Active Federal Meddling in Elections: Federal Bureau of Prisons

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

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Federal Bureau of Prisons

The Federal Bureau of Prisons announced that it aligned with the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, the Campaign Legal Center, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee, Disability Rights DC, and the Sentencing Project to help increase voting among former inmates and even some in the incarcerated population.

These are also organizations that consistently railed against the most common and popular election integrity measures.

In 2018, the ACLU launched a $25 million campaign attacking Republican politicians for, among other things, wanting to ensure that only citizens can vote, Politico reported. That same year, the ACLU also spent $5 million on a Florida ballot initiative to push felon voting, which would add an estimated 1.5 million to the state’s voter rolls.

The Campaign Legal Center mostly engages in election-related litigation such as lawsuits over redistricting. The organization has opposed voter ID laws, opposed proof of citizenship laws, and supported voting for released felons.

The Washington Lawyers’ Committee is a left-of-center organization that supports increased use of welfare programs and expansionist immigration policies. The organization has been funded by left-leaning groups such as Equal Justice Works and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union.

The Sentencing Project has advocated for ending voting restrictions on ex-felons and for allowing full voting rights for incarcerated individuals.

The prison bureau said the League of Women Voters (LWV) helped distribute an informational voting video, offer civics education classes, and voter registration drives at federal correctional institutions.

Though the LWV says it’s about voting, it has advocated for more welfare spending, for liberal environmental policies, on gun restrictions, and in favor of the United States joining the International Criminal Court. The group also claimed the 2016 election was “rigged.”

Most states bar convicted felons from voting on at least a temporary basis. However, certain incarcerated individuals—such as someone awaiting trial—are eligible to vote.

“If comprehensively implemented, it should significantly increase voting access for eligible voters incarcerated in BOP facilities—who face some of the highest hurdles to participating in our democracy,” the Leadership Conference’s progress report said, adding later: “While BOP issued some helpful materials and has been working on making changes to provide voter registration services to eligible individuals under federal custody or control, they have been slow to implement such changes.”

The Bureau of Prisons further partnered with other local nonprofits, such as Chicago Votes to bring voter education and registration to the Metropolitan Correctional Center Chicago. Chicago Vote focuses on increasing the youth and prisoner vote in Chicago, using such programs as “Reimagining Democracy,” “Give a Sh*t Chicago,” and “Cook County Jail Votes.”

Agriculture Department Farming Democratic Voters

Under Biden’s executive order, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has tried to enlist voters through farm policy, as well as through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps.

According to records, USDA officials met with executives from Demos. Demos was an obvious fit, as the liberal New York City think tank wrote the first draft of Biden’s executive order, which it published on December 3, 2020, in a report titled “Executive Action to Advance Democracy: What the Biden-Harris Administration and the Agencies Can Do to Build a More Inclusive Democracy.”

The White House has been hands on in how the USDA would go about imposing the order as well. In April 2021, Paul Zeiss with the White House scheduling office sent a list of “stakeholders” on voting issues to then USDA official Akhil Rakam that called for partnering with two clearly left-leaning organizations, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the sixth largest labor union in the United States, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, a group that sued Texas in 2006 over the state’s redistricting and challenged Texas election reform laws in 2021.

Other groups the White House suggested to the USDA were less overt, such as the Intertribal Agriculture Council, the National Black Farmers Association, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, the National Association of Counties, the Rebuild Rural Coalition, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the American Public Human Services Association, and Rural Organizing.

U.S. Trade Representative

The Office of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) doesn’t typically have anything to do with elections and voting. Nevertheless, the office has been carrying out the president’s mission on this.

The trade office has been working with the Brennan Center for Justice, which has been the Darth Vader of opposition to voter ID laws that are popular with about 80 percent of the public.

The Brennan Center has also supported liberal redistricting policies, automatic voter registration, voting for convicted felons, and including illegal immigrants in the population for congressional apportionment. The group also wants to scrap the Electoral College for a national popular vote for president.

On its website, the Brennan Center lists multiple court cases where it has opposed voter ID. The organization has also advocated for vast expansion of mail-in voting. The Brennan Center has characterized efforts to update voter registration rolls by removing the names of dead voters and voters who moved out of town as “purges.”

The USTR’s strategic plan is among the few that became public:

In addition to featuring senior USTR officials, USTR will seek to partner with nonpartisan, public service and civic engagement organizations (e.g., Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, National Pan-Hellenic Council, Brennan Center for Justice)  in developing and amplifying content for these online engagements.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, has opposed redistricting and apportionment based on eligible voting population, as opposed to only raw population. It has also called for including noncitizens in the count for legislative and congressional districts. Further, the group has advocated noncitizen voting in some local jurisdictions. This would allow noncitizens to potentially give certain states more power in the House of Representatives than others.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice is known for litigating on voting rights and affirmative action. Meanwhile, the National Pan-Hellenic Council is an association of sororities and fraternities.

Indian Health Services

The Indian Health Service’s orbit for voting awareness has included the ACLU, Demos, the National Congress of American Indians, and the Native American Rights Fund.

The first of the six recommendations says, “The Biden-Harris administration can make voting more accessible by directing specified federal agencies, in their administration of federal programs, to act as voter registration agencies.”

Another agency that partnered with the Indian Health Service was the National Congress of American Indian Funds, which has been financially backed by major donors on the left such as  W.K. Kellogg Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Northwest Area Foundation.

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In the next installment, federal employees overwhelmingly lean left.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/active-federal-meddling-in-elections-part-3/