A Democratic group has launched a three-year program to recruit and train 5,000 candidates for local offices in charge of administering elections.
Politico reported on the effort Monday, saying, “The program would recruit candidates in 35 states for everything from county probate judges in Alabama to county clerks in Kansas and county election board members in Pennsylvania — all offices that handle elections and will be on voters’ ballots between now and 2024.”
“Spearheading the effort is Run for Something, a Democratic group that launched soon after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory to recruit candidates for local elections,” it said.
“Now, the group plans to raise $80 million over the next three years for this push, which would include at least a hundred staffers to support those candidates in-state, according to details and donor memos” shared with Politico.
According to the report, one Run for Something memo read, “The left is decades behind in investing in the local infrastructure needed to fight back against emerging anti-democracy forces on the right.”
“Taking over our election administration infrastructure at the local level is our last best option. If we want to win, we need to go big quickly.”
Politico said the effort — which it claimed was “intended to fight subversion of future election results” — was being pitched to Democratic donors.
Amanda Litman and Ross Morales Rocketto, co-founders of Run for Something, said the candidate recruiting project is called “Clerk Work.”
“Election subversion in 2024 is not going to be a mob storming the Capitol, it’s going to be a county clerk in Michigan or a supervisor of elections in Florida who decides to f*** the whole thing up,” Litman said, according to Politico.
“The only way to make long-term democracy protection is by electing people who will defend democracy.”
Litman said the group had raised nearly $6 million for effort so far.
Former President Donald Trump has endorsed three candidates for secretary of state in key swing states: Mark Finchem in Arizona, Kristina Karamo in Michigan and Jody Hice in Georgia.
If Trump had carried these states, he would have won his 2020 race against Democrat Joe Biden.
Arizona and Michigan both had Democratic secretaries of state at the time of that election, while Georgia had Republican Brad Raffensperger, who, along with his Democratic counterparts in the other two states, has stood by the integrity of the contest.
Adrian Fontes, Maricopa County’s top election official in 2020, is one of two candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for secretary of state in Arizona this fall.
Finchem, a state representative, has called for Arizona to decertify Biden as the winner of the presidential race based on the results of the Maricopa County election audit and findings by the Arizona attorney general’s office.
Tap dancing. No matter how many barriers you employ, it does not take away from the fact that the election was irredeemably compromised. Read my Resolution to #decertify. https://t.co/FimoHLFNpm https://t.co/5eH3DmZYSA
— Mark Finchem (@RealMarkFinchem) April 7, 2022
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich released an interim report this month concerning the 2020 election in Maricopa County, concluding that fraud did occur and uncovering serious issues with the handling of more than 100,000 mail-in ballots.
In Wisconsin — another state Biden narrowly won that Trump had carried in 2016 — a special counsel is investigating the role private groups played in the conduct of the state’s election.
Special counsel and former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman testified before the state Assembly last month that the Center for Tech and Civic Life, largely funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used large sums of money to impact how the elections were conducted in Wisconsin’s five largest cities: Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison, Racine and Kenosha.
Gableman called the $8.8 million the center spent in these cities “bribery,” though The Associated Press reported in October 2020 that a federal judge rejected this characterization, ruling that the private funds were lawful.
Special Counsel Michael Gableman says Facebook CEO's $8.8 million into Wisconsin's Democrat cities was election bribery in violation of the law pic.twitter.com/pDBzOpZulG
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 1, 2022
Gableman offered the example of Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, whom he described as a “lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, who was running the election site on Election Day in the city of Green Bay.”
Then-City Clerk Kris Teske went on leave two weeks before the general election out of frustration with how Spitzer-Rubenstein was usurping her authority, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Democratic Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich “allowed staff who were not educated on election law to run the election, along with people who weren’t even City of Green Bay employees,” Teske wrote in an email in December 2020.
Biden carried Wisconsin by 20,682 votes over Trump, a margin of less than 1 percent.
While testifying before the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections last month, Gableman said, “I believe the Legislature ought to take a very hard look at the option of decertification of the 2020 Wisconsin presidential election.”
via wnd