The Left’s Plot to Take Over Election Administration: Power of Election Officials

The Left’s “Dark Money” Plot to Take Over Election Administration (full series)
Power of Election Officials | Clerk Work
U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence | Big Tech Funding

Summary: The Left is less focused today on criminal justice reform than on sweeping election law change, many of which they hope will ring in permanent Democrat majorities in Congress and various state legislatures. House Democrats passed For the People Act (H.R. 1), which would effectively ban voter ID, mandate localities to allow voter registration on Election Day, expand ballot harvesting, and essentially nationalize corruption by undermining the most basic election safeguards. The legislation thankfully died in the Senate, but the Left has a multipronged strategy for seizing control of the elections process. One prong is emulating the Soros prosecutor strategy by taking over local election offices across the United States, putting national campaign resources into what had previously been low-dollar, down-ballot local campaigns.

Over the past year, conservatives have pushed back against far-left prosecutors elected largely after George Soros, a Hungarian American billionaire, poured tens of millions from his personal fortune into the Justice and Public Safety Political Action Committee (PAC), and other efforts, to overhaul the criminal justice system from the bottom up.

But the Left is less focused today on criminal justice reform than on sweeping election law change, many of which they hope will ring in permanent Democrat majorities in Congress and various state legislatures. House Democrats passed For the People Act (H.R. 1), which would effectively ban voter ID, mandate localities to allow voter registration on Election Day, expand ballot harvesting, and essentially nationalize corruption by undermining the most basic election safeguards.

The legislation thankfully died in the Senate, but the Left has a multipronged strategy for seizing control of the elections process. One is emulating the Soros prosecutor strategy. Only this time the goal is to take over local election offices across the United States, putting national campaign resources into what had previously been low-dollar, down-ballot local campaigns.

Two left-wing organizations are taking different but complementary strategies to taking over the nation’s election infrastructure. Both initiatives began in April 2022, and both aim to spend $80 million each. Although George Soros’s money isn’t behind either of these efforts, both are certainly following his bottom-up approach to implementing change without having to bother with changing any laws.

Run for Something is applying the Soros model more directly. The 527 PAC established the Clerk Work program in April to bankroll liberal candidates running for election clerks, election supervisors, registrars, recorders, and other local officials charged with running elections. In some jurisdictions, this includes judges. The group is spreading the $80 million over three years.

In a separate effort, the U.S. Alliance for Election Assistance is spending $80 million over five years on training and coaching of election officials. This sounds benign enough until seeing the alliance is a coalition of left-leaning groups financed largely by Big Tech–connected donors.

The key organization behind the alliance is the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which distributed $350 million in “Zuckerbucks” to local election jurisdictions in 2020. Zuckerbucks is the nickname derisively given to the grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, named for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. While 24 states have enacted bans on private money for elections, critics say the U.S. Alliance for Election Assistance has found a loophole to those bans through financing the coaching.

The Power of Election Officials

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is quoted saying, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”

In the United States, infamous Tammany Hall boss William Tweed once said, “The ballots made no results; the counter made the result.”

Since 2000, after a contested presidential race in Florida, the Left saw the value of electing secretaries of state to supervise elections. But the focus on county clerks is relatively new.

Don’t think for a moment that local election administrators are inconsequential.

Some of the controversies in the 2020 election provided a glimpse into the clout local election officials can have and the consequences that incompetence can have on trust in the outcome.

Just as far-left prosecutors can’t make laws but have wide latitude in prosecutorial discretion and what sentences to seek, officials on other levels of government have broad discretion—including chief election officials.

Election officials don’t make election law but have the power to interpret and enforce state election regulations. These clerks can decide on such matters as which absentee ballots to count that come in after Election Day, how strictly to enforce voter ID or signature-matching requirements, and how closely poll watchers may monitor the ballot counting on Election Day.

County-level election officials are directly elected in 22 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 18 states divide election administration duties between two or more officials, one of whom is usually elected. In 10 states, elected officials appoint members to a local board of elections.

Whether elected or appointed, misconduct by election officials has been a source of scandal over the last decade.

In 2022, in Philadelphia, former U.S. Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers (D-PA) pleaded guilty in federal court to bribing the city’s election officials to stuff ballot boxes in local races. Credit: Latest News Today. License: https://bit.ly/3hPdiB5.

In 2022, in Philadelphia, former U.S. Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers (D-PA) pleaded guilty in federal court to bribing the city’s election officials to stuff ballot boxes in local races. In Philadelphia, these officials are known as judges of elections. The federal probe commenced in 2020 under the Trump administration Justice Department when several lower-level officials cut a deal with federal prosecutors who were aiming at Myers, the ringleader and a Democrat operative in Pennsylvania since leaving Congress in 1980 over his involvement in the Abscam bribery scandal. The Biden administration continued the prosecution, wrapping up the case with the Myers conviction.

In a 2017 lawsuit, Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes (D) admitted that the county had more registered voters than eligible voters and that noncitizens and ineligible felons may have voted in past elections, the Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL) reported. Moreover, a Florida state judge ruled in 2018 that Snipes violated the law when she destroyed ballots from a Democrat congressional primary in August 2016. Not long after taking office, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) removed Snipes from office. Florida empowers governors to remove county officials.

In Wisconsin, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus (R) resigned in 2012 after saying that “human error” led to the late discovery of 14,000 uncounted votes in a contested election, Mother Jones reported.

That same year the Associated Press reported in West Virginia that Lincoln County Clerk Donald Whitten (D) pleaded guilty to stuffing ballot boxes and falsifying absentee ballots in 2010,

These are some of the worst examples of misconduct or incompetence. But a nationalized push to politicize what had largely been a job based more on competence than ideology poses a significant danger to democracy.

In the next installment, Run for Something recruits thousands of liberal Democrat candidates for state and local election offices.