The Wisconsin Purchase

Democrats seem to know that they cannot win a national election without employing the same tactics that they used to win in 2020. As Nsé Ufot, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project, said “If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f—ed.”

What happened in 2020 involved a highly coordinated and privately funded “shadow campaign” for Joe Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system itself. Through the injection of over $419 million of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s money, laundered through the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices by nominally nonpartisan, but demonstrably ideological, nonprofit organizations and activists in key areas of swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Although CTCL and CEIR are chartered as non-partisan 501(c)(3) corporations, our research shows that the $419.5 million of CTCL and CEIR spending that took place in 2020 was highly partisan in its distribution, and highly partisan in its effects. Targeted CTCL and CEIR spending played a decisive role in building a “shadow” election system with a built-in structural bias that systematically favored Democratic votes over Republican votes.

Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, lobbying, or other costs that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. Rather, it had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by Democrat activists and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and surgically targeted, concierge-level get-out-the-vote efforts in areas heavy with Democratic voters.

The injection of bias into select local election offices through CTCL infiltration introduced structural bias into Wisconsin’s entire 2020 election. This involved favoring certain voters and voting practices over others, and disfavoring other classes of voters and voting practices, giving CTCL’s preferred voters and voting methods an outsized impact on the final election results. The outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin is not the outcome that would have occurred if the election had been conducted on the basis of established election laws, equal treatment of voters, and administrative neutrality.

CTCL In Wisconsin: Ground Zero For CTCL’s Nationwide Effort

CTCL’s Safe Elections Project in Wisconsin was not the result of a grass roots clamor for greater election funding among money-starved municipalities desperately seeking additional election funding. It was entirely a top-down endeavor, initiated by CTCL operatives, and funded by a massive inflow of money from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who cultivated connections among “Wisconsin Five” mayors and other city officials, incentivized the first grant applications, and provided funds and advice to aid in their completion.

CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election began in Racine. In late May, CTCL issued a $100,000 grant to the southeast Wisconsin city to “recruit other Wisconsin cities to join the ‘Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan.’” Racine Mayor Cory Mason spoke to his fellow liberal mayors in Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Kenosha about accepting CTCL’s grants—with the proviso that there would be strings attached.
CTCL authorized the City of Racine to distribute from its initial $100,000 grant, $10,000 to each of the four recruited cities (keeping $10,000 for itself), as an incentive for them to participate with Racine in applying for the larger CTCL conditional grants.

Emails obtained through public records requests show Mason’s office in May 2020 setting up numerous virtual meetings with the four other mayors three months before CTCL publicly announced the first round of grants to the “Wisconsin 5” on July 7, 2020. The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, and CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election was the culmination of a collaborative effort between CTCL’s activist directors and election officials in Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine. These cities would soon come to be referred to in CTCL inner circles as “The Wisconsin 5.”

At least 10 other cities in areas that were important to Democratic efforts to retake Wisconsin would eventually seek to become part of the plan by applying for and accepting significant CTCL grants considerably in excess of the minimum $5,000 offered to non-urban election offices throughout the state.

CTCL And “The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan” to Infiltrate Wisconsin’s Election System

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan—which would emerge out of a collaboration between high level CTCL Advisors, several representatives of the Pierre Omidyar funded National Vote at Home Institute, and Milwaukee’s City Clerk office during Summer, 2020—was the lynchpin of CTCL’s involvement in Wisconsin’s 2020 election. Fulfilling its major objectives was a condition for CTCL funding. City officials among The Wisconsin 5 signed off on “clawback provisions” that allowed CTCL to reclaim their grant money if it was not used to further the objectives contained in the plan.

For example, the CTCL contract that Green Bay approved warns that the grant was to be used “only for” safe and secure election administration, “and for no other purposes,” which means under the ambitious terms they set forth in their portion of the WSVP. The grant’s clawback provision stated that “CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part of the grant funds if it determines, in its sole judgment, that (a) any of the above conditions have not been met or (b) it must do so to comply with applicable laws or regulations.”

How The Wisconsin 5 Sought to Implement CTCL’s Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan: Bonfire of the Inanities

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan lists CTCL’s four major strategic objectives.

• First, to “encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and submission, and the installation of ballot drop boxes
• Second, to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”
• Third, to recruit new election workers, mainly from among paid young activists who would replace the usual, older election day volunteers.
• A distant fourth, both in emphasis and level of funding, was the funding of Covid-19 related safety measures.

CTCL funded election offices in Wisconsin seemed particularly intent on courting a demographic favored by the activists at CTCL—a loosely defined “New American Majority” coalition—to replace the working-class voters who had abandoned the party in droves in 2016, and who formerly made up a significant part of the old Democratic “Blue Wall” in the industrial upper Midwest.

This coalition encompasses people of color, single women, young people, and is often extended to include members of the LGBTQ community. Two of the non-profits most closely affiliated with CTCL, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, are at the forefront of proponents of this electoral strategy. According to Democracy Docket, “In the 2020 election, VPC and CVI overcame unprecedented challenges to help engage voters from the New American Majority.”

Addressing these challenges would involve a large commitment of financial and human resources in Wisconsin. There was therefore considerable anguish expressed in the Wisconsin Safe Voting plan about the “hand holding” level of assistance that such voters required in order to cast valid votes, even under greatly relaxed absentee ballot standards during Covid-19 afflicted 2020. To meet this need, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine together budgeted over $540 thousand of their CTCL grant money toward various forms of “non-partisan voter education” alone.

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan outlined the prodigious efforts that the Wisconsin Five were willing to make in order to bend the election system from within toward these untapped tranches of low-propensity potential Democratic voters, and thereby increase Democratic votes in their cities, and in the statewide totals. Established by officials of the Wisconsin Five in collaboration with CTCL advisors, it would serve as the general template for CTCL’s efforts in other key swing states nationwide. It is an extravagant wish list of far-left Democratic election concerns and priorities……

William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections. Previously, he was associate professor and chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Dallas.

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Continue reading this article, published on December 24, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.