Extreme Danger: "Boring" Election Issues
by J. Christian Adams • December 4, 2022 at 5:00 am
One of the beautiful things about a democratic republic is you agree on the rules in advance. That way, everybody buys into the outcome. It's like a football game. If you were to change the rules in the middle of the game, first half Super Bowl for example, the Los Angeles Rams needed 10 yards for a first down, but in the second half, it went up to 15. That's what happened in the 2020 election, is the rules changed in the middle of the game.
The second thing that happened, and this is the most important. Philanthropy, primarily through the Center for Technology and Civic Life, started pouring money through educational 501(c)3s. The Mark Zuckerberg‑funded C3s poured money into state and local election offices. They would give the state and election office money and say, You now need to enact these policies. In the old days, giving a government official money and telling them what to do with it was called a bribe, right? It was. It was a bribe. If I were to give money to a government official and say, you need to now do this, I would be arrested. But that is what happened all over the country to the tune of almost $600 million, according to 990 filings.
Let me show you Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, the original election budget was $9 million for the city office, according to records from the city council's budget. Center for Technology and Civic Life gift to Philadelphia totaled $12.3 million, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer article on 8/26/20. They massively increased the Philadelphia budget; what did they do with the money?
These newly hired activists went door‑to‑door handing out ballots. Strangely, the ballots had what is called "undervoting" in it. They would vote for president -- and nothing down below. Because after all, there was only one important election to the crowd that was funding all of this. The city employee could not wait around on the front porch to get all those dog catcher and judge races filled in. He would go door to door to door. Also in Philadelphia, they bought radio advertisement. They did a marketing campaign.
[A] county election official... was being told by the government, by the state of Virginia Election Board, "Allow ballots to come in after the election with no postmarks." Think about that. Allow ballots to come in the mail late with no postmarks.
What happened was a full attack on the rule of law. Philanthropy was funding this just as it had with the "Zuckbucks." They were rolling over state procedures to allow ballots to be counted that under the law would not be counted.
Think of the consent of the governed. One of the reasons we agree to election rules in advance is so the loser buys into the result, right? That is why you do not change the rules in the middle of the game. That is why you do not have a billion dollars flood the zone with biased spending by election offices.
There's dark money, and there's darker dark money. What has been happening is, all of these litigation shops such as the New York University Brennan Center, League of Women Voters -- many people are not non‑biased -- all of these litigation shops are being fueled by dark money.
We do not know where Marc Elias is getting his donations. He will not say. He does not have to. He has 60 lawyers -- 60. Do some payroll calculations here. These are not fee-cases that can fuel this. You can look at the disclosures from the party apparatus to Elias. It does not add up to the accounting. Somewhere, someone is funding this.
What Elias is doing is attacking every state election law that is designed to fix what happened in 2020. Every state is under attack. We just filed to be intervenor‑defendants to help Texas, and Georgia, and wherever he goes, but we have only five lawyers. There aren't other groups like us. They have a huge, gigantic army.
My concern is in 2024, not only will 2020 be repeated, but it will get even worse.
President Biden recently proposed $10 billion of your tax dollars, federal money, to flood the zone in elections for structural transformation, turning federal agencies, for example, into turn‑out machines, turning the Justice Department into an even more weaponized tool to help one side and not the other.
What I want to leave you with, is that many have developed this massively well‑funded, philanthropic architecture, of much of which we do not know the funding sources. Are they sovereign? Are they Kellogg's Foundation? Do we even know? Are they Russian? Are they Chinese?
Election operatives have developed this architecture that changes how we run elections. Child voting, foreigners voting, early voting, mail voting.
Mail voting, by the way, is the worst form of voting there is. Let me mention a few mail voting things....We found at the Public Interest Legal Foundation that 158,000 ballots, --158,000 mail ballots in the 2020 election -- came in late and were rejected. 158,000 people lost their vote....We also found that 15 million ballots are unaccounted for. What that means is the government election office mailed out a ballot, and it never came back. Mailed it out. We don't know what happened. 15 million.
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were where the Zuckbucks money was used most effectively and not been banned, and the governor would veto any legislative change. I'm afraid it's going to happen again in those states. Those three are the places that worked, where Zuckerberg made the difference in Philadelphia and surrounding suburbs, Detroit, Madison, or Milwaukee. I'm telling you guys the reason Trump lost those states was this private spending in those urban centers through philanthropic money.
There is an effort to disbar all the lawyers. Have you guys seen project 65? Talk about architecture.... Project 65 is another "left‑wing" philanthropic effort. They have no shortage of money. Project 65 was announced a month ago. They're going to go after the law licenses of any lawyers who do anything after the election, to try to have them disbarred.
Their explicit purpose, they say this, is to shrink the talent pool of election lawyers like me to shrink the talent pool of election lawyers, so the next time we don't have soldiers who can go to court. That is literally what they say their purpose is.
Some of you may have heard that first New York City and now Washington D.C. passed a law allowing non-citizens to vote in city elections.
When I tell people in the real world about this, they don't understand what I mean at first because it sounds so outlandish because Americans are supposed to be electing American leaders -- not people from the Dominican Republic, or Chinese nationals, and so forth.
We filed a lawsuit. We've got four clients, and we're suing New York City.
You may have heard the Republican Party suing them on some procedural things. We're suing them on the 15th Amendment. The 15th Amendment was passed right after the Civil War, and it prohibits racial discrimination.