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Democrats have two weapons to win elections, creating and mobilizing electoral clienteles and manipulating the electoral processes in their favor. Following the 2020 elections, several states enacted laws to ensure electoral integrity. Arizona, Texas, and Florida banned private financing of election offices. Others revise their ballot harvesting laws and strengthened the custody of mail ballots and mailboxes.
The governors of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan and Louisiana vetoed any legislation restricting or prohibiting private financing of elections. A giant, well-funded leftist litigation apparatus attacked all post-2020 election reforms in federal and state courts. Now they are blocking reforms in the courts.
Arizona legislated to ensure that only citizens could register to vote, and immediately sued the organization Mi Familia Vota. Kansas had earlier tried to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. He sued the ACLU and a federal judge ruled in his favor in 2018. The Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, the Supreme Court did not take the case, and Kansas taxpayers paid court costs.
In Florida, a federal judge struck down the SB90 election integrity legislative package passed after the 2020 election. SB90 mandated that mail ballot delivery boxes be monitored to ensure ballot security, prohibited third parties from interacting with voters within 150 feet of mailboxes or ballot boxes, reduced the validity of vote-by-mail ballot applications from two elections to one, and required mail ballot applications to include voter verification information.
Judge Mark E. Walker ruled that the requirement to protect ballot boxes would have a discriminatory impact on black voters, the prohibition against interacting with voters near a mailbox would violate the First Amendment, and limiting the validity of vote-by-mail ballot applications from two elections to one election would violate the Voting Rights Act because black voters use vote-by-mail voting. Walker also concluded that providing part of the Social Security number to request mail-in ballots would hurt white voters more than black voters; and accepted the legality of the requirement.
Mi Familia Vota sued SB90 in Florida along with the League of Women Voters of Florida Education Fund Inc, League of Women Voters of Florida Inc, Black Voters Matter Fund Inc. and Florida Alliance for Retired Americans Inc. They are organizations that claim to be “nonpartisan,” but the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, according to InfluenceWatch.com, would be a facade of unions dedicated to pushing the progressive left-wing agenda at the local level. Federal records note that they are funded by the AFL-CIO, the postal workers union, SEIU and Amalgamated Transit Union.
Why is this concerning? Well, remember the role of the union bureaucracy in the widespread 2020 “shadow campaign” to hide critical information, going so far as to censor media on major social networks, change the rules and influence election officials, and fund, protect and justify incendiary looting, among other things proudly revealed by the complicit Time magazine.
Speaking of “voter turnout” in 2020, hundreds of millions of dollars in private money funded all of that. Now the Biden administration will employ the federal government to promote “voter turnout” in 2022, mobilizing all federal agencies for the vote of “historically marginalized communities” — a euphemism for racial groups.
Biden has already proposed a $10 billion federal fund to expand 2020-type cash injections to election offices for a decade. He also requested another $5 billion for the Postal Service to expand vote-by-mail voting. Even if he gets less, these are amounts that make amounts like the $300 million Mark Zuckerberg spent on “voter turnout” insignificant, to make what happened in 2020 happen. All together it points to the enormous risk of a new and much larger “shadow campaign” against a red wave in 2022.
Guillermo Rodríguez is a professor of Political Economy in the extension area of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at Universidad Monteávila, in Caracas. A researcher at the Juan de Mariana Center and author of several books // Guillermo es profesor de Economía Política en el área de extensión de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas de la Universidad Monteávila, en Caracas, investigador en el Centro Juan de Mariana y autor de varios libros