PolitiFact Tries To ‘Fact-Check’ A Federalist Article On Democrats’ Dark Money Election Takeover And Fails Miserably
In its latest bid to run interference for the Democrat Party, the historically dishonest, left-wing PolitiFact published a “fact-check” of a Federalist article that explores leftist nonprofits’ ploy to use private money as a means of changing local election operations to benefit Democrats.
Titled, “How Georgia Became Democrats’ Test Site For Their 2024 Private Takeover Of Election Offices,” the article in question details how DeKalb County — one of Georgia’s most populous localities and a Democrat stronghold — had been selected to join the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence and how county officials had violated the spirit of state law by accepting a $2 million grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL). As The Federalist previously reported, the Alliance is an $80 million initiative by left-wing nonprofits such as CTCL to “systematically influence every aspect of election administration” and advance Democrat-backed voting policies in local election offices.
In an ill-fated attempt to classify The Federalist’s reporting as “False,” PolitiFact staff writer Amy Sherman decided to play semantics with the meaning of the word “takeover.”
“When we’ve fact-checked claims that a bill in Congress equals a ‘federal takeover’ of an industry (such as health care), we’ve considered whether the measure calls for the government to assume total control of the sector,” Sherman writes. The “claim of a ‘takeover’ of an elections office suggests that the nonprofit would control crucial tasks, such as in-person or mail-in voting operations.”
There’s just one small problem with Sherman’s claim: Nowhere in the article does The Federalist suggest that nonprofits from the Alliance such as CTCL would be in “total control” of operating local election offices.
Perhaps if she invested more time in understanding the article’s findings than playing Democrat Party activist, Sherman would know the extent to which left-wing nonprofits have previously utilized private funding to alter election administration to the benefit of Democrats. During the 2020 election, groups like CTCL received hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. These “Zuckbucks” were poured into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsecure election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes. To make matters worse, the grants were heavily skewed towards Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.
Much like what happened in 2020, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence is attempting to replicate such a strategy ahead of the 2024 elections. In a recent report, the Honest Elections Project and the John Locke Foundation revealed how the Alliance seeks to skirt existing “Zuckbucks” bans or restrictions passed by 24 states by providing election offices with “scholarships” to cover membership costs. These scholarships are then “instantly converted into ‘credits’ that member offices can use to buy services from CTCL and other Alliance partners.”
Instead of mentioning such crucial details, Sherman attempts to whitewash CTCL’s influence in the 2020 contest by claiming the “Zuckbucks” were used “to cover staffing costs and for personal protective equipment and equipment that sorts absentee ballots.” Funny how she doesn’t bother to mention reports indicating that less than 1 percent of CTCL’s 2020 funds were spent on personal protective equipment. For added measure, Sherman also quotes a DeKalb County commissioner and a so-called “election expert” from the left-wing Bipartisan Policy Center, both of whom (predictably) offered statements reinforcing her effort to “disprove” the notion that CTCL is running local election offices — a suggestion The Federalist’s article never made.
A History of Phony ‘Fact-Checks’
Sherman’s mischaracterization of The Federalist’s reporting isn’t surprising, however. A quick skim through her repertoire reveals a history of dubious “fact-checks.” Following Democrat Rep. Mary Peltola’s victory in Alaska’s August special election for the state’s at-large district, for example, Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted that, despite nearly “60% of Alaska voters [having] voted for a Republican,” the reason Peltola won was due to the state’s use of a “convoluted” ranked-choice voting system and “ballot exhaustion.”
Under ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.
Despite Cotton’s accurate assessment that nearly 60 percent of voters supported a Republican candidate in the first round of voting, Sherman rated Cotton’s claim as “Mostly False” because his comment “only applied to the first round of voting — which was not the final round — when that percentage voted for one of two Republicans.”
In a separate phony “fact-check,” Sherman also attempted to disprove a claim from 2022 Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters that Democrats’ support for an open U.S. southern border is an electoral strategy designed to “bring in and amnesty tens of millions of illegal aliens.” Not only did Sherman ignore remarks from prominent Democrats who’ve publicly implied such an idea, she rated Masters’ claim “False” by absurdly trying to make the case that the U.S.-Mexico border is secure.
“The term ‘open border’ can be subjective, but controls at the southern border are significant,” Sherman and coauthor Jon Greenberg wrote in May 2022 when President Joe Biden’s lax border policies were leading to record numbers of encounters at the U.S. southern border nearly every month (239,416 in May). The PolitiFact duo even cited empty rhetoric about border security from Biden during his 2022 State of the Union address to make it appear as if America’s commander-in-chief is serious about stemming the flow of aliens illegally entering the country.
At the end of the day, PolitiFact’s game-playing with facts isn’t surprising. The corrupt outlet’s failed attempt to “disprove” The Federalist’s reporting is just the latest example of legacy media distorting the truth to push their leftist agenda.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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