is encouraging illegals to go to their local welfare office to sign up for benefits. Guess what? When you go to a welfare office, they also ask you if you would like to register to vote. Many people, we think, are going to do that.”
Weeks after coming into office in 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing every federal agency, including social service offices, to boost voter registration.
Earlier this week, the House advanced legislation that would require a citizenship question on the census form and that officials no longer count noncitizens of jurisdictions when drawing up congressional maps.
The post Speaker Johnson to Put Democrats on Record With Vote on Proof of Citizenship to Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Progressives are using legal loopholes and the power of the federal government to maximize Democrat votes in the 2024 election at taxpayers’ expense, RealClearInvestigations has found.
The methods include voter registration and mobilization campaigns by ostensibly nonpartisan charities that target Democrats using demographic data as proxies, and the Biden administration’s unprecedented demand that every federal agency “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”
A dizzying array of overwhelmingly “democracy-focused” entities with ties to the Democratic Party operating as charities and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from major liberal “dark money” vehicles are engaged in a sprawling campaign to register the voters, deliver them the ballots, and figuratively and sometimes literally harvest the votes necessary to defeat Donald Trump.
These efforts, now buttressed by the federal government, amplify and extend what Time magazine described as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people ranging across industries and ideologies,” who had worked behind the scenes in 2020 “to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” to defeat Trump and other Republicans. The “shadow campaigners,” Time declared, “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
Heading into 2024, “there is not a ‘shadow’ campaign,” said Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “There is an overt assault on President Trump and those who wish to vote for him occurring at every level of government and with the support of all major institutions.” (The Daily Signal is the news organization of The Heritage Foundation.)
By contrast, Republican Party stalwarts lament that no comparable effort exists on their side. The GOP’s turnout and messaging efforts seek to thread a difficult needle by encouraging early and absentee voting and ballot-harvesting—pandemic-era measures that Trump and supporters blame for his 2020 electoral defeat—while the party simultaneously fights the mainly blue-state laws that made the practices possible. The party’s position is further complicated by its standard-bearer’s warnings of a rigged election bigger than in 2020, which some speculate could turn off moderate swing voters.
The IRS permits tax-exempt nonprofit groups to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives so long as they do not “refer to any candidate or political party” nor conduct their activities “in a biased manner that favors (or opposes) one or more candidates prohibited.”
These entities have become magnets for funds not only from wealthy donors, who can contribute without traditional campaign finance limits—and get a tax break to boot—but also abundantly endowed private foundations that are prohibited from engaging in partisan activities.
In recent years, dozens of progressive-oriented 501(c)(3)s, now pulling in upward of $500 million annually, have engaged in purportedly neutral efforts to impact elections, according to Hayden Ludwig, director of policy research at the election integrity-focused advocacy group Restoration of America.
In practice, critics like Ludwig argue, left-leaning charities flout the law by registering and mobilizing demographics that tend to vote disproportionately Democratic behind a veil of nonpartisan democracy promotion.
During the 2020 election, for example, the Voter Participation Center solicited millions of ballot applications in swing states—many of them prefilled for respondents. This nonprofit, like its peers, is clear that it isn’t targeting just any voters, but what it and progressive activists have dubbed a “New American Majority” of “young people, people of color and unmarried women.”
Tom Lopach, a longtime Democratic Party operative and the center’s president and CEO, told RealClearInvestigations in a statement: “We do the work that state election officials typically do not do—seeking out underrepresented voting-eligible Americans … This is difficult but necessary work that brings democracy to eligible Americans’ doorsteps.”
In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan showed how supposedly neutral efforts can have a partisan impact when they funneled some $400 million through two progressive–led but purportedly nonpartisan nonprofits into election offices across the country.
That money disproportionately went to jurisdictions that Joe Biden won in the pivotal battleground states that delivered his victory, often flowing to left-leaning nonprofits to whom election offices outsourced the administration of sometimes critical functions.
In April 2022, a primary conduit of these so-called Zuckerbucks, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, announced the launch of a successor to the 2020 effort—the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a five-year $80 million program “to envision, support, and celebrate excellence in U.S. election administration.”
“The left has assembled an impressive ‘election-industrial’ complex of nonprofit organizations that is constantly working towards goals like ‘promoting participation’ targeting ‘underrepresented minorities,’” said Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project. Such terms, Snead says, “are code for identifying and mobilizing liberal voters.”
Election experts view such activities as potentially decisive.
“‘Nonpartisan’ and ‘charitable’ voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups” are the Democratic Party’s “electioneering super-weapon[s],” said Parker Thayer, an analyst with the conservative-oriented Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C.
Of these, Thayer sees the Everybody Votes Campaign as of paramount importance.
Born of a plan “commissioned by [Hillary] Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, funded by the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, and coordinated with cut-throat Democratic consultants,” Thayer writes in an extensive analysis of the group’s efforts, “the Everybody Votes campaign [has] used the guise of civic-minded charity to selectively register millions of ‘non-white’ swing-state voters in the hopes of getting out the Democratic vote.”
It does so by funding and training over 50 community groups to register voters to close “the voter registration gap in communities of color,” which it attributes to “modern forms of Jim Crow laws,” such as voter ID requirements, the group’s executive director, Nellie Sires, said in a January 2024 interview.
From 2016-2021, the Everybody Votes Campaign, doing business as three entities, collected over $190 million from major Democratic Party donors, unions, and environmental activists. Some of the largest donors include the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund; the New Venture and Hopewell funds, managed by for-profit consulting firm Arabella Advisors; and the George Soros-funded Foundation to Promote Open Society—all 501(c)(3) public charities or private foundations forbidden from supporting “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias.”
The Everybody Votes Campaign distributed the funds to a slew of left-leaning state-based voter registration organizations largely in eight pivotal states from 2016 to 2019—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada—and then to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2021.
According to Thayer’s analysis, the Everybody Votes Campaign’s voter registration push “would have provided Democrats more votes than the total margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania,” securing Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
One notable backer of the Everybody Votes Campaign is Mind the Gap, a “Moneyball-style” Silicon Valley Democratic super PAC founded by Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, and connected to the political activities of her convicted crypto-fraudster son, Sam Bankman-Fried.
The analytics-focused outfit prepared a confidential strategy memo leaked in advance of the 2020 election, noting that “501(c)(3) voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in the electorate” would be the “single most effective tactic for ensuring Democratic victories”—“4 to 10 times more cost-effective” on after-tax basis at “garnering additional Democratic votes” relative to alternatives like “broadcast media and digital buys.”
Mind the Gap recommended that donors contribute to three organizations: the Voter Participation Center and its sister organization, the Center for Voter Information for mail-based registration efforts, and Everybody Votes for site-based registration efforts.
The largest grant recipient, receiving $24 million during the 2016-2021 period, was State Voices, which describes itself as a “nonpartisan network of 25 state-based coalitions … that collectively partner with over 1,200 organizations” consisting of “advocates, organizers, and activists … work[ing] together to fight for a healthy democracy and political power for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), and all people of color (BIPOC).”
Another top recipient, raking in over $10 million, was the Voter Participation Center.
According to the Capital Research Center, the Everybody Votes Campaign would collect and spend over $50 million in connection with the 2022 midterm elections—the most recent period for which financials are available. All told, since its founding in 2015, the campaign says, its network has registered 5.1 million voters, of whom 76% are people of color; 56% are women; and 47% are under the age of 35.
Last November, the news outlet Puck reported on a secret memo circulated by Mind the Gap regarding its plans for 2024. “Our strategy early in the 2024 presidential race will be to massively scale high-performing voter registration and mobilization programs,” the memo read. The PAC again specifically directed donors to the Everybody Votes Campaign, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Lopach, who has worked in Democratic Party politics his entire career, bristled at RealClearInvestigations’ questions regarding critics’ claims of a partisan bent to its work. “The presumptions baked into the questions … emailed to us are inaccurate and reveal the reporter’s own biases,” he responded, while emphasizing the organization’s targeting of “underrepresented voting-eligible Americans.”
Thayer has dubbed Everybody Votes the “largest and most corrupt ‘charitable’ voter registration drive in American history.”
Of such organizations’ claims of nonpartisanship, Howell told RealClearInvestigations: “If they were truly interested in an informed participatory constitutional Republic, they would have an even-handed approach to registering voters.”
“Call me when they show up to a NASCAR race, Daughters of the American Revolution event, or a gun show,” Howell added. “Then we can pretend for a minute that these are beyond just facial efforts to appear somewhat neutral.”
But NASCAR races have not been hubs for GOP-led voter registration efforts either. Restoration of America’s Ludwig estimates that the Right may spend as little as 1% of what the Left spends on voter registration efforts.
A recent memo from the Sentinel Action Fund, a super PAC that aims to elect conservatives, noted that in the 2022 election cycle, while $8.9 billion was spent on federal elections, there were zero large independent expenditure organizations on the Right focused on get-out-the-vote efforts or “ballot chasing.”
Republican Party vehicles and conservative outfits like grassroots-oriented Turning Point Action, a 501(c)(4), are engaged in such efforts in the 2024 cycle, but the scale and sophistication of their political counterparts’ efforts would appear unrivaled at this point.
Election experts attribute this gap to several factors beyond the GOP’s focus on other tactics to win elections, or ineffectiveness. They note that Democratic voters tend to be more concentrated in urban areas and college campuses, making it easier to run efficient registration drives. As regards early and absentee voting and ballot harvesting, it is not clear if these efforts will substantially grow the pool of Republican voters versus merely enabling the party to “bank” votes earlier.
With respect to the use of 501(c)(3)s to conduct such activities, Ludwig said some conservatives may still be fearful of running afoul of the IRS—through exploiting tax laws to pursue efforts perceived to be partisan effectively on the taxpayers’ dime—in the wake of its targeting of tea party groups for extreme scrutiny during the Obama years.
Since the 2020 election, Democrats have opened a second apparent electioneering front that Republicans could not match even if they wanted to: The rise of so-called Bidenbucks, which uses the “unlimited funding, resources, and reach” of the federal government and agency offices located nationwide to turn out favored voters, according to Stewart Whitson, legal director of the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden introduced Executive Order 14019. The directive on “promoting access to voting” orders every federal agency, more than 600 in all, to register and mobilize voters—particularly “people of color” and others the White House says face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further directs the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits in pursuit of its goals.
As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, Executive Order 14019 appears to have been designed by left-leaning think tank Demos and implemented in consultation and sometimes coordination with a slew of progressive, labor, and identity-focused groups with the goal of generating up to 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually.
The ACLU and Demos have reportedly helped execute the order. RealClearInvestigations additionally found that at least two recipients of grants under the Everybody Votes Campaign, the NAACP and UnidosUS—formerly the National Council of Raza—were also listed on an email as participants in a July 2021 listening session on the executive order convened by the White House and agency officials.
Whitson, whose organization unearthed that email in its fight to expose details about the order, emphasized that “[U]nlike 2020 wherein the shadow campaign was conducted by private citizens seeking to influence government election operations from the outside, the threat we face in 2024 is being launched from within the government itself.”
Facing both congressional scrutiny and litigation, the administration has closely guarded the strategic plans agencies were to develop to carry out the order, how they are implementing them, to what end, and with whom.
Perfunctory press releases, reports from groups supportive of the order, and documents slowly ferreted out via Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, however, demonstrate that relevant agencies have sought to drive voter registration via public housing authorities, child nutrition programs, and voluntary tax preparation clinics.
In August 2023, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued updated guidance calling for the agency to register voters at naturalization ceremonies.
More recently, the Department of Education did the same, blessing the use of federal work-study funds to pay students for “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration,” and other activities. Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, recently told The Epoch Times that the department had previously threatened schools “that you better be registering students or you could lose your federal funds.”
When asked by RealClearInvestigations to respond to Walter’s claim, the Department of Education would not. Over two dozen Pennsylvania state legislators challenged the order via a lawsuit in January. Citing alleged unlawful attempts by several agencies to register Keystone State voters, the lawmakers asserted:
By engaging in a targeted voter registration effort of this magnitude, focused specifically on these agencies and the groups of potential voters they interact with, leveraging the resources and reach of the federal government, this effort appears to be a taxpayer-funded get-out-the-vote effort designed to benefit the current President’s political party.
Echoing this view, Whitson’s Foundation for Government Accountability submitted an amicus brief noting that “all of the federal agencies FGA has identified as taking active steps to carry out EO 14019 have one thing in common: They provide government welfare benefits and other services to groups of voters the vast majority of which have historically voted Democrat.”
The plaintiffs alleged the executive order violated both Pennsylvania law limiting voter registration efforts to non-federal actors and constitutional provisions reserving election laws to the states.
On March 26, a district court dismissed the case, claiming the plaintiffs lacked standing. Whitson told RealClearInvestigations that others would likely lodge similar lawsuits, building on the Pennsylvania legislators’ case in the wake of the dismissal. Days later, The Federalist reported that the plaintiffs intended to appeal their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A White House spokesperson did not reply to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiries regarding the executive order.
Republicans have had more success opposing the use of Zuckerbucks and other private monies used to finance public elections. More than two dozen states would move to ban or restrict such grants in response to the activities observed during the 2020 election.
Most recently, Wisconsin, where some of the most controversial Zuckerbucks-related efforts took place, was added to that list when, on April 2, voters approved a constitutional amendment barring the private funding of elections.
Despite this crackdown and the feds seemingly stepping into the breach, efforts to privately finance election administration persist. The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence bills itself as an initiative to bolster “woefully unsupported” election offices to “revitalize American democracy.”
The organization says it services jurisdictions—11 listed on its website, ranging across states from Arizona to California and Wisconsin—with “training, mentorship, and resources.” Alliance officials did not respond to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiry about whether it would be terminating the relationship with the city of Madison, Wisconsin, in light of the passage of the recent ballot measure that would seem to have barred it. Nor did it respond to RealClearInvestigation’ other inquiries in connection with this article.
Most of these partnerships were initiated with jurisdictions in states that have not banned Zuckerbucks, though it has sought to circumvent such prohibitions in Georgia and Utah. The stated goal of the Alliance for Election Excellence is to support voters via measures like assisting participating centers in “redesigning” forms to make them more intuitive and purchasing infrastructure “to improve election security and accessibility.”
Alliance launch partners include entities such as:
Critics argue this seemingly more modest effort is, in reality, an ambitious Zuckerbucks rebrand.
Snead’s Honest Elections Project published a report in April 2023, based in part on documents received from FOIA requests, indicating “that the Alliance is a reinvention of CTCL’s scheme to use private funding to strongarm election policy nationwide.”
Among other takeaways, it found that:
The report shows that many of the alliance’s launch partners, starting with the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Civic Design, are funded by major Democrat-tied, so-called dark money groups such as the Democracy Fund and Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund and Hopewell Fund.
The Democracy Fund is led by Democrat tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, which has granted some $275 million to like-minded organizations from publications like Mother Jones and ProPublica to the Voter Registration Project since its founding.
The District of Columbia recently closed a criminal investigation into Arabella, whose fund network reportedly spent nearly $1.2 billion in 2020 alone, after probing it over allegations its funds were pursuing political ends in violation of their tax-exempt statuses. The Center for Secure and Modern Elections, the Honest Elections Project says, pushes “left-wing priorities like automatic voter registration” and is run by the New Venture Fund. The Elections Group’s CEO and co-founder, Jennifer Morrell, previously served as a consultant at the Democracy Fund.
The Capital Research Center’s Walter uses a football analogy to explain why he sees these efforts as untoward. He told RealClearInvestigations:
Election offices are the refs in elections; the parties are teams trying to score. You’d be puzzled if you heard Super Bowl refs say they’re trying to boost points scored. You’d be outraged if you learned those refs had received money and training from people who previously worked for one team’s offensive coaching staff. That’s what left-wing political operatives, using left-wing money, are doing, and it’s clearly unfair.
Democrat-aligned groups continue to engage in litigation, like that brought by chief election lawyer Marc Elias, aimed at loosening election laws to their benefit. Snead told RealClearInvestigations, “There are more than 70 active lawsuits right now targeting voter ID laws, anti-ballot harvesting laws, signature verification, drop box regulations, and more.”
After securing victory in a lawsuit requiring signature verification for mail voting in Pennsylvania, the Republican National Committee touted its engagement as well in 81 election integrity cases this cycle. Swing-state Wisconsin is another major battleground for such efforts.
There, Elias’ legal team has challenged witness signature requirements and bans on election clerks filling address information on mail-in ballots. It and others are also working to overturn a state Supreme Court decision finding drop boxes illegal. The Badger State’s now liberal-majority Supreme Court announced in March it would take up the case.
Cutting against these efforts are not only the state’s citizen-approved Zuckerbucks ban, but another Badger-passed April 2 ballot measure amending the state’s constitution to prohibit those other than “an election official designated by law” from carrying out election-related tasks.
Watchdogs like Howell are concerned that left-leaning electioneers and lawfare forces collectively are pursuing an “election ‘dis-integrity’ strategy … to greatly expand the universe of ballots while limiting any ability to ensure that they are fairly cast and counted.”
“It’s a basic recipe for fraud.”
Elias says those seeking to combat such efforts are engaged in “voter suppression and election subversion.”
Democrats also have the federal government working on their side on the litigation front—and in ways extending beyond the veritable lawfare barrage the Biden Justice Department has leveled at Trump.
Speaking in Selma, Alabama, on the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 1965 police assault on civil rights marchers, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared that “the right to vote is still under attack.”
Garland vowed the Department of Justice was punching back, including “challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.”
The post How Taxpayers Will Heavily Subsidize Democrat Boots on the Ground This Election appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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