Joe Biden boasted last fall from his basement that he had the best “voter fraud organization” in the country. We thought it was one of his typical malapropisms, but it turns out, he may not have been kidding around.
Beginning last year, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook joined with Google and other high-tech companies and NGOs to grant hundreds of millions of dollars to fund already taxpayer-funded elections across the country, with the express purpose of defeating Donald Trump. A public-interest law group says those dollars were used to take over election offices and use local government apparatus to turn out Democrat voters to get rid of Trump. As previously reported in December by PJ Media colleague J. Christian Adams, this was done to great effect on behalf of Joe Biden in multiple cities and counties throughout the swing and other states.
Now, the evidence is piling up even higher and deeper.
Private money influenced the the 2020 presidential election.
Green Bay, Wisconsin offers a stunning illustration of the harmful influence of that private money on public elections, and is a stark reminder of the need for integrity at the ballot box and in the counting room.
— Phillip Kline (@PhillDKline) March 19, 2021
The Amistad Project, a project of the Thomas More Society, a public-interest research group, looked into the funding of the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL). The latest fruits of that investigation into its election efforts have begun to be revealed. Public disclosures, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and other findings have centered on Wisconsin’s and Philadelphia’s experiences with the CTCL, with more revelations to come from other cities and counties.
While the pretext for this “Zuck Bucks,” as some call them, funding was to pay for extra COVID expenses, there was far more going on behind the scenes, according to the Amistad director, former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline.
Kline says that on the surface, this might be explained away by saying campaigns do this all the time. But not like this. Kline believes private Big Tech money was used “to purchase government to … [get] involved in partisan activities.”
Here’s the difference, Zuckerberg, the Skoll Foundation, Google, and others in Big Tech, paid well over $400 million in to Center for Tech in Civic Life and they purchased government to do these things. So this is government getting involved in partisan activities.
Kline says the plan came directly from Obama campaign chair-turned-tech executive David Plouffe’s playbook entitled, “A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump.”
Like Capital Research discovered while looking into Georgia’s elections and as PJ Media colleague J Christian Adams put it in his piece called “Real Kraken: What Really Happened to Donald Trump in the 2020 Election,” private money was given to government and manipulated into a turnout machine for Joe Biden.
Flush with hundreds of millions in new cash, government election offices turned those donations into manpower, new equipment, and street muscle to turn often sluggish and incompetent urban election offices into massive Biden turnout machines across the country – in Madison, Milwaukee, Detroit, Lansing, Philadelphia, and Atlanta among dozens of others.
Those millions were used to hire local activists as city employees to drive around and collect ballots. The millions bought new printers and scanners to accommodate mail ballots. Philadelphia established brand new satellite election offices across the most Biden-friendly neighborhoods in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The millions bought scores of convenient drop boxes across the same neighborhoods where mail ballots could be conveniently dropped. Even though laws limited third parties from collecting and dropping off multiple ballots, people were photographed dropping off bundles of ballots at the boxes.
The old saw about “people are policy” couldn’t have been more true in this scenario.
CTCL admits that most of the grant funding went to new personnel who were there to help this noble cause.
It is no surprise that election offices overwhelmingly spent grant funds on hiring additional workers, incentivizing workers with hazard pay, and compensating overtime work. One official lamented that the dire conditions in 2020 “all combined to place election staff in the most difficult working environment in the history of elections.” Even without the pandemic’s complications, they cited the “long hours, denial of leave time, and high-stress environment” and the “historically low pay for elections personnel,” which makes it difficult to maintain staff morale and retain educated and experienced staff. The grant money brought another election official to tears because he’d been struggling to pay his staff, and he used the funds to give them hazard pay raises.
“Helping” those “heroic” elections workers who worked under conditions that “brought [an] elections worker to tears” was the storyline and, in fairness, might have been true in some cases. But Kline arrived at a different conclusion about what this meant after reading the emails, studying the grant documents, and seeing how, basically, the enterprise was used “to turn out Democrats in Democrat strongholds,” to further “a political strategy to defeat Donald Trump.”
Kline was on John Solomon’s podcast recently and revealed that those new hires essentially took over local elections offices, crowding out the people hired to do the job in the first place. He says that’s what happened in Wisconsin beginning in May of 2020. The group’s first move in Wisconsin was to go to the mayor of Racine, Cory Mason, and give him Zuck Bucks and to pay four more cities to apply for more free money from the CTCL.
When you go back and look at how they used the money, they did outreach, they did clear back in May $100,000 to the partisan Democrat Mayor of Racine and said, ‘”look, here’s what we want you to do. We know that there’s state election laws governing an election. But we want you to go get these four other cities – give them money to ask us for money. And then you can design your own plan for an election. And we’re gonna call it the ‘safe election plan.'”
Kline believes the plan was always to increase turnout by dictating policies and new rules that would be implemented in order to get the big bucks.
In Philadelphia, the CTC grant which gave that city $10,000,000 and said ‘you must have 800 satellite voting locations or we’re going to take back all our money. Now what’s that have to do with safety?
It’s saying you’re going to be mobile ballot pick up. You might argue that’s for safety but it’s primarily turnout focused.
And this is how that additional help worked out.
Beginning in July, the Wisconsin election clerk in Green Bay starts writing emails saying “who are these outsiders? They don’t know about our law. They’re from Illinois, some of them. They don’t know about our election. Why are they here trying to tell us what to do?”
And they [the CTCL paid employees] keep pushing and pushing and edging her out. By October, two of her clerks came to her in tears because of the bullying of these outside groups.
What happened was the mayor of Racine, with that CTCL money and that grant in May, reached out to Green Bay at the direction of CTCL and brought in Green Bay into this plan and they got the mayor. So the mayor invited these outsiders in to run the election in order to take their money.
Green Bay Republicans have called for Mayor Eric Genrich’s resignation because of the outside influence by CTCL and others over elections. The man sent to Green Bay to be the point man for CTCL and a “sister organization” called the National Vote at Home Institute was Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein.
Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, a former Democratic operative, who was working for the Vote at Home Institute. He helped the city with the election as part of a $1.6 million grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
“I think it’s really important to note that grant was accepted, approved without a dissenting vote of our common council,” said Genrich.
But Kline believes that Spitzer-Rubenstein’s presence in Green Bay was not benign or altruistic.
In October, an affiliate organization – these are ten leftist organizations – ran a shadow government, thanks to Zuckerberg money that ran the election, a sister organization called the National Vote at Home Institute, which CTCL brought into play, they send a person there, by the name of Rubenstein – Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein – and Mr. Spitzer-Rubenstein says, “we cure ballots, fix ballots that are flawed why don’t you have us do this for Green Bay like we’re doing for Madison, Wisconsin?”
The mayor says the outside groups didn’t “cure” — fix ballots — but Kline’s information says they did.
Curing is when a ballot comes in and it doesn’t have the proper information – they’re required by law to make sure that a ballot is cast properly by a valid voter. It might not have an address or it might not have a signature that is flawed, it doesn’t match.
Outsiders, paid by outsiders, determined whether some ballots would be counted. It’s nothing short of outrageous and illegal.
This is several violations in Wisconsin law. One is, we don’t know how he cured them. Two, there’s no transparency, no Repbulicans in the room and generally when ballots are handled you need members of both parties there. That’s basic campaign law so that you can ensure that things are handled correctly.
Furthermore, the alleged “bullying” by Spitzer-Rubenstein drove out the duly appointed elections officer in charge, according to Kline, and left the hand-picked Big Tech outsider in charge of the Green Bay elections office one month before the election. He had control over the ballots.
Micheal Spitzer-Rubenstein ends up running – they edge out the [election clerk] so much he writes some emails saying ‘look, I’m being bullied, I’m being marginalized … I can’t take it anymore, they’re not letting me do my job. I’m taking a leave of absence.’ This is October.
It was Michael Spencer Rubenstein who ran that election.
We have the contract with the hotel that was the counting facility and in that contract they say all the keys go to Michael Spencer Rubenstein. Nobody gets a key unless he says they get one.
But if you can believe it, it got worse. Much worse. People who were required to get a witness to attest that they were the ones filling out their own ballots got a witness alright. The Zuck Bucks were used to buy a professional witness who attested to the veracity of the ballots by multitudes of strangers.
The Zuckerberg money was used to hire a professional witness [for absentee/mail in ballots]. The reason you have a witness is because somebody knows you and they’re going to verify it was actually you that filled out the ballot. But if you have a professional witness, they don’t know you. [laughs] It kind of undercuts the purpose for a witness. In any event, Rubenstein says, we’ll do this; we will handle the ballots.
And those measures had real-world results in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
In Wisconsin, the emails talk about ‘we can get you geofencing technology to look for areas to increase turnout. And all of this was happening where Democrats routinely get between 85% to 90% of the vote.
In Philadelphia it would increase turnout by 25% to 35%. That gives the Democrat candidate a 100,000 votes and Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania by 80,000.
So all of this big money and this focus on turnout directly into the urban core that David Plough said that any candidate against … Trump must win in 2020 and it’s all gonna be based on turnout.
Indeed, as J. Christian Adams reported in PJ Media in December, activists were sent to concentrated areas to turn out the vote in Democrat-rich areas but not in areas where Republicans were concentrated. Of course.
In Philadelphia and the surrounding urban counties that received millions of dollars in CLTC grants, turnout exploded.
The plan worked.
In case you still don’t follow: Hundreds of millions of private charitable dollars flowed into key urban county election offices in battleground states. The same private philanthropic largess did not reach red counties. Urban counties were able to revolutionize government election offices into Joe Biden turnout machines.
Adams believes, as an elections lawyer, that the plan was marginally legal. The Safe Election Plan was, in Kline’s view, illegal from the start.
Now, first of all, that’s a problem. The [US] Constitution vests authority for the elections in the state, not local, government. Secondly, the state legislature is asked to treat all the voters equally. …So these rules apply to state governments and that’s one of the reasons why the federal government requires a state plan, not a city plan, for elections.
The only way to find out is one lawsuit at a time or appealing to state legislatures to halt the unethical practice.
Elections officials all over the country were given the CTCL money. CTCL said the money was for struggling elections offices, but tellingly, Kline says many municipalities had balances left over from their regular budgets.
With 2,500 cities and counties signing on to get free money in exchange for changing the way they run elections, you can expect to hear more revelations – and better understand why Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
As Adams reported, “the plan worked.”
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the Amistad Project from the Thomas More Society as the Amistad Law Project, a different organization. We apologize for the error.
Victoria Taft is the host of “The Adult in the Room Podcast With Victoria Taft” where you can hear her series on “Antifa Versus Mike Strickland.” Find it here. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, MeWe, Minds @VictoriaTaft
Join the conversation as a VIP Member