Virginia's Election Volunteers Surge to Catch up
After Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Gov Winsome Sears, and Attorney General Jason Miyares made history, local officials are swamped with election integrity volunteers for 2022.
"Time to get to work" said Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin after he was sworn into office Saturday and issued 11 Executive Orders and Directives. They include giving parents an opt-out of masks for children in schools, ending the racially divisive critical race theory curriculum, and ending vaccine mandates for state workers.
After Democrat-leaning school districts said they would ignore the order, he was vowing to use every “resource within the Governor's authority … to make sure that parents rights are protected.”
[Updated] By Monday, the Martin Luther King, Jr, federal holiday, Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears was making history as the first woman and minority to preside over the Senate.
Gov. Youngkin was delivering an address to a joint session of Virginia’s assembly, submitting 59 bills and 25 budget amendments.
Attorney General Jason Miyares had announced a probe of Loudon County over sexually explicit books in its library (one of which it removed Friday), and told the prior administration’s staff their services were no longer needed.
It was a strong signal to parents whose organizing efforts against a progressive agenda in their kids’ schools ignited a political movement to help elect the Youngkin-Sears-Miyares ticket.
A similar energy was at play with election integrity workers. Thousands of volunteers worked as poll watchers in Virginia in 2021. They never stopped after the election.
Republican party officials report even more interest ahead of the 2022 midterms.
For example, a poll-watching training event by the Fairfax County GOP with elections expert Hans Von Spakovsky, had to wait-list signups after the venue hit capacity.
Volunteer poll watching groups who organized during the 2021 election were moving into new phases of election integrity at the local, state, and federal level.
During inaugural events over the weekend, local Virginia elections officials reported they were overwhelmed with interest, and sign ups.
They are constantly asked: how do I get involved?
Lots of them pointed to election law expert Cleta Mitchell, who leads the Election Integrity Network of the Conservative Partnership Institute at www.whoscounting.us.
She recently published a 20-page "Citizen's Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure," which explains how to get started.
During her popular "Who's Counting” podcast, she spotlighted some of the leading grassroots volunteers from Virginia’s 2021 election.
For example, Christine Brim of Fairfax County, who was instrumental in training thousands of poll watchers for Virginia’s 2021 election, talked about the chaotic early days and how they got organized.
Shelley Oberlander of Loudon County, a Washington, D.C. suburb, recounted her journey to becoming involved in monitoring elections in November of 2020 after rapid changes to balloting under the guise of Covid.
“We had 80,000 absentee ballots sent out in Loudon County in 2020, but 20,000 were returned in person” to vote in-person instead, she explained. Yet those absentee ballots — live ballots — were left lying around the precinct during voting.
She worked with her local Republican party chairman, who reached out to registrars on improving processes. It took five weeks before they started invalidating absentee ballots turned in by in-person voters.
Prior to 2021, Virginia’s Democrat-majority legislature allowed no-photo ID for voting, a vector for illegal balloting if not monitored; with 45 days of early voting in Virginia, elections officers are needed to help registrars achieve parity to ensure Republican and Democrat election officers are observing the process.
Ned Jones of the Virginia Project, another one of the volunteers spotlighted, has been tracking the $400 million in grant money that left-wing billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation poured into the 2020 election.
Of the $4 million that Virginia precincts received from the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), $3.6 million went to areas that Biden won, while $400,000 went to areas carried by President Trump.
The “Zuck bucks” controversy has thrown a bigger spotlight on a larger trend over the past decade: progressive billionaires funding a web of “charity” organizations who are influencing election management at every level, including “risk-limiting audits,” funding progressive-agenda news organizations, and even vote-tracking apps.
The leading source tracking the spending is conservative think tank Capitol Research Center and its popular Influence Watch site.
Take the story of the Trusted Elections Fund, which CRC tracked as part of a $731 million “dark money” activist network run by the consulting firm Arabella Advisors, based in Washington, DC.
“One of the professional Left’s top vote-by-mail groups created to warp the 2020 election seems to have popped out of existence as quickly as it appeared, sparking questions about how much damage it caused on the way out,” writes Hayden Ludwig of The Trusted Elections group, which Arabella funded.
In November, Ludwig reported:
A confidential donors’ memo obtained by CRC described the network’s then-newest activist front as a way for mega-donors to combat “political fearmongering,” “attacks on voter registration,” “viral misinformation,” “disputes regarding election results,” and “post-Election Day violence,” presumably by Trump-supporting disputants.
In other words, the fund was set up to help Democrats oust President Donald Trump, silence accusations of election fraud and mischief, and cover for leftist groups’ get-out-the-vote antics. All of it was paid for by tax-exempt foundations and proudly labeled “charity.”
Worth noting in what are clearly partisan operations:
The IRS “absolutely prohibit[s]” 501(c)(3) nonprofits and foundations from “directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”
One need only study the spending from the 2018 election cycle to understand the scale of 2020, explains Scott Walter, president of CRC, in a podcast with Mitchell.
In 2018, “hard dollar” spending (such as donations to candidates), the ratio between Democrat and Republicans was close, 54% to 46% respectively, he explains.
Soft dollar donations, such as political action committees, are not so even — 65% on the left versus about 35% for the right on funding.
Then comes the so-called public charity 501(c)(3) nonprofits and foundations spending, which practically blocks out the sun in comparison.
In 2018, the ratio was 78% spending by the left compared to 22% on the right. When viewed as a pie chart, it looks like a death star. The 2020 numbers will be even bigger.
Americans who feel that the 2020 election was not on the level, and was not run in a fair manner — are catching up with the research that CRC and other groups have published that raise serious questions over “Big Philanthropy’s election influence.
Oberlander and other volunteer groups’ advice to newcomers, who are shocked to see the way “charities” are flooding elections, is to start local. Attend county elections board meetings; work through local political party organizations.
And follow the money. #