A ‘Well-Funded Cabal’ Influenced the 2020 Election—What Lies Ahead in 2024?

Republicans may be holding a losing hand this November as the Democratic Party
uses the advantages it gained during and after the 2020 election cycle.

 

TheEpochTimes.com

While former President Donald Trump appears to be cruising toward the GOP nomination, and with a polling lead over incumbent President Joe Biden in key swing states, Republicans will likely face a much steeper climb in the general election than they realize.

Fundamental changes in state election laws, coupled with an alliance of left-wing federal, corporate, financial, and nonprofit entities, have handed the Democratic Party advantages that the GOP may be unable to overcome.

In the decades before 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) machines each had their own unique strengths: The RNC had the money and the DNC had the troops.

As noted in the book “The Victory Lab,” an analysis by political journalist Sasha Issenberg, Republicans excelled at fundraising and spent heavily on messaging through paid television, radio, and online ads. The DNC, with its voters often concentrated in urban centers, called on its foot soldiers, most notably students and union leaders, to go door-to-door and stir up support.

While praising the effort, Ms. Ball said that the actors “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”

The “conspiracy,” as Ms. Ball described it, included DNC operatives, union leaders, tech and social-media companies, Wall Street bankers, and a network of nonprofit donor funds that pooled hundreds of millions of dollars to finance “armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.”

While the coalition’s purpose, ostensibly, was “saving democracy,” the overriding goal was to keep President Trump from winning a second term.

And the “well-funded cabal” appears to be gearing up for a repeat performance in 2024, with a few new twists.

An editor looks at the official Twitter account of President Donald Trump in Los Angeles on May 26, 2020,
with two tweets by the president under which Twitter posted a link reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.”
(-/AFP via Getty Images)

The DNC and groups allied with them rely on a five-part strategy to ensure that President Trump didn’t then and will not now get a second term.

That strategy includes intense legal pressure on state election officials to loosen voter integrity laws, a data nerve center that contains personal profiles of voters to predict how they will vote, an alliance of left-wing foot soldiers to bring out Democratic votes in key swing states, a collection of groups capable of bringing violence and mass unrest to cities and towns if called upon, and a network of financing vehicles to fund it all.

“That effort involved voiding basic security protocols on election procedures, including absentee ballots, and pushing for the equivalent of all-mail elections, which would give their activists a free hand in pressuring, coercing, and influencing voters in their homes in ways they are unable to do in polling places,” political analysts John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky wrote in their 2021 book titled “Our Broken Elections.”

“To force these changes, they ended up filing more election-related lawsuits than had ever been filed in an election year in U.S. history,” the authors said.

Perhaps the most enticing of all the electoral opportunities presented by the pandemic and civil unrest was the advent of universal, unsolicited mail-in ballots, which are still in use in some states.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 43 percent of American voters cast their ballot by mail in 2020, compared to 21 percent who did so in 2016.

In their book, Mr. Fund and Mr. von Spakovsky wrote that “the flood of millions of mail-in ballots opened the system to unprecedented confusion and largely untraceable fraud.”

“There’s a reason that a bipartisan commission co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter in 2005 called mail-in absentee ballots the ‘largest source of potential voter fraud’ and that most countries in the European Union have banned ‘postal voting’ over the same concerns,” they wrote.

Poll workers receive Vote-by-Mail ballots in a drive thru system setup at the Election Headquarters polling station
on October 19, 2020 in Doral, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

“Because the tax code allowed nonprofit organizations to run registration and turnout drives as long as they did not push a particular candidate,” Mr. Issenberg wrote, “organizing ‘historically disenfranchised’ communities became a backdoor approach to ginning up Democratic votes outside the campaign finance laws.”

One example of what Mr. Fund and Mr. von Spakovsky call the “privatization” of state election systems by wealthy donors, is the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a group that is nominally nonpartisan but led by Democrat activists.

CTCL received $350 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ostensibly to protect the health of voters and election officials during the pandemic.

These “Zuckerbucks,” as they have come to be known, were channeled through CTCL into 2,500 mostly liberal jurisdictions to pay for new polling locations, ballot drop boxes, “voter education” centers, and campaigns to reach non-English-speaking voters, according to the authors.

In one instance, CTCL gave $10 million to the city of Philadelphia, whose entire election administration budget was $15 million before the grant. However, CTCL stipulated that the funds be used for “private printing and postage for mail-in ballots and to scatter ballot drop boxes,” the authors wrote.

A voter delivers his early voting ballot at drop box outside of City Hall in Philadelphia
on Oct. 17, 2020. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)

“CTCL’s intervention effectively greased the wheels for an unprecedented flood of largely untraceable, potentially fraudulent mail-in ballots submitted via private drop boxes throughout an urban stronghold for the Democratic Party with no official oversight or accountability after the fact,” Mr. Fund and Mr. von Spakovsky stated.

Donations from CTCL weren’t spread evenly across the country but rather concentrated in swing states, according to analysts.

And as journalist Mollie Hemingway detailed in her 2021 book, “Rigged,” less than 2 percent of CTCL funds were actually spent on COVID-related protection equipment; most of the rest financed efforts by left-wing organizations to bring in more ballots, particularly in left-leaning jurisdictions within swing states.

“The five cities of Wisconsin that received Zuck Bucks outsourced much of their election operation to private liberal groups,” Ms. Hemingway wrote.

“In one case, the private group’s control was so extensive that a government official frustrated at being sidelined by Zuckerberg-funded out-of-state activists quit her job before the election

“While Zuckerbucks-receiving counties [in Georgia] won by Donald Trump were granted nearly $2.3 million—at a rate of $1.91 per registered voter—Joe Biden counties that received Zuckerbucks were given nearly $29 million, at a far higher rate of $7.13 per registered voter,” the report reads.

“It’s targeted voter registration,” Steward Whitson, FGA legal director, told The Epoch Times. “You don’t have to worry about turning out more Republican voters if you focus your efforts in places where the vast majority of voters are going to lean left.”

Pennsylvania was a similar case.

All five of the counties that received the most “Zuckerbucks” were won by Mr. Biden (Allegheny, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia), the report states, and those counties account for 81 percent ($17,993,405) of all grants to Pennsylvania.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan attend an event in Mountain View, Calif., on Nov. 3, 2019.
(Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize)

“It’s not ‘everybody votes,’” Scott Walter, CRC president, told The Epoch Times. “It’s ‘the right people vote in a half dozen states that we really care about so we can seize power in Washington.’”

In Arizona, CTCL efforts succeeded in increasing voter turnout for both parties but heavily favored Democrat-voting counties, Mr. Fund and Mr. von Spakovsky wrote.

Analysts say that, despite the fact that the United States isn’t currently in the grip of a pandemic, the practice of widespread, unsolicited mail-in balloting continues, particularly in key swing states.

“Compared to pre-2020 elections, [state] laws are still far less secure in terms of election integrity than they were prior to COVID, and the biggest reason for that is that many states have now adopted plans that allow for widespread mail-in balloting,” Mr. Haskins said.

“Among the swing states, which is really where the election is going to be decided, very little has been done to improve the security of mail-in balloting.

“The reason for this is that in many of those states, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, governors are in office who do not support strong election integrity laws, so legislatures have struggled in those states to pass legislation.”

Electoral workers inspect a ballot during the vote-by-mail ballot scanning process at the Miami-Dade County Election Department
in Miami, Florida on November 3, 2020. (Chandan Khanna/Getty Images)

Governors in most key swing states, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, are Democrats.

Since the 2020 election, 29 states, including Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, have passed laws banning payments of private money to state election systems, according to the FGA.

“It’s keeping private funding out of the one part of elections that is supposed to be nonpartisan, and that is election administration,” Mr. Whitson said.

In Michigan and Wisconsin, however, Democrat governors vetoed the legislation.