The Dark Money Federal Takeover of Elections

Americans today don’t just disagree on whom to vote for – we also disagree on the best way to ensure that we have free and fair elections. The left has advocated for mail-in voting, election drop-boxes, and against requiring ID to vote, in the name of allowing as many Americans as possible to vote. The right advocates for voter ID, a tighter chain of custody for ballots, and measures to ensure that only citizens can vote.

Joe Biden against ensuring integrity of elections

Joe Biden campaigned as a uniter, but he has demonized election integrity measures as “Jim Crow 2.0” and enacted the left’s preferred election “reforms.” In fact, his administration has worked with a leftist group to transform federal agencies into voter registration offices, a move likely to help the party that offers more federal handouts.

When Biden began his term in 2021 with razor-thin Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, he urged the passage of H.R. 1, the “For the People Act.” That bill would have mandated that federal agencies remind citizens about voter registration in the course of regular duties, undermined state voter ID laws, prevented states from updating their voter registration rolls (to purge dead voters), and set up a public funding program for candidates running for Congress.

The bill never got a vote in the 50-50 Senate, so Biden signed an executive order implementing part of these agenda items in lieu of legislation. His March 7, 2021, order directed each federal agency to focus on providing access to voter registration and vote-by-mail applications, developing a plan to “promote voter registration and voter participation … in the course of activities or services that directly engage with the public.”

The Demos project

This executive order almost entirely matched a policy recommendation from the left-leaning activist group Demos. After Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Demos released a document urging the incoming administration to “make voting more accessible by directing specified federal agencies, in their administration of federal programs, to act as voter registration agencies.”

The group called for “an executive order directing federal agencies serving under-registered populations to provide voter registration services.”

President Biden didn’t just crib the executive order’s language from Demos; federal agencies also worked with Demos to implement the order.

What is Demos, and why is it calling the shots in the administration?

A left-wing think tank founded in 2000, Demos aims to “power the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy.” None other than Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, served on the organization’s founding board.

K. Sabeel Rahman left his role as Demos president to become senior counselor at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Biden in August 2022. That office forms part of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Chiraag Bains, former Demos director of legal strategies, became a special assistant to the president for criminal justice on Biden’s Domestic Policy Council in March 2021, around the same time Biden signed the elections executive order. Bains also previously served as a senior fellow at the Open Society Foundations, a left-wing money arm founded by George Soros and run by his son, Alex.

Demos’ reach

Current Demos leaders have visited the White House at least 13 times.

Various federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Indian Health Service, have worked with Demos to implement the executive order.

When implementing the order, the Justice Department, White House staff, and other government agencies held a “listening session” on July 12, 2021, inviting “nonpartisan nonprofit organizations engaged in voting rights advocacy to provide their recommendations and thoughts on best practices.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which received documents on the listening session via a Freedom of Information Act Request, checked the party affiliation and political donation history of each attendee for the meeting. Each was Democratic, except for one Green Party member.

This meeting included a host of left-leaning groups, including the AFL-CIO, the AFSCME, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the National Education Association, the Open Society Policy Center (connected to the Soros foundation mentioned above), and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Not one conservative group advocating for election integrity was invited.

Notes from the meeting quote Laura Williamson, a Demos staffer, as saying, “Don’t stop at registration. It’s just the first hurdle.” She recommended making the offer to register to vote something “integrated into service, must offer help in completing it, and an office to transmit the registration form.”

Why does this matter?

Everyone supports voter registration. Most American citizens have the right to vote, and states use voter registration systems to make sure that everyone who casts a ballot is legally qualified to do so. Although these systems are hard to maintain, they are a necessary check on fraud.

Yet if government agencies can help register voters, they can also target people who receive federal aid –people who may be more likely to vote for more government programs.

This is why left-wing groups support turning federal agencies into voter registration offices – these efforts will likely help register more Democrats, and the administrative agencies tend to lean left, anyway.

Demos’ efforts here represent just one tentacle of a vast influence campaign I call “The Woketopus,” and it’s the subject of my forthcoming book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

It works like this: the left’s dark money network – including the Open Society Foundations but also shadowy nonprofits like the New Venture Fund – bankrolls a system of woke nonprofits like Demos that staff, advise, and help call the shots in the administrative state. While the Constitution gives Congress the right to pass laws and the president the prerogative to enforce them, the administrative state has become an effective fourth branch of government, writing far more rules than Congress and often opposing the sitting president’s agenda.

Subverting elections by empowering social-program agencies to register people to vote

Demos represents one of the clearest examples of the left wielding the federal government to its advantage, and many of the groups that met with Demos in the “listening session” represent other arms of the Woketopus. My book exposes this vast network’s nefarious agenda and how it works behind the scenes to pull the levers in Washington.

The Woketopus’s efforts to turn federal agencies into voter registration offices will only deepen conservatives’ suspicions that the left is rigging elections. Americans should unite in demanding election integrity so that neither side suspects foul play after the people exercise their sovereign will on Election Day.

Sadly, it seems that even this bedrock issue has been politicized, and the Woketopus’ tentacles are all over this effort.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.