Two large-scale liberal organizations with $80 million in each are looking to control elections in the future.
“The overall objective of the political left is to change the way you conduct overall elections,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, which advocates clean elections, told The Daily Signal.
One of the two liberal groups is Run for Something. It was founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer. Run for Something was founded in spring. Clerk WorkProject with the goal to elect clerks, election supervisors and registrars, recorders and other local officials responsible for running elections.
The PAC claims it will support thousands more election administrators in the coming years. For 2022, the PAC reports endorsing 11 candidates for races in California, Colorado and Illinois, Missouri, Nevada. North Carolina, North Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
The state election regulations are generally interpreted and enforced by local election clerks. They have discretion over matters such as whether to count absentee voting ballots received after Election Day, how strict voter ID or signature matching requirements are enforced, and how closely the counting of ballots on Election Day may be monitored by poll watchers.
According to the National Conference of State LegislaturesIn 22 states, county election officials are elected. In 10 states, elected officials appoint local boards of elections members. Another 18 states have two or more offices that handle election administration.
Donating to candidates for election oversight could have a direct or indirect effect on who holds these positions.
Another $80 million effort by U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence could also guide some local election administrators. It is a coalition of predominantly left-leaning organisations that are funded in part from Big Tech executives to train local officials in the running of elections.
Snead, along with other critics, see parallels in Run for Something and efforts by liberal hedge fund manager George Soros to elect liberal prosecutors. They also see strong similarities between the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election administration grants in the 2020 election cycle.
“What we shouldn’t lose track of is they are playing the long game,” Snead said. “They are going to look for every possible way to impact elections, and they can make substantial changes in the long run through this kind of program that they wouldn’t have been able to make in 2020.”
The Alliance for Election Excellence is not formally aligned with Run for Something’s Clerk Work project. However, Run for Something has received a donation from the Chan-Zuckerberg Institute (created by Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan).
“I would not be surprised if someone gets elected with the support of Run for Something and then immediately plugs themselves into the [Alliance for Election Excellence], because there are those natural synergies,” Snead said.
Election Clerk Controversies
Although the Clerk Work project is relatively new this year, there has been growing controversy over the politicization and abuse of election officials for many years.
Last month in Philadelphia, a former Democrat congressman Michael “Ozzie” Myers pleaded guilty in federal court of bribing the city’s election officialsTo stuff ballot boxes in local elections.
In 2012, Kathy Nickolaus, a Republican county clerk in Waukesha County, Wis., agreed to step down after saying that “human error” led to the late discovery of 14,000 uncounted votes in a contested election.
In 2019, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (a Republican) removed Brenda Snipes from Broward County Supervisor for Elections. A 2017 lawsuit revealed that the county had more eligible voters than registered voters and that some noncitizens and ineligible felons might have voted in past elections.
In 2018, a Florida judge ruled that Snipes had violated the law by destroying ballots from a Democrat congressional primaries in August 2016. Her office had posted the results of an earlier election 30 minutes before the polls closed.
Donald Whitten was a Democrat and county clerk in 2012. Lincoln County, West Virginia, pleaded guiltyFalsifying absentee votes in 2010 and stuffing ballot boxes
Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He said that a national project that aims to elect partisans for election supervisory positions threatens clean and honest elections.
“It is a very dangerous development for local election officials, who were supposed to be objective and nonpartisan,” von Spakovsky said.
“This group is trying to elect political consultants and political activists to these positions, with the potential for meddling with the election results and further undermining confidence in elections,” he said of Run for Something.
Soros Prosecutors Provide Model
Run for Something’s $80 million Clerk Work project, which began in April, is set to span three years and encompass 35 states.
Snead noted that the project is very similar to one undertaken by Soros, an Hungarian-American billionaire to elect district lawyers across the country who would adopt a progressive approach towards prosecutions. But in this case, it’s a national effort to elect left-leaning election officials, he said.
Justice and Public Safety was funded by Soros, who was also the main funder of Justice and Public Safety, a super PAC that made large donations to the campaigns for liberal candidates for the office of district attorney.
“What we are seeing is the same sort of strategy being directed toward election officials,” Snead told The Daily Signal, referring to activists on the left. “They are trying very much to repeat that strategy and the successes that they’ve seen in these local election officials, and the consequences could be significant.”
Soros funded national campaign resources to support low-dollar, low-ballot local campaigns. Snead suggested that similar efforts could be made to place sympathetic election officials.
“A lot of these positions are very, very down-ballot races. They can be won or lost—in terms of campaign spending–at the cost of buying a box of doughnuts,” he said. “The idea that you have an organization coming in like Run for Something, bringing national resources to these races, it could be a substantial impact on the race itself.”
‘Influence … Who is Administering Elections’
Former Hillary Clinton campaign aide Amanda Litman created Run for Something in 2017. It is a 527 political committee that aims to win down-ballot elections, endorse candidates and help them fund their campaigns.
The Daily Signal received numerous inquiries about Run for Something but they did not respond.
Litman, however was recently told The Washington Post, “You can influence quite literally who is administering elections,” and added: “If we don’t do it, we are absolutely going to regret it.”
The organization’s Clerk Work project specifically aims to elect liberal election workers. In April, Litman tweeted that Clerk Work will be “supporting 5,000+ candidates for local offices in charge of election administration,” the website of the Alliance for Election Excellence says.
However, Run for Something’s candidates page lists only 11 candidates running in 2022 for offices such as county clerk, county registrar, and county recorder–all with supervisory roles over local elections.
Run for Something notes that Steve Bannon is a former White House adviser and campaign manager to Donald Trump. said in December 2021:
We will take control of the election apparatus. American citizens who are volunteering. … They are going to volunteer to become a precinct committeeman. They will volunteer to become election officials. They will run for county clerk, and overthrow the incumbents. [incumbent]County clerks.
In a December 2021 tweet, Run for Something said of the former Trump aide: “Steve Bannon is currently recruiting candidates for the office of local election administrator. So are we.”
Snead, who is the head of Honest Elections Project, said that it is different to recruit registered Democrats or Republicans to be poll workers or monitors than to well-financed efforts to place party activists as election supervisors.
One of Run for Something’s largest donors is LinkedIn’s political arm, which gave $250,000 in the 2018 election cycle, the most recent listed by the Center for Responsive PoliticsThe, which monitors political contributions.
The 501 (c)(4) group Onward TogetherHillary Clinton founded PAC, which gave $100,000 to Run for Something in 2017. Act Blue, a PAC devoted primarily to electing Democrats nationwide, gave $50,000. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative contributed 10,000.
Election Excellence
The Alliance for Election Excellence, a $80 million five-year project, is made up of seven nonprofit organizationsThis guide is intended to assist local election offices in running elections in their respective jurisdictions.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (the leading organization) is one of seven members of the alliance.
The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative provided $350 million for the Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020. It was a left-leaning group that distributed grants mostly to Democrat-dominated precincts. This helped to increase the vote. The Zuckerbergs’ grants, dubbed Zuckerbucks, helped finance drop boxes and expanded mail-in balloting, among other activities.
Although the Alliance for Election Excellence doesn’t specify which recommendations it will promote it, critics such Snead suspect that it will be suggestions that tends to help Democrats such as expanding mail in voting.
Other groups in the alliance include the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, a project of the New Venture Fund, itself sponsored by the liberal dark money group Arabella Advisors. Arabella Advisors sponsors many left-leaning groups. Some are pop-ups that only exist for the duration a particular election cycle. Others become independent nonprofits.
The alliance’s “training” is a loophole to avoid bans on private funding of election administration in 21 states, Snead said. He stated that it is wrong to assume that this $80million project will be less effective than the $400,000,000 Zuckerberg project in 2020.
The funding was heavily directed towards expanding mail-in voting and providing drop boxes. Critics say that this could have been a “get-out-the vote” effort that helped Democrats.
“If you assume that 2020 was a learning opportunity at the very least, then certainly they could come back with potentially more effective programs the second go-around,” Snead said.
The alliance also includes the Center for Tech and Civic Life and Center for Secure and Modern Elections.
—The Center for Civic Design, an election-administration policy organization that frequently partners with left-of-center organizations.
—The Arabella-sponsored Center for Secure and Modern ElectionsThe, which advocates automatic voter registration.
—The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, part of the university’s school of engineering.
—The Elections Group, a consulting organization that works with election officials and was established in 2020 to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
—The Prototyping Systems LabUniversity of California Davis focuses on technology design.
—U.S. Digital Response, which started during the pandemic to help with state and local governments’ digital needs.
The Alliance for Election Excellence is inviting cities, counties, and other local election jurisdictions to apply for training to become “centers for excellence.” Its website says:
The alliance will provide training, mentorship, resources, and support for the centers and all election departments across the country. … Local election officials are the expert on what their voters need, and the alliance will work with each center to fill in the gaps. This could look like redesigning a form so it’s more likely a voter will successfully complete it or updating an election website so it is mobile-friendly and answers voters’ top questions.
Given the political ties of the organizations running the alliance, Heritage’s von Spakovsky said, he is skeptical that the organization is trying to train election officials in best practices.
“‘Best practices’ is a thin disguise necessary for doing what these organizations wanted to see done under the HR 1 federal bill, which was legislation that would have made fair and honest elections nearly impossible in the future,” von Spakovsky said.
The former Federal Election Commission member was referring to HR 1, dubbed the “For the People Act,” legislation from congressional Democrats that passed the House last year but died in the Senate.
The bill would have nationalized state or local election procedures by banning voter identification laws in most states, expanding controversial practice of ballot harvesting and mandating that all states allow Election Day voter registration.
Do you have a comment 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. Be sure to include the article’s URL, headline, and your name.
