Politics
worked vigorously, supporting new election laws and opposing such mea- sures from the other side. But Democrat groups draw special
concern because they are often provid- ing “nonpartisan” training to election officials and seeking private money to flow more freely. In Georgia, the Hopewell Fund and
Secure Democracy USA dispatched lobbyists to the Atlanta capitol build- ing to water down a bill banning pri- vate funding of elections two weeks before its passage in March 2021. They won a loophole that allowed
DeKalb County to accept a $2 mil- lion grant from CTCL — despite the law having been drafted in part by Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Now it looks like some of these
states will have to go back and amend their legislation to ensure things like DeKalb can’t happen,” Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heri- tage Action for America, said. Utah lawmakers last year passed a
measure prohibiting elections offices from accepting private grants. “The way it’s written, I could
technically take grant money if I wanted for certain activities, but I
choose not to because I don’t want to push the envelope,” Ricky Hatch, Weber County clerk and a member of CTCL’s advisory board, said in a Zoom event earlier this year. CTCL’s allies include the National
Vote at Home Institute, the Center for Democracy & Technology, Vot- ing Rights Lab, Rock the Vote, and the Center for Secure and Modern Elections. The groups over the past several
years have worked with CTCL on symposiums and presentations to election officials across the U.S. The go-to for elections workshops
and information has for decades been the Election Center, the national association of election offi- cials, which holds numerous events each year. The Election Center’s spokeswom-
an and CEO of programs is CTCL board director Tammy Patrick, who is a senior adviser to the elections division of the Democracy Fund. Patrick said in an email that elec-
tion training “continues to evolve,” and that as technology changes, more training is needed. “Although [the] Election Center
strives to meet every need our mem- bership has, this is where our rela-
tionships with academic institutions, partner organizations, and other gov- ernment agencies play a vital role in keeping election professionals cur- rent,” Patrick wrote. The Biden administration has
sought to stem state probes of pos- sible voting malfeasance, sending both broad and specific warnings to states engaged in post-election studies that would potentially catch election malfeasance. “Since 2018, we’ve seen Democrats
catch up with the Republican strat- egy of getting voters to vote,” said Paul Bentz, a political consultant in Arizona. Voter registration, early voting,
and mail-in ballots are cornerstones of the strategy, he said. Mac Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, said his party needs to become more aggressive in elections, using some of the same tactics as their opponents. “When you’ve lost so many elec-
tions, you finally have to decide to fight fire with fire,” said Warner, who is a gubernatorial candidate for 2024. “You don’t win elections by not get-
ting ballots out there. You can start play- ing by their rules and win an election. It’s time to go in another direction.”
‘Zuckerbucks’ Boosted Democrats Big-Time M
any of the progressive groups seeking to
influence elections are connected to Arabella Advisors, a Washington-based, for-profit consulting company founded by Eric Kessler, a White House appointee during the Clinton administration.
Arabella’s projects, which include the New Venture Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and Secure Democracy USA, had combined revenues of $1.3 billion between 2020 and 2021, tax filings show. Nonprofits supported
by Arabella in 2020 gave out $529 million to “defend democracy.” That coincided with the
rise of private-public election partnerships as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, who donated an estimated $350
48 NEWSMAX | MAY 2023
million to the progressive Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to support local efforts in the pandemic-challenged 2020 election. The voting was marked by
social-distancing rule changes encouraging early and mail balloting, imposing policies that Republicans seek to roll back to pre-pandemic rules. The grants of
“Zuckerbucks” or “Zuckbucks,” as they are referred to by conservative critics, were supposed to be nonpartisan, but research indicated they were disproportionately
allocated to areas to boost Democrat voter turnout. Apart from legislative curbs on private financing of elections, Republicans so far have not shown any interest in countering their opponents’ strategies. Scott Walter, president
of the conservative Capital Research Center, told a Zoom audience of Greenwich, Connecticut, residents in March that 2020 was an outlier in the way voting was shaped by outside influences. “There haven’t been any efforts by Republicans that we’re aware of to do anything like this anywhere,” he said. — S.M.
CZI/TWITTER
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