Active Federal Meddling in Elections: “Bidenbucks”

Active Federal Meddling in Elections (full series)
“Bidenbucks” | “Listening Session”
Federal Bureau of Prisons | Federal Employees

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Summary: Some of the most notorious leftwing interest groups partnered with federal agencies for what amounted to a taxpayer-sponsored get-out-the-vote campaign under President Biden’s election-meddling executive order. The Biden-Harris administration kept most details for implementing the order secret, but the act itself was a brazen politicized use of government power. Making little secret of the political goals, the federal agencies aimed to boost voting by immigrants, inmates, social service recipients, and other perceived Democratic Party constituent groups.

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In October–weeks before the 2024 election, the Biden-Harris Justice Department sued Virginia for cleaning the names of 6,300 noncitizens from the voter rolls. This followed a similar lawsuit by the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the League of Women Voters of Virginia objecting to the removal.

Those two private plaintiffs in the Virginia lawsuit were represented by Campaign Legal Center, Protect Democracy, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Advancement Project.

In a near identical move the previous month, the Justice Department sued Alabama for removing 3,000 noncitizens from the voter rolls. The plaintiffs in this case were the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Campaign Legal Center, the Fair Elections Center, and the Alabama chapters of the NAACP, and the League of Women Voters.

It would almost seem as if the Justice Department was partnering with private nonprofit organizations to achieve a common goal during an election season.

As a matter of fact, five of the organizations involved in the litigation across both states—the SPLC, the League of Women Voters, the Campaign Legal Center, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Advancement Project—were part of a White House listening session, along with multiple other organizations that met to determine how to implement President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14019.

Chiefly, the Biden directive required every federal agency—including the Justice Department—to partner with private nonprofit groups as part of a taxpayer-funded get-the-vote campaign. The administration has fought disclosure on how it is implementing the order. The Justice Department even invoked presidential privilege to prevent the public release of its strategic plan for implementing the order.

As of this writing, we have no way to know whether the Justice Department lawsuits on the eve of an election were part of the executive order since the Justice Department has been shrouded in secrecy. But it certainly corresponds with what we know about the order.

Just four months after Biden signed an executive order to meddle in elections, the White House held a “listening session” that included dozens of its constituent groups known for turning out voters for Democratic candidates.

“Looking forward to our session this afternoon,” wrote Devontae Freeland, special assistant in the White House counsel’s office in a July 12, 2021, email to other federal bureaucrats across multiple agencies about the forthcoming Zoom meeting. “Attached, please find a roster of advocates who will be participating and an agenda for the meeting.”

That roster of advocates included staffers from more than four dozen left-leaning groups including big labor groups AFL-CIO and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees; the relentlessly anti–voter ID Brennan Center for Justice; the left-wing think tank Demos (which essentially wrote the executive order); the Al Sharpton-founded National Action Network; the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center; and the SPLC, known for labeling even mainstream conservative groups as “hate groups.”

“Bidenbucks”

It’s little surprise that so many interest groups would be involved in a White House session.

When Biden signed Executive Order 14019 on March 7, 2021, just weeks after taking office, the order specifically said, “Agencies shall consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process,” which would include “soliciting and facilitating approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises.” [emphasis added]

Notice these “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations” didn’t include Americans for Prosperity, the Family Research Council, or any other organization on the right.

The Biden executive order that professes to be interested only in “promoting access to voting,” but  is aligned heavily with its own crony organizations, as well as a handful of advocacy groups specifically representing ethnic groups or the disabled.

The administration initially boasted about the order, then went silent, giving only the vaguest description of how it is implementing the order. More than 50 members of Congress pressed the White House and federal agencies for answers to no avail.

In May, the House Small Business Committee subpoenaed top officials in the Small Business Administration (SBA) after the officials refused to show up for interviews regarding the agency’s election meddling in a battleground state. The SBA had entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Michigan Department of State, which oversees the state’s elections, to “promote civic engagement and voter registration in Michigan” through January 1, 2036. The SBA called the MOU, a “first-of-its-kind collaboration.”

In December 2023, the House Administration Committee advanced legislation to defund the executive order, but the measure didn’t pass the full House.

Since the executive order was issued, only trickles of information have been leaked or smoked out through the Freedom of Information Act about how the order is working and which “nonpartisan third-party organizations” are carrying out the administration’s political mission.

Occasionally White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre has mentioned it in response to a question. a day before the 2024 State of the Union address, Jean Pierre told reporters, “If you think about voting rights, the first couple of days of this administration, he put forward an executive action to do everything that he could on the federal level to deal with that issue.”

“Voting rights” is a benign way of phrasing it. Enforcing the 15th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, and similar laws is already the job of the Justice Department. The Election Assistance Commission is already charged with overseeing the Help America Vote Act. This executive order has nothing to do with protecting constitutional or legal voting rights of Americans.

Many Americans were alarmed that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spent more than $400 million on election administration that drove up the vote in heavily Democrat areas in 2020. Critics nicknamed this “Zuckerbucks” or “Zuck bucks.”

Some of those same critics warn that “Bidenbucks” is a fiercer threat to honest elections, using the full force of the federal government to partner with dozens of well-financed agenda-driven left-wing organizations for what might be an unparalleled get-out-the-vote operation aimed at electing Democrats.

Yet calling it “Bidenbucks” wouldn’t be exactly accurate. Unlike Zuckerberg who spent his own fortune, the Biden-Harris administration is using taxpayer dollars in a way that Congress never approved. Republicans could not hope to have the type of government-backed political infrastructure going into the 2024 elections.

GOP lawmakers have argued that the order could cause federal employees to violate two federal laws. The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty, in government offices, wearing government uniforms, in government vehicles, or using taxpayer dollars. The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress and prohibits any federal agency from accepting voluntary service from individuals.

Yet, the order is definitely a boon for certain left-wing nonprofits, as was evident at that July 2021 Zoom conference—the details of which mostly emerged this year.

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In the next installment, a who’s who of the far Left attended the July 2021 listening session.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/active-federal-meddling-in-elections-part-1/