It’s much cheaper to buy an election by controlling who counts the votes rather than spending money to persuade voters to your side.

It’s a lot easier to load up the gold at Fort Knox than mine your own gold, as long as somebody lets you inside to load it up.

In 2020 we had Zuckerbucks, where big tech money flowed into government-run elections offices to “aid” them in running elections during a pandemic. The effort was famously biased, pouring money into Democrat-leaning areas than Republican ones, helping juice turnout for Team Blue.

In 2024 Big Philanthropy will dive into elections again. Steve Miller at RealClearInvestigations has the report.

Echoing the private financing of public elections that critics saw as heavily favoring Democrats in 2020, some of America’s richest foundations are pouring money into a similar effort again, in the face of more organized conservative resistance.

A nonprofit group called the Audacious Project, whose supporters include the Gates and MacArthur foundations and the Bridgespan Group, a consultant whose clients include Planned Parenthood, has committed $80 million to a progressive organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, to provide grant funding to run local elections.  

The Audacious Project is essentially a spinoff of TED, of TED talk fame. I have enjoyed a few TED talks myself, but I have no illusion that the organization doesn’t lean left.

A quick look at who funds the Audacious Project, and who the Audacious Project funds (to the tune of $2 billion so far), shows that it is hardly an unbiased or nonpartisan organization. It may be non-partisan in the same sense that Planned Parenthood is–meaning that it is not a direct organ of a Party–but it leans left and hopes to see Democrats elected.

It’s like calling an anti-tax group “non-partisan;” sure, it opposes tax increases not Republicans, but that is usually a distinction without a difference.

So who funds Audacious?

Funding for the Audacious Project Comes from at least 37 organizations, including many left-of-center grantmaking groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, the Oak Foundation, and the Someland Foundation. ^[10]

TED does not provide any funding to the Audacious Project. ^[11]

The Audacious Project is “supported” by the Bridgespan Group, a non-profit consulting firm which has worked for many major left-of-center organizations, including Planned Parenthood and the Rockefeller Foundation. ^[12] Inside Philanthropy calls the Bridgespan Group “a major influence” on the Audacious Project. ^[13]

Prospective Audacious Project grantees are identified by the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a project of the left-of-center fiscal sponsorship nonprofit New Venture Fund. ^[14]

I think you can rest assured that few if any of the people dispersing funds would be excited to see a Republican elected.

If you thought Zuckerbucks stank, prepare for suffering through a miasma of poisonous fumes in the future. The Center for Tech and Civic Life is the group that steered those notorious funds to Democrat precincts and helped deliver the election to Joe Biden. I assume that what they did is technically legal, but in practice, it was a successful attempt to use private dollars to distort our elections.

As part of its review process, the CTCL is sending operatives to local elections offices, examining practices and equipment, and acquiring the sorts of data coveted by political campaigns. Despite public claims of transparency, the center has refused to provide basic information about its operations.

The CTCL became a focus of controversy in 2020 when it helped direct hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to help run elections during the pandemic, which prompted ad hoc changes to rules minimizing in-person voting. Many objected to that as unlawful. While the outside assistance was touted as nonpartisan, post-election analysis found that the so-called “Zuckerbucks” or “Zuck Bucks” were distributed on a partisan basis that favored Democrats.

In response to concerns about the private money, 24 states and 12 counties have prohibited elections offices from accepting it. Democratic governors in three of the states selected to be part of the CTCL’s initial membership group – Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan – overrode legislation banning private funding of elections, stoking more concern that the grants are a ruse for partisan infiltration of elections offices.

Democrats love to characterize criticisms of these efforts as “conspiracy theories,” but they are only theories if the conspiracy isn’t real. And this one is very real indeed.

You can imagine how Democrats would have screamed to high heaven if the same efforts had been made by the Koch Foundation in 2016. They would have chosen to target the Kochs rather than Russia as the ones who stole the election for Donald Trump. And the media would have eaten it up. Instead, there is little focus on this effort for obvious reasons. It benefits the Democrats, and the media are Democrat operatives who happen to have bylines.

The CTCL in April created a consortium called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, whose six partner groups include the CTCL, and are intertwined to specialize in different aspects of elections. For an annual fee, the consortium offers assistance to elections offices, providing online tutorials, consulting, and other services on an as-needed basis. A basic alliance membership costs a municipality $1,600 a year; a premium membership runs $4,800 annually.

Both subscriptions offer consulting, coaching, and conferencing, and belonging obligates the member to “make non-monetary (but highly significant) contributions to the broader activities of the Alliance.”

These include attending events put on by the CTCL-created alliance and the sharing of materials. Virtual conferences began in January, one described as a “debrief” of elections officials from the 2022 election designed to “inform preparation” for the 2024 elections.

“Inform preparation” for the 2024 elections. How nice. Hand over your data, please. CTCL needs to get prepared to steer the 2024 election.

The CTCL is using the “nonpartisan” gloss of the Audacious Project to collect reams of information–some of which is very sensitive and nonpublic.

“We are collecting data on your operations, setup, and equipment to help Alliance partners better understand who you are and how you operate,” the email read.

Greenwich registrar Fred DeCaro sent an email to an assistant asking her to prepare materials for the CTCL team to review, including sample ballots, maps of polling places, voting books, trouble reports from poll moderators, and electronic poll books.

While some of the material involved is in the public record, “I would be a little worried about turning over poll books and voting software to anybody that wasn’t actually hired by an elections office,” said Doug Lewis, former executive director of the Elections Center (not The Elections Group), also known as the National Association of Election Officials. “Even if this all starts with the right intentions, there’s too much opportunity for manipulation.”

Ya think?! Vote software to a group with known ties to politically active groups who support specific candidates? Uh, no.

But yes, they are doing it, obviously knowing that no matter how far they stretch the letter of the law, common sense, and common decency the MSM will cover for them, accusing critics of voter suppression and racism.

I find it difficult to believe that anybody, no matter what they are willing to say aloud, actually believes that these activities improve the democratic process. They may tell themselves that driving out left-leaning voters to the polls is a worthy goal to ensure that everybody is enfranchised, but that is just a cover. Both because they pick and choose who to drive to the polls and because the mantra that everybody should vote is complete BS.

In America, people get to choose their level of interest and participation in politics, and that is a good thing. One of the first choices a citizen has is to ignore politics altogether, or only participate when an issue directly affects him. That may sound odd in today’s “everybody should vote” environment, but actually, most people want to live their lives without much government interference and don’t want to waste their time on the back and forth of politics.

Obviously, that isn’t my choice, nor yours given the fact that you are reading this. But it is a legitimate one.

To be a responsible voter you should actually know what the issues are, what the choices are, the pros and cons of actions, and do a pretty deep dive into the issues of the day. Otherwise, it is simply a popularity contest, where sound bites determine everything. Look how well that works.

An engaged citizenry is vital, and lots of people aren’t engaged nor should they be forced to be. Lots of people shouldn’t vote, because they don’t have a clear idea of what they are actually voting on. And politicians on both sides of the aisle like it that way.

We are focusing way too much effort on solving the wrong problem. Driving people out to vote is only a good thing if the voters are engaged more than one day every two years. If you can’t name the people you are voting for, but only their party, then don’t vote.

Instead, we should be focused on ensuring that the people who do vote, from whatever party, are confident that their votes are being counted properly. Over the past two decades people from both parties have had suspicions about the legitimacy of elections, and inviting Left-wing groups into the voting process isn’t going to improve confidence.

Ever since the 2000 presidential election, we have seen questions arise about election integrity from both sides of the aisle. We should focus our efforts there, not on driving voter turnout. Instead, we are doing the opposite, ramping up suspicions on both sides of the aisle. Clearly, the invasion of a second round of Zuckerbucks, or in this case Gates-bucks is simply going to fuel suspicion, as indeed it should.

It sure makes me suspicious.

Of course, liberals will misrepresent my downplaying of driving voter turnout as “voter suppression,” and I even understand why. It has become an article of faith that the ideal voter turnout would be 100%, and wanting anything less sounds bad.

But the whole point of representative democracy is the opposite. Trying to turn a representative democracy into direct democracy by proxy is almost as bad. As with most things in life, a division of labor is a good thing. Demanding people vote when they haven’t an idea of who they are voting for, what their policy preferences are, what the issues at stake are, or any of the things an election is all about is just plain idiotic.

And, frankly, sometimes an informed voter just doesn’t want to participate because they hate the choice before them. Opting out is OK for that reason too.