Login
The Democrats’ efforts in recent election cycles were fueled by half-a-billion dollars from a shadowy foreign billionaire with a stated goal of turning the U.S. Constitution into a left-wing political tool.
The post Exclusive—Sen. Bill Hagerty: Time to Close the Loophole Allowing Foreign Billionaires to Interfere in Our Elections appeared first on Breitbart.
Former President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) appeared together for a joint press conference in Palm Beach, Florida, to promote an election integrity bill.
The post Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson Announce Election Integrity Bill: ‘Common Sense’ appeared first on Breitbart.
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.
During a conference call with White House officials, top state election officials wanted to know how the Biden administration intended to implement its government-backed get-out-the-vote effort in 2024.
The White House answer essentially was that “those plans are not public and they never intended for them to be public,” according to two secretaries of state who were on the call last week.
“The sad part is, that answer should have been a surprise but it wasn’t,” Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, told The Daily Signal.
Secretaries of state typically are their states’ chief election officials. Their growing frustration comes as more than two dozen state lawmakers in Pennsylvania, a major battleground state, ask the Supreme Court to block President Joe Biden’s executive order to increase voter registration.
Mississippi’s Watson noted that in 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife spent $400 million for election administration grants targeting key jurisdictions that would drive up the Democrat vote.
But, he added, Biden’s putting the power of the federal government behind a similar effort is “1,000%” worse.
The call with White House officials was coordinated by the National Association of Secretaries of State, Watson said.
“We might join in that Pennsylvania case with an amicus brief,” West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, a Republican, told The Daily Signal. “Now we are leading an effort among secretaries of state to push back against partisan election interference and a get-out-the-vote effort using federal tax dollars.”
In 2022, Warner led a group of 14 other secretaries of state who asked Biden to rescind his executive order from the year before, since states are supposed to run elections.
“There is something surreptitious about the Biden administration and the lack of transparency that reveals what is going on here,” Warner said. “The federal government is not supposed to be doing this. We need states to stand firm on this.”
Federal plans largely have been shrouded in secrecy since Biden signed Executive Order 14019 in March 2021, directing federal agencies to work with nonprofit groups to boost voting.
Involved nonprofits include left-leaning organizations such as Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Brennan Center for Justice, as The Daily Signal has reported using details obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“It was troublesome on the phone call [with the White House]. Several spoke up that none of these third-party groups partnering with federal agencies are associated with Republicans or conservatives,” Watson said. “They responded, ‘We welcome anyone.’ Well, they aren’t bringing them to the table.”
In July 2021, the White House held a “listening session” with dozens of left-leaning groups on plans for implementing Biden’s executive order, according to documents obtained by the Foundation for Government Accountability through the Freedom of Information Act.
Those groups include the Southern Poverty Law Center, People for the American Way, the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, an the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center.
The White House did not respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for this report.
In Pennsylvania, 27 Republican members of the state Legislature sued both Biden over his executive order on elections and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, also a Democrat, over his own executive order implementing automatic voter registration.
The plaintiffs contend that both orders violated the constitutional rights of state legislators to make election law.
“The executive order is beyond the scope and powers of a president, not to mention he is interfering in an election where he is on the ballot,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Dawn Keefer, a Republican who is chair of the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus and lead plaintiff in the case.
“We need courts to clarify if legislators have standing. We believe it is a solid case,” Keefer said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “We believe we have standing not only as legislators but, for most of us, as candidates who will be affected by these actions.”
In late March, a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed the case on standing without considering the merits, stating that the Pennsylvania Legislature wasn’t harmed as an institution. The lawmakers are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, asserting that the rights of individual legislators were violated.
“The judge’s decision would imply that every single member of the Legislature [must] agree on something before the constitutional and civil rights of legislators can be enforced,” Heather Honey, executive director of Election Research Institute, a watchdog organization whose lawyers represent the suing lawmakers, told The Daily Signal. “There is no way you could ever get agreement.”
Honey noted that Democrat legislators twice proposed automatic voter registration, but the bills were defeated in committee.
The effort, she said, was a tacit acknowledgment that such a measure would require legislation and couldn’t be done through a governor’s executive order. Shapiro implemented automatic voter registration through an executive order anyway.
The federal government’s coordination of voter registration efforts has the most far-reaching impact, Honey said.
“The federal government has no right getting involved in the method of selecting presidential electors,” Honey said. “Time, place, and manner of elections is to be decided by Congress, such as the Help America Vote Act. Otherwise, it’s up to the states.”
“There is no role for the president in regulating elections. The full force of the federal government unleashed by an unlawful executive order is interfering in a presidential election,” she added. “Obviously, the Founding Fathers never intended for a president to have the power to use the government for a get-out-the-vote campaign.”
GOP lawmakers contend that the president’s executive order puts the federal government’s thumb on the scale in elections, which are supposed to be the purview of states.
Republicans also argue that Biden’s order could prompt federal employees to violate the Hatch Act, which bars them from any political activity on government time or using government resources.
The post How States Are Punching Back on Biden Federal Election Takeover appeared first on The Daily Signal.
After a key House committee advanced legislation this week to require a citizenship question on the U.S. Census, support for the measure could be growing in the backdrop of the border crisis and its potential impact on congressional reapportionment.
Heritage Action, a policy advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, announced Friday the Equal Representation Act would be scored as a key vote. The bill is S 3659 in the Senate and HR 7109 in the House. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Under current law, foreign citizens living in the United States are counted in the Census, and thus toward congressional apportionment. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., publicly admitted, “We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. … I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”
Democrat Congresswoman Yvette Clarke on illegal immigrants in America:
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 9, 2024
"I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes."
The end game: Dems are willing to destroy what it means to be an American citizen to help themselves politically. pic.twitter.com/3XmBDqYEsH
“Joe Biden’s deadly border policies have made the illegal immigration crisis the number one concern of the American people, and voters are pleading for Congress to fight back,” Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker said in a statement.
The House version has 100 co-sponsors and was approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. After being in all but one census from 1820 to 2000, the Census citizenship question was abandoned in the 2010 questionnaire during the Obama administration.
?PASSED?
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) April 10, 2024
We just passed this commonsense bill through our committee.
Unsurprisingly, every Oversight Democrat voted against it.
On to the floor! https://t.co/DztcpKaBZN
“Congressional apportionment and electoral votes should be based solely on the needs of American citizens. Heritage Action is proud to have helped push this bill past the 100 cosponsor mark and will keep working with conservatives across the country to finish the job,” Walker said.
The Heritage Action announcement comes the same day House Speaker Mike Johnson was set to join former President Donald Trump for a press conference on election integrity Friday, The Hill reported.
Reps. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, introduced the House version and Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., introduced the Senate version. The goal is to protect Americans’ electoral power and congressional representation.
“Members of Congress represent U.S. citizens, not foreigners,” Davidson said in a statement. “Under the Democrats’ open border policies, sanctuary cities and states inflate their population with illegal aliens. Then they’re rewarded with more congressional representation by a Census that counts illegals. The inflated count is then used to draw congressional maps, undermining fair representation for our citizens.”
Edwards stressed only American citizens can legally vote, “so only American citizens should be counted when determining federal representation.”
“In the 2008 Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, the justices defined ‘the people’ to mean all members of the political community. To be a member of a political community, you must be an eligible voter,” Edwards said in a statement. “The Equal Representation Act addresses one of the many consequences of our open border—illegal immigrant influence in America’s electoral process. America is waking up to this insidious threat to our democracy.”
The post This Bill Would Prevent Illegal Immigrants From Swaying Congressional Representation appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Before voters approved a constitutional amendment to make their state the 28th in the nation to ban private funding of election administration, Wisconsin’s capital city, Madison, already had spent over $1 million in private grants.
Madison, like jurisdictions in three other states that ban private dollars from paying for elections—Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri—is a member of the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The organization, founded by the left-leaning Center for Tech and Civic Life, doled out $350 million in election-administration grants in 2020 funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
Wisconsin’s move to ban private money to pay for elections was significant progress for election integrity but not a silver bullet, said former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative.
“It is like staying ahead of hackers,” Cuccinelli told The Daily Signal. “But this is the real world and not digital, where we are dealing with votes and maintaining clean elections.”
“The other side will keep trying to muddy the waters and we will keep trying to clean it up,” he said. “Some jurisdictions are bragging about already spending the money. Good. This is about stabilizing elections going forward.”
In the book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” I detail the impact of the Zuckerberg grants in battleground states. Democrat-leaning counties in Pennsylvania got about 92% of the grant money. In Arizona, more than half of the “Zuckerbucks” went to Maricopa County.
A special counsel appointed by the Wisconsin Legislature concluded the Zuckerberg grants functioned as a state-sanctioned get-out-the-vote campaign conducted almost entirely in the heavily Democrat areas of Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Madison.
The city of Madison got $1.5 million in private dollars before the ballot initiative, which won’t be affected by the voter-approved ban.
“The city has spent the second grant it received from CTCL in the amount of $1.5 million to purchase equipment that will automate the process of mailing absentee ballots and sorting them upon return, as well as security carts to transport voting equipment,” Madison City Attorney Michael Haas told The Daily Signal.
“There was also a grant to help the city pay for its membership in the [Alliance] for Election Excellence,” Haas said in a written statement. “Since that grant was made and the membership was purchased prior to the constitutional amendment being passed, I do not believe the amendment applies to it.”
“Plus, the amendment prohibits the use of money or equipment from a grant to conduct elections,” the city attorney added. “I think it is a stretch to argue that learning and developing best practices, which is what [the alliance] does, is actually conducting an election.”
The Daily Signal previously reported that DeKalb County, Georgia, accepted a $2 million grant from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence last year despite a 2021 Georgia law that banned the use of private money to administer elections.
DeKalb County contended that it could accept the money because the 2021 law said only that “no superintendent” who oversees elections could accept the money. So the county’s general treasury accepted the money and then passed it to election officials.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other Georgia Republicans accused DeKalb County of skirting the ban. In 2023, the Georgia Legislature closed the loophole and made it a felony for any public official to accept private dollars intended for elections.
DeKalb County officials acknowledged an inquiry from The Daily Signal, but didn’t respond before publication of this report.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life was founded in 2012 by Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges, and Whitney May, who previously worked together at the New Organizing Institute, which The Washington Post referred to as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts of digital wizardry.”
For the Alliance for Election Excellence, CTCL partners with several nonprofits, including the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, that are funded by Arabella Advisors, a left-wing dark money organization.
Coconino County, Arizona, is also a member of the alliance. But it’s not getting any grants, County Recorder Patty Hansen said.
“We received a $614,000 grant from the CTCL in 2020 before the Legislature passed the ban,” Hansen told The Daily Signal. “We don’t accept any money from the alliance. We accept services. … The alliance works on developing best practices and standards that can be shared across the country.”
Both Arizona and Georgia were formerly solid-red states that flipped blue in the 2020 election. Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Donald Trump in each state was assisted by large margins of victory in Coconino County, where the largest city is Flagstaff, and DeKalb County, where the largest city is Decatur.
Two Missouri counties, Boone and Scotland, are also members of the Alliance for Election Excellence and neither received grants, Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said. She made it clear when the county signed up that it couldn’t receive private funds, Lennon said.
“Boone County is a member of the Alliance for Election Excellence; however, we do have the prohibition in Missouri law for private funding and, as a result, our county has not received grant funding from the alliance,” Lennon told The Daily Signal in a written statement.
Missouri, which leans heavily Republican, isn’t a battleground state in elections.
Boone County, which includes Columbia, the state’s fourth-largest city, also went heavily to Biden in 2020. Scotland County, with a population under 5,000, went overwhelmingly to Trump.
“Scotland County, Missouri, is our other Missouri member of the alliance and they also have not received private funding,” Lennon said in the written statement, adding:
The membership gives us access to subject matter experts that are current or former local election officials on administrative areas like poll worker recruitment (finding enough election judges, especially judges that affiliate as Republicans, is a perennial problem for us), better ways to design forms and applications so that voters can understand them, and ways to make our existing elections processes more efficient.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this report.
The center’s Alliance for Election Excellence gave $3 million to Clark County, one of the larger jurisdictions in Nevada, which is considered a battleground state in 2024 with no ban on private money to run elections.
The other jurisdictions in the alliance are in solidly blue areas and have no ban on private dollars bankrolling local elections. They are Shasta and Contra Costa counties in California; Kane and Macoupin counties in Illinois; and the city of Greenwich, Connecticut.
The post Left-Wing Election Group Still Rooted in These Areas With ‘Zuckerbuck’ Bans appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The FBI arrested a Virginia couple Thursday morning for entering the Capitol building three years ago on January 6, 2021, according to the couple.
The post FBI Arrests Couple Three Years Later for Being Inside the Capitol on January 6 for Twelve Minutes appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Documents reveal an organization backed by Obama White House alumni such as Valerie Jarrett and bankrolled by liberal dark money donors advocated using tax dollars to pay college students to get out the vote in the 2024 election, doing so before the Biden administration announced the same policy.
The Daily Signal obtained the documents through a public records request in which it sought documents from the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to President Joe Biden’s controversial executive order to promote voting.
In January, an activist with ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a project of the liberal group Civic Nation, contacted officials with the state of Wisconsin and its capital city, Madison, about a need to allow money from the Federal Work-Study Program to pay for students to engage in election-related work.
By late February, the U.S. Department of Education and Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the Biden administration was doing exactly that.
A new Wall Street Journal poll of voters in battleground states found former President Donald Trump tied with Biden in a two-way race in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by only about 20,000 votes of over 3.2 million cast.
In a Jan. 18 email, Ryan Drysdale, director of impact and state networks for the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, sent an email to Bonnie Chang, voter outreach coordinator in the Madison city clerk’s office, about U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s plans to revise how taxpayer money may be used.
“Lastly, as you may be aware, the secretary has been working on clarification about Federal Work-Study being eligible for supporting student workers with local election officials and feels confident another letter will come from the WH/Dept of Ed with guidelines,” Drysdale wrote to Chang, referring to the White House and the Department of Education.
The Federal Work-Study Program, funded by the Department of Education, provides financial aid to eligible undergraduate and graduate students at colleges and universities.
The youth vote helped stop an anticipated “red wave” for Republican candidates in 2022. It once was perceived as a core Democrat constituency, which is one reason the Biden administration has tried repeatedly to “forgive” student loan debt.
ALL IN asserted that the youth vote was the deciding factor in 2022 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The initiative announced that 394 colleges and universities across 44 states and the District of Columbia were part of its first program recognizing “Most Engaged Campuses for College Student Voting.”
“I was invited to join a meeting with the secretary, the UW-Superior campus team and surrounding local election officials who are exploring both internship and FWS opportunities,” Drysdale wrote to Madison’s Chang, referring to Cardona, the University of Wisconsin in Superior, Wisconsin, and the Federal Work-Study Program.
“There was a lot of excitement even without the FWS component,” he wrote. “They hope to use UWS [University of Wisconsin-Superior] as a case study for other [Wisconsin] institutions and local election officials to learn from. Happy to share more on a quick call if that would be helpful. There’s a big interest from partners and funders about FWS and these types of opportunities so we’ll be following these developments in WI.”
On Jan. 19, Chang forwarded Drysdale’s email about the Federal Work-Study Program, or FWS, to Madison City Attorney Michael Haas.
She noted that University of Wisconsin-Madison officials said that “it’s in the federal language that FWS students are not able to work at the polls on Election Day nor engage in GOTV/voter engagement spaces.”
GOTV is a reference to “get out the vote.”
That same day, Haas wrote to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe.
“If I understand correctly, there is a request to change the FWS rules regarding work as election inspectors but I don’t think that has happened yet,” Haas said of Federal Work-Study rules. “In any event, the secretary of state is trying to help make it happen.”
The Wisconsin Secretary of State’s Office didn’t reply to inquiries from The Daily Signal by publication time.
The Daily Signal previously reported that Civic Nation’s board includes Jarrett, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama; Tina Tchen, former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama; and Cecilia Muñoz, former director of the Obama White House’s Domestic Policy Council.
Funders of Civic Nation include left-leaning grantmakers such as the Democracy Fund, established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; the Carnegie Corporation of New York; the Environmental Defense Fund; and the Joyce Foundation, which included Barack Obama on its board before he became president.
Besides ALL IN, other groups run by Civic Nation include United State of Women and When We All Vote.
Amanda Hollowell, When We All Vote’s national organizing director, was among activists who met Feb. 27 at a White House event with the vice president to talk about turning out voters.
“We have been doing work to promote voter participation for students. And, for example, we have—under the Federal Work-Study Program—[we] now allow students to get paid, through federal work-study, to register people and to be nonpartisan poll workers,” Harris told the gathering at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“As we know, this is important for a number of reasons,” she said. “One, to engage our young leaders in this process and activate them in terms of their ability to—to strengthen our communities. But also, this is the work that we need to do, knowing that so many poll workers have left this work for a variety of reasons that we will also discuss.”
The city of Madison played no role in pushing for a clarification of U.S. Education Department policy on allowing the program to pay students for election work, the city attorney told The Daily Signal.
“City of Madison officials did not lobby the Biden administration to change FWS rules. We have not been involved in that issue except for receiving the email from Ryan Drysdale so I do not [know] details about the FWS regulations or how they changed as they do not affect the city’s operations,” Haas said. “The city of Madison hires a number of UW-Madison students as poll workers and pays them in the same way as other poll workers with city funds.”
The Daily Signal sought comment from ALL IN’s Drysdale and the press contact for Civic Nation. Neither responded.
The Education Department referred The Daily Signal to a “Dear Colleague letter” to college administrators, dated Feb. 26, from Nasser H. Paydar, assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education.
In part, the letter says: “The department is today clarifying that FWS funds may be used for employment by a federal, state, local, or tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group.”
The documents released to The Daily Signal by the Wisconsin Elections Commission also showed consultation between state officials and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency within the Commerce Department.
NIST was putting together its strategic plan to comply with Biden’s executive order on getting out the vote, which it later made public.
The institute is one of at least four federal agencies to make such a strategic plan public. The Justice Department, however, has claimed presidential privilege to prevent public release of its own plan for complying with Biden’s order.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Left-Wing Group Pushed a Policy That Could Shape 2024 Election Outcome—Using Your Tax Dollars appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is laser-focused on "electing Donald Trump as president," RNC Chair Michael Whatley said.
The post Exclusive — RNC Chair: We Are Laser-Focused on ‘Electing Donald Trump’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is hiring "election integrity directors and election integrity councils in every battleground state" ahead of the general election, RNC Chair Michael Whatley said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
The post Exclusive – Michael Whatley: RNC Hiring ‘Election Integrity Councils’ in Battleground States appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—To comply with an executive order from President Joe Biden, the Peace Corps pushed to make its headquarters a voter registration center, upped efforts to register U.S. citizens abroad, and moved to supply multilingual voter registration forms.
The Peace Corps, a federal agency, assigns volunteers to provide services and meet needs in over 60 countries.
The agency released its plan to implement Biden’s order late last week in response to a request by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project under the Freedom of Information Act. (The Daily Signal is the news and commentary outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The Peace Corps completed a Sept. 23, 2021, draft of “the compliance plan that Peace Corps is prepared to execute” to implement Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which requires federal agencies to help boost voting.
“Overseas citizens are protected by federal law that does not require an ID to vote,” the Peace Corps plan says, a reference to voter ID requirements in many states. “Only requirement is SS# [Social Security number] and overseas address. For domestic citizens, Peace Corps will include usa.gov/voter-id hyperlink on the landing page, which provides information on voter ID requirements.”
The Peace Corps’ strategic plan says the agency will connect more citizens in the U.S. as well as citizens living abroad to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, known as FVAP, for information about registering and voting.
“For overseas citizens, registration forms are only in English; however, Peace Corps can highlight that FVAP has registration instructions in French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. Provide translated instructions to post via Diplomatic Pouch. For domestic citizens, we can provide those same instructions either in hard copy format or pdf,” the plan says.
Biden’s order, issued in March 2021, required most federal agencies to submit a strategic plan for getting out the vote.
House Republicans advanced legislation to rescind the Biden executive order on elections, asserting that it could put the federal government’s thumb on the scale in elections.
Meanwhile, GOP state legislators in Pennsylvania have sued to challenge the constitutionality of Biden’s order.
The Peace Corps is at least the third agency to make a plan public even as the Justice Department invokes presidential privilege to block release of its own strategic plan to implement Biden’s order.
“If requested by the District of Columbia, Peace Corps HQ agrees to be designated as a voter registration agency,” the strategic plan says.
Neither the Peace Corps nor the D.C. city government responded to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this report.
The Daily Signal previously reported, based on documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act, that taxpayer-backed federal agencies were partnering with transparently left-leaning organizations—among them Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union—to implement Biden’s executive order.
The Peace Corps plan mentions working with nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, but doesn’t specify which groups.
“For domestic citizens, invite NGOs to Peace Corps HQ to provide informational seminars to staff, unless COVID keeps Peace Corps HQ at Phase I. If so, invite NGOs to conduct virtual informational seminars,” the plan says.
The agency’s plan uses 12 steps to explain how the agency will expand its website to promote greater voter participation.
“Peace Corps will build out an information/landing page on peacecorps.gov (a public website), PC Live and Intranet (for both staff and Volunteers) that covers both domestic and overseas access to voting,” the plan says, adding:
For overseas citizens, have FAQ [frequently asked questions] and video to show How to Register. Provide the hyperlink to the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) which provides registration services/information to overseas citizens. Additionally, Peace Corps will use State Department’s Diplomatic Pouch to distribute voter registration forms to each post. For domestic citizens, include vote.gov hyperlink on the landing page, which provides access to on-line registration forms.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Biden’s Peace Corps Pushes Expanded Overseas Voting appeared first on The Daily Signal.
When veteran pollster Scott Rasmussen surveyed a group of Americans he calls the elite 1% earlier this year, he discovered a startling number who say it’s OK to win an election by cheating.
The elite 1%—individuals who make over $150,000 a year, live in densely populated areas, and have postgraduate degrees—are overwhelmingly liberal. They give President Joe Biden an 82% approval rating, compared to his 40% average from the rest of Americans.
Rasmussen asked these liberal voters: “Suppose that your favorite candidate loses a close election. However, people on the campaign know that they can win by cheating without being caught. Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?”
Among all Americans, just 7% said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. But that number rose to 35% among the elite 1% and skyrocketed to 69% among those who are part of the politically obsessed 1%, meaning they talk about politics every day.
“I’ve been polling for a very long time and the last finding is the most terrifying poll result I’ve ever seen,” Rasmussen told The Daily Signal.
Rasmussen spoke to “The Daily Signal Podcast” about his findings and his upcoming plans for a weekly TV show. Listen to the full interview or read an edited transcript below.
Rob Bluey: Your firm, RMG Research, takes a different approach to polling and public opinion, trying to understand where voters stand on key issues. You’ve coined the term counterpolling. Tell us what that means.
Scott Rasmussen: Counterpolling is designed literally to counter misleading information that’s that comes out from a lot of establishment polls. Our belief is that most public opinion polling that comes out of Washington is presented and analyzed in the language of a Georgetown cocktail party. They use words that nobody else in America uses.
We go out and we make a strong effort to ask questions in the language of everyday Americans. We respect voters. We think they are intelligent. We have great hopes for the commonsense wisdom of the American people, but we also know they have better things to do with their lives than talk politics every day.
Bluey: It reminds me of after the 2016 presidential election when so many media organizations had a reckoning that they were out of touch with everyday Americans.
Rasmussen: We start by trying to understand. We don’t want to get into the innards of what you think about this policy detail vs. that policy detail. We want to know their attitudes. We want to know because that is something that is constant.
I’ve been polling on immigration for decades. And you know what’s never changed. About 80% of Americans say legal immigration is good for America and about 80% say illegal immigration is bad for America. That’s constant.
Bluey: One of the polls you did recently was on what you call the elite 1%. Can you give us some toplines on what you learned?
Rasmussen: The elite 1 % are people who make at least $150,000 a year. They live in a densely populated urban area, more than 10,000 people per square mile. And they have a postgraduate degree.
That last one is very important. We hear a lot about the diploma divide—that people with a college degree are more Democratic. Actually, it’s the postgrads who are different. The gap between postgraduates and people with a bachelor’s degree is often bigger than the gap between people with a bachelor’s and without a bachelor’s degree.
The elite 1% represent 1% of the population. They are extraordinarily influential. A heavy concentration of them went to one of 12 elite schools. The reason I bring that up is about half the policy positions in government, half the corporate board positions in America, are held by people who went to one of these dozen schools.
Their views really play a large role in the country, and it all feeds into this elite 1%.
They are in power centers. Somebody who is in Manhattan or Washington, D.C., is in a different circle of public influence than somebody who lives in McKinney, Texas.
If you’re thinking of who’s shaping the mainstream media narrative, it’s this group.
The Elite 1% are even more out of touch than you think https://t.co/q1Um2YuqSy
— Scott Rasmussen (@ScottWRasmussen) January 26, 2024
Bluey: The biggest headline for me was what this group thinks about the issue of cheating in elections. Can you unpack that one for us?
Rasmussen: We asked voters, 1,000 voters, to suppose there was an election and it was close but your candidate lost. And if their campaign team knew they could win by cheating and not get caught, would you want them to do so?
Among voters, only 7% say they’d rather cheat than win. I wish it was 1% or 2%, but 7% is not bad. Among the elite 1%, 35% would rather cheat than win. Then among a group that we call the politically obsessed elite—people who are not only in the elite 1%, but they talk politics every day—69% of them would rather cheat to win the election.
It’s because they don’t have much respect for the opinions of voters.
Bluey: What are their views on government compared to the general population?
Rasmussen: Let’s start with a very simple one. Most Americans think we don’t have enough individual freedom. Among the elite 1%, about half say, “No, we’ve got too much freedom.” And among that politically obsessed group, about 7 out of 10 say, “There’s too much individual freedom in America.”
That’s just mindboggling to me, but part of the reason is because they trust government. In America, it’s been 50 years since most voters trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. But among the elite 1%, 70% trust the government.
When I look at all the data, there’s a sense that most of us believe in government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And I think they would say, it’s of and by the elites that is what’s best for the people. They really believe that if they could just make the decisions and get us out of the way, we would be a lot better off.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN NUMBER OF THE DAY:
— Scott Rasmussen (@ScottWRasmussen) January 29, 2024
47% of the Elite 1% of American voters believe that the U.S. provides too much individual freedom.
In contrast, a separate survey found that most voters (57%) believe there is too much government control. pic.twitter.com/1UTXTYNDt5
Bluey: As somebody who’s been in the polling business for a long time, what is it that keeps you going?
Rasmussen: I remain convinced that most of the polling data is misleading. Most of the data that guides the polling narrative is misleading. And as someone who believes deeply in our nation’s founding values, I want to lift up the voice of the people so loudly that it can’t be ignored in this city.
That’s the objective. We want to transform the debate. We want to help people see most Americans still embrace those founding ideals.
It just offends me to no end to see this misleading impression of the American people. And by the way, as a people, we are far more united than we are politically. In our day-to-day lives, there’s an awful lot of unity and common ground.
Bluey: On April 7, “The Scott Rasmussen Show” will premiere. Could you give us some details on the show and where people can tune in to watch?
Rasmussen: It’s going to be on the Merit Street Media, which is Dr. Phil’s new television network. It’ll be available everywhere. And I’m sure that they’ll have something on the website to tell you about specifics in your local area.
The show came about because of the counterpolling concept and because of my belief that most Americans still believe in those founding ideals and traditional values.
The show is going to be a lot of politics because as a pollster you can’t get away from that. But we’re also going to touch on other things. We’ll do some holiday types of stories and how people are reacting to cultural twists.
My favorite polling question every year is about New Year’s Eve. Most people are shocked to learn that more Americans pray than drink on New Year’s Eve. Now, that’s because a lot of Americans pray every day. It’s not because they’re out there just on that one day. That’s just a different perspective of the world. And we want to highlight that. Again, it’s all part of lifting the voice of the American people up so loudly that you can’t ignore it.
The post ‘Most Terrifying Poll Result I’ve Ever Seen’: Scott Rasmussen Surveys America’s Elite 1% appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A nonprofit organization dedicated to “assisting migrants with their paperwork and legal needs” in New York City has been caught on video illegally filling out residency documents for a man without procuring any form of identification from him.
Video shot by Muckraker.com and obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project appears to show the nonprofit organization, La Jornada, saying that distributing such documents is against the law but then proceeding to do so with another person the next day. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
The video also shows the organization distributing paperwork to get a government-issued New York City identification card through the city’s IDNYC program.
Such a process suggests that an illegal alien easily could get a city ID card under a phony name through the nonprofit.
La Jornada, which operates out of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Queens, describes itself as an organization that is “helping migrants navigate the complex asylum processes and other legal procedures.”
The organization’s website states that La Jornada is “committed to justice and equality” and adds that “we strive to provide comprehensive support and expert guidance to those seeking safety and opportunities in a new country.”
The video, narrated by Muckraker.com founder Anthony Rubin, first shows him speaking to La Jornada employees about obtaining residency documents. Rubin tells one employee that a friend said he could obtain or buy those papers at the facility.
?Election Integrity Under Attack – Undercover Video
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) March 20, 2024
Illegal Alien "Charity" Distributing Fraudulent Papers Exposed
In Queens, New York, the organization La Jornada provides services to illegal aliens
The Oversight Project obtained video from @realmuckraker discovering a… pic.twitter.com/FOIDDn28jy
“How can you buy that here?” the woman responds. “No, you could do your process of asylum.”
Rubin asks, “Not possible here?”
She says in response: “Buy papers here? No, we cannot do that. … We could help you do your documentation if you need to get a Social Security or work permit.”
Later in the video, the woman is seen saying to Rubin: “You cannot go asking how much is the residency we sell, because that’s illegal … that’s something that you could do that you could get in trouble. That’s not what we could do. … They will think we are doing something illegal.”
However, the next day, a Mexican associate of Muckraker’s went back to the La Jornada office in Queens. Another employee gives the man residency and IDNYC paperwork although he hasn’t produced any form of identification.
In the video, the man is heard giving only his first and last name to the organization’s employee.
“Do you have a first and last name? Nothing else? Only have Jose Rubiano?” she asks.
The man affirms that.
The La Jornada employee says: “I’m going to get this signed and then I’ll be right back.”
Next, the employee produces documents with the name “Jose Rubiano” for both residency and the IDNYC card.
Muckraker’s Rubin explained why illegally facilitating residence and official identification cards is so problematic.
“Anyone, from someone seeking unauthorized employment to spies, saboteurs, or even terrorists, could obtain a government issued ID by visiting La Jornada and acquiring fraudulent papers,” Rubin said. “This risk also includes those who enter this country legally and overstay their visa.”
Such fraud, he said, potentially has allowed thousands of illegal aliens to obtain a new identity and integrate themselves into New York City undetected.
This is also a problem when it comes to illegal immigrants voting in local elections. With fraudulent residency papers, illegal aliens could take the first step toward voting in New York, which requires 30-day residency.
La Jornada is one of countless nonprofit organizations in New York and across the country that use U.S. taxpayers’ money to facilitate the increase in illegal immigration since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
In 2023, Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., secured $250,000 in federal taxpayer dollars for La Jornada.
The failed Senate border bill promoted by Biden in February was set to send $1.4 billion to nonprofits that cater to illegal immigrants.
“What started out decades ago as faith-based organizations supporting the State Department to resettle genuine refugees in the U.S. after a legitimate application process has evolved into mass illegal immigration and downstream activities, creating an immigration industrial complex worth billions of dollars,” Lora Ries, director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, wrote in May for The Daily Signal.
The Daily Signal sought comment about the video from La Jornada, but the organization didn’t respond by publication time.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
The post Nonprofit Caught on Video Handing Residency Papers to Man Without ID appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Vaunce News 
