by Erick Kaardal at Thomas More Society
The 2020 Presidential election witnessed an unprecedented diversion of election authority from urban election officials to private corporations. In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife invested $400,000,000 into Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to cause allied private corporations such as the Vote at Home Institute, Elections Group and Center for Civic Design to engage in election administration. The private corporations’ collective goal was to use urban public election resources as a medium for urban absentee ballot harvesting. The method of achieving that goal was to divert election authority away from the municipal clerks, who have in the past run the elections, to private corporations who want to engage in urban absentee ballot harvesting.
CTCL’s grants to urban cities or counties in swing states covered areas such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Pheonix. CTCL’s grant agreements included claw-back provisions which entitled CTCL to recover all the money if its allied private corporations were not engaged in election administration. For the private corporations, the goal was to use public resources to accomplish urban absentee ballot harvesting.
The first documents showing CTCL’s programmatic diversion of election authority to private corporations were found in Wisconsin. In March of 2021, Wisconsin Open Records Law (Wisconsin Statutes §19.31, et seq.) requests relating to Wisconsin election administration and Wisconsin legislative hearing testimony relating to election administration, revealed that election officials from the five largest Wisconsin cities—Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Racine and Kenosha—who are responsible for the election process and procedures, adopted and implemented private corporate conditions, including direct corporate and corporate employee engagement in the administration of the general election. Moreover, the Mayors of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay agreed in private meetings to place the same corporate conditions on their election administration. These are the five largest cities in Wisconsin. The private corporations through engaging in these five cities’ election administration hoped to conduct outreach and target certain neighborhoods and communities for extra voting information, to register more voters and to obtain more votes and absentee votes.
The five cities and the private corporations began to self-identify as the “Wisconsin Five,” including a letterhead with the five cities’ seals, separating themselves from the rest of Wisconsin’s cities as to election administration, as if they were their own parallel government. By way of contrast, the State of Wisconsin has only one seal: the Great Seal of the State of Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin State Legislature never gave municipalities, jointly or otherwise, the authority to adopt or accept private corporate conditions affecting existing state election laws. The Wisconsin Elections Commission, as the responsible entity in the administration of election laws, never opined on the legality of private corporate conditions affecting existing election laws. Nor did the State Legislature or the Commission authorize the Wisconsin Five cities to obtain private funds of over $6,000,000 from CTCL to target get out the vote effort for special targeted and geo-fenced neighborhoods. The Wisconsin Five cities were not authorized to “share screen shots” of their databases or information, or to share census information with these private actors. The actions of the Wisconsin Five cities violate state law and the U.S. Constitution’s Elections and the Electors Clauses because they diverted constitutional authority of the State Legislature and the Commission to private corporations.
Beyond Wisconsin, Thomas More Society Amistad Project’s next step is to look for the same CTCL-led diversion of election authority in the other swing states including the following cities and counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona: Philadelphia, Delaware County, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Lansing, Flint, Fulton County and Maricopa County. These cities all agreed to the same CTCL conditions to engage the allied private corporations in election administration. So, in turn, the same documents exist there to prove the diversion of election authority to private corporations. It is just a matter of further investigation and litigation before the truth comes out…