Deception & Misdirection

The Origins of “Zuck Bucks”: Getting Out the (Democratic) Vote


The Origins of “Zuck Bucks” (full series)
Getting Out the (Democratic) Vote | New Organizing Institute
Reaching the Emerging Majority | Center for Tech and Civic Life


Summary: The New Organizing Institute (NOI) is the predecessor of the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the organization behind “Zuck bucks.” From 2005 to 2015, NOI had one purpose: elect Democrats. NOI dissolved amid allegations of financial mismanagement in late 2015. Its activist training arm was absorbed by RePower, which churns out campaign organizers, while three top staffers—Whitney May, Tiana Epps-Johnson, and Donny Bridges—left to found CTCL in Chicago to advocate for election “reforms.” The rest is history.

 

The first step to civic engagement beyond registration is turning out to vote . . . Once people are registered, they are highly likely to vote . . .

—New Organizing Institute, 2011

 

When did professional activists first scheme to hijack America’s elections with $350 million from Mark Zuckerberg? Concerned citizens have sought the answer to that question since November 2020. Newly discovered documents suggest the plan may go back a decade or more.

This is the New Organizing Institute (NOI), the brains behind the “progressive” turnout machine that went defunct in 2015—yet still haunts our elections today.

Getting Out the (Democratic) Vote

NOI is the predecessor of the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the organization behind “Zuck bucks.” From 2005 to 2015, NOI had one purpose: elect Democrats, earning it the Washington Post’s praise as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry” and “the Left’s think tank for campaign know-how.” CNN even quoted a supposedly fearful Republican staffer calling NOI “the Left’s new Death Star.”

Notably, NOI was part of the Funders Committee for Civic Participation, a convening of major funders and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operatives that take advantage of IRS 501(c)(3) voter registration rules to “organize and mobilize communities,” “hold elected officials accountable,” and “achieve policy impact.” The committee boasts that this in-house model helped turn Colorado into a Democratic bastion.

A 2010 NOI report on using new technologies to enhance registration rates thanks the Funders Committee for funding the group’s research.

NOI dissolved amid allegations of financial mismanagement in late 2015. Its activist training arm was absorbed by RePower (formerly Wellstone Action), which churns out campaign organizers, while three top staffers—Whitney May, Tiana Epps-Johnson, and Donny Bridges—left to found CTCL in Chicago to advocate for election “reforms.”

NOI, it turns out, didn’t so much die as evolve.


Also read our deep-dive report on New Organizing Institute.


Too Many Whites in the Electorate

But a secret memo entitled “Using Voter Registration to Reshape the U.S. Electorate” places NOI—and, by extension, CTCL—squarely in the Left’s plans to radically “reshape” America’s electorate wholesale using a targeted, ruthless voter registration campaign. Its end goal: the 2020 election.

The memo is dated February 27, 2015, and was developed by Corridor Partners, a DC environmental activist consultancy led by Bill J. Roberts, former board chair for the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund and an former official for the Bermuda mega-funder Atlantic Philanthropies (which spent itself out of existence in 2020).

From Roberts the memo went to Molly McUsic, president of the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss’s Wyss Foundation (a major environmental donor), then on to the infamous Democratic operative and Clinton crony John Podesta, co-founder of the Center for American Progress. The memo was nabbed in 2016 as part of Podesta’s leaked emails and posted by WikiLeaks.

Amazingly, the 26-page Corridor Partners memo boasts that its proposed “large-scale, multi-year voter registration programs” could “fundamentally reshape the electorate in as many as 13 states” by 2020. How? By exclusively registering “non-white” citizens (a phrase featured 18 times in the document), whom leftists believe will uniformly vote for Democrats far into the future.

“The goal is to generate an adequate number of voters to exceed the vote margin in years when key elections are happening,” the memo observes, adding:

But, sometimes it is necessary to get a head start and begin the [registration] program two or four years before in order to have time to produce the necessary voter registration applications [emphasis added].

The price-tag: $105–$210 million in eight to 13 states, notably Arizona, Georgia, Texas, and other battlegrounds.

In Florida alone Corridor Partners estimated that its programs could produce an additional 108,748 new non-white voters, enough to “influence the policy positions in upcoming elections.” The memo argued that voter registration alone could achieve this leverage in nine states and nearly achieve it in another five.


In the next installment, the New Organizing Institute advises Democrats on how to target of the “emerging majority.”

Hayden Ludwig

Hayden Ludwig is the Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America. He was formerly Senior Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. Ludwig is a native of Orange County, California,…
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