by Patrice Johnson. Spreadsheet by Bill Richardson.
In the run-up to the 2020 elections, Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan pumped $15 million into Michigan elections via the Center for Tech & Civic Life (CTCL), and strings were attached—dark, rubber-band strings.
You see, recipient government agencies, strategically located in mostly Democrat areas, were required to recruit and register quotas of new voters. Outrageous as it sounds, clerks who failed to meet the Zuckerbuck-set goals risked having to pay the money back. These were no grants. These were employment contracts.
In effect, a private company, under the auspices of COVID-19 relief, contracted government agencies in primarily blue jurisdictions to sign up new voters.
On page 22 of his Interim Report to the Wisconsin Assembly, Special Investigator Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, wrote, “The WSVP [Wisc. Safe Voting Plan] and CTCL’s grant acceptance letter incorporating the WSVP is the agreement where the city agreed to take CTCL’s private money to facilitate increased in-person voting and to facilitate absentee voting.” (editor bold)
How biased was this voter recruitment?
Analysis is underway in Michigan, but Detroit and Wayne County received $7,852,849, more than half of the total $15 million of CTCL funds that swamped Michigan. The City of Dearborn and Dearborn Heights received $428k; Ann Arbor, $417k; and Grand Rapids, $281K. (Check out the attached spreadsheet to see how much your local elections agency received. Click here to access CTCL 990 Tax Form and go to pages 89-104.)
If other states are an indicator, the Dec. 2021 announcement from Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R-NY) sounds an alarm. “of the $144.2 million spent by CTCL on eight key states in the 2020 election, 90 percent went to Democrat-leaning counties won by Joe Biden, while only 10 percent went to right-leaning counties that voted for Donald Trump.”
As an example, the City of Lansing received $488k in CTCL funds, whereas Ingham County, in which Lansing is located, received $55,806.
PIME supporter Thomas Hamlin, curious as to how the City of Lansing spent its $488k, submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Come to find out, “the reports indicate that $5,700 was spent on Personal Protective Equipment and $125,000 on vote-by-mail supplies and equipment.” The remainder, Hamlin said, was apparently spent on ‘personnel related items.’”
So, the majority of dollars, up to $358k, funded government ‘personnel related items.’ How much of that was used to recruit and register heavily Democrat voters?
To be clear, Pure Integrity for Michigan Elections favors more people voting. Each citizen has a right to vote and to have that vote counted one time per election. But for a private, partisan group to effectively hire government agencies to put their finger on the political scales is wrong. It smells of bribery. It threatens the core of our republic.
Bottom line, it appears CTCL (a private corporation) and the Zuckerberg-Chan duo (two private citizens) paid local government election officials under false pretenses to recruit mostly Democrat voters.
A spooky similarity to ERIC. Like Zuckerbucks, the Electronic Registration Information Center requires government officials to conduct get-out-the-vote efforts. But ERIC moved up the food chain. Obama lawyer David Becker founded ERIC in 2011 with PEW Research and George Soros funding, and he structured the non-profit corporation to tap into states’ virtually unlimited taxpayer dollars.
According to investigative reporter Jim Hoft, ERIC’s “$25,000 membership fee plus costs can run into the millions.” (Who’s “Cleaning” Our Voter Rolls? Soros Founded and Funded ERIC Is Now Used In 31 States, Gateway Pundit, Jan. 20, 2022.)
Instead of pressuring local elections officials to get out the vote, ERIC provides lists of potential eligible voters to the secretaries of state and requires them to contact 95% of residents on the list regarding becoming a registered voter.
Then ERIC goes a step further. On penalty of expulsion from the organization, ERIC’s Bylaws indicate that the chief elections officials of states must recruit new voters and ask ERIC for forgiveness and permission when they fail to do so. In fact, ERIC requires Michigan’s sec. of state to contact at least 95% of these ERIC-chosen souls and to register them in time for the next election. Per its Bylaws:
—https://pureintegritymichiganelections.org/2022/03/29/eric-bylaws/
The risk of bias is staggering.
Disturbing relationships. ERIC’s ties to Senzing, an artificial intelligence software company, raise another ghastly specter. Ex-IBMer Jeff Jonas, Senzing’s founder and CEO, sits on ERIC’s Privacy and Technology Advisory Board. Considering that ERIC employs a tiny, three-person staff, yet it is keeper of the personal records of residents in its 31-member states, it’s reasonable to ask if Senzing’s self-proclaimed wizards of big data are graciously helping manage and massage all this highly personal, legally protected information.
What information is Michigan providing to ERIC? What is ERIC doing to safeguard this information? Is ERIC sharing the 350-million personal records to which it claims to have access with Senzing? With others? What criteria are Senzing or ERIC using to select those it dictates that state elections officials must contact to register to vote?
API links. There are those who suspect SOS Benson may be allowing ERIC to link directly into Michigan’s QVF via an applications programming interface, an API. After all, her office is reported to have allowed Rock the Vote to connect via an API.
To wrap up, both the ERIC and Zuckerbucks schemes appear to be leveraging the unbridled power of the government to drop the F bomb, fascism, onto the American election system.
Merriam Webster defines fascism as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
If the definition fits, Zuckerbucks and ERIC must wear it.