Active Federal Meddling in Elections: “Listening Session”

Active Federal Meddling in Elections (full series)
“Bidenbucks” | “Listening Session”
Federal Bureau of Prisons | Federal Employees

“Listening Session”

While a who’s who of the far Left attended the July 2021 listening session, only a few gave presentations, based on the meeting agenda that later became public.

Documents on the “listening session” were obtained by the Foundation for Government Accountability and the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project from the Justice Department through the Freedom of Information Act.

Justin Levitt, the White House senior policy advisor for democracy and voting rights, kicked off the event along with Jesselyn McCurdy, a vice president with the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights.

Later, representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Sentencing Project, and the Campaign Legal Center spoke about “voting rights for those incarcerated in federal custody.”

Keeda Haynes—legal adviser with the Sentencing Project, a legal assistance and training organization for prisoners—said “eligible voters who are incarcerated have been left out of voting.” Haynes added, “Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression.”

Later on, a representative of the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action talked about one of the Left’s favorite strategies: “vote by mail.”

Jose Morales, the deputy director of Fair Fight Action, which opposes voter ID and practically any other election integrity measure, called for allowing federal employees to take the day off to vote. Morales also complained that “based on experiences last year and this year, there are many new ID requirements.”

Also on the “listening session” agenda, the League of Women Voters representative talked about voter registration at naturalization ceremonies by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In August 2023, the USCIS issued new guidance directing USCIS offices to facilitate voter registration at naturalization ceremonies.

Meanwhile, a representative from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund talked about “immigration and citizenship issues” concerning voting, according to the agenda. Nik Youngsmith, legislative staff attorney for the fund, spoke about “immigrants and noncitizens.”

To Youngsmith’s credit, he seemed to express caution, even if it was for the sole purpose of keeping the immigrants out of trouble. The meeting notes paraphrase Youngsmith as saying, “We support registration efforts. We also want to make sure they are done in a careful way.” “All fed employees must be well trained in this. Need to trust people are acting in bounds of the law. Especially when there are language issues. Federal employees should know who should be properly registered and not. Don’t want someone to face charges for registering on bad info.”

At the meeting, two ACLU lawyers Sarah Brannon and Ceridwen Cherry explained that the HealthCare.gov website, better known as the Obamacare exchanges, reaches 20 million people per year and should be used for signing up voters.

Laura Williamson, then associate director of Demos, told the confab on Zoom that the Department of Housing and Urban Development should register voters at public housing units. It also called for the Fair Housing Administration to engage in voter registration when making loans to buy homes. Sure enough, shortly thereafter, the public housing units became voter registration centers.

However, tying voting into housing, health care, or other government benefits could easily give a beneficiary a wrong impression, given the power disparity. “Nice government benefits you have there. It would be a real shame if something happened to them.”

Progress Report

While Congress, the press and the public wasn’t allowed to see how the plan was working, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of administration allies, seemed to know plenty.

The Leadership Conference is an umbrella of about 200 mostly left-leaning organizations that would go on to grade the effort. The coalition includes far-left groups, more center-left groups, and even some mainline Protestant Christian denominations. It has previously characterized updating voter registration lists to remove the names of dead people or people who have moved out of a voting jurisdiction as voter “purges.”

In March 2023, the organization released a “progress report” signed by 53 left-of-center organizations that evaluated 10 federal agencies on how they were working to turn out voters. Not surprisingly, many of the signatories of the progress report were participants in the White House Zoom session nearly two years earlier.

“We estimate that, if these agencies integrate a high-quality voter registration opportunity for the people they serve, as recommended in this report, they could collectively generate an additional 3.5 million voter registration applications per year,” the progress report says.

The report determined that three agencies—the Department of Interior, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Treasury Department—were “on the right track.”

According to the report, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, the U.S. Marshalls Service, and the Bureau of Prisons still had “work to do,”

The report said that the Department of Education, the Indian Health Service, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were “falling behind.”

In the next installment, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has aligned with several left-of-center nonprofits on inmate voting rights.