A left-wing organization responsible for interfering in the 2020 contest to the benefit of Democrats hosted a training on Thursday instructing election offices on how to take advantage of President Biden’s federal intervention in state election administration.
Hosted by the Election Infrastructure Initiative, the webinar lectured college and local election officials on how best to utilize a program announced earlier this year by the Education Department that allows Federal Work-Study grants — which are used to provide part-time campus jobs to help students with tuition costs — to employ students for election-related work. This includes activities such as “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, providing voter assistance at a polling place or through a voter hotline, or serving as a poll worker.”
The agency launched the program as a means of complying with Executive Order 14019, a directive signed by Biden in March 2021 ordering hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration by using taxpayer dollars to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities.
While the webinar was marketed as “nonpartisan,” the Election Infrastructure Initiative is anything but. According to InfluenceWatch, the initiative is a joint venture of the left-wing Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and Center for Secure and Modern Elections that “seeks to help congressional Democrats pass a proposed infrastructure bill, including sweeping changes to the elections process.”
CTCL is well-known for siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg into local election offices in the 2020 election. Colloquially referred to as “Zuckbucks,” these funds were used to alter how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsupervised 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.
The Training
Thursday’s webinar was primarily led by Dan Meuse, a faculty member at Princeton University and fellow with the Institute for Responsive Government, which is a think tank sponsored by the left-wing New Venture Fund. Meuse’s LinkedIn profile indicates he previously worked for the office of former Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts, a Democrat.
Meuse advised local and state election officials on the “benefits” of employing Federal Work Study (FWS) students, which he claimed will help these officials “enhance [their] operations.”
“We know that election agencies are already thinking about hiring or have already started hiring … for the election season that’s coming up this fall,” Meuse said. “There are opportunities here to create for Federal Work-Study students and for your agency.”
Screenshot from Webinar Presentation.
Meuse also provided attendees with examples of potential roles for FWS students hired by election offices, including that of a junior customer service assistant. Key responsibilities for the role listed in an accompanying PowerPoint included “greet[ing] visitors and provid[ing] them with nonpartisan election information” and “provid[ing] clerical assistance in peak times, such as filing, tracking equipment, and supporting data entry.”
Other potential jobs Meuse suggested included junior election technician assistant and junior voter services associate, the latter of which is tasked with “support[ing] election processes by assisting voters in completing and submitting relevant forms” and “ensur[ing] confidentiality and security of all election materials.”
Screenshot from Webinar Presentation.
Meuse additionally advised attendees on potential hiring timelines for onboarding FWS students to work in election offices, how best to schedule students to work these jobs, and compensation guidelines.
‘Zuckbucks’ Meets ‘Bidenbucks’
To this day, the meddling in the 2020 election by private actors to boost Biden and Democrats represents an unprecedented level of interference in our elections system. But the “Bidenbucks” scheme that left-wing groups like CTCL and others are helping election offices implement is “Zuckbucks” on steroids.
The Education Department’s reimagined FWS guidance was issued in compliance with Executive Order 14019. In addition to forcing federal agencies to increase their voter registration and GOTV activities — which Congress never authorized — the directive required these departments to draft “strategic plan[s]” explaining how they intended to fulfill the order and collaborate with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” approved by the White House to supply “voter registration services on agency premises.”
Contrary to the administration’s claims, these “nonpartisan” groups are unsurprisingly left-wing. Among those identified by good government groups and conservative media as collaborating with agencies on taxpayer-funded GOTV efforts are the ACLU and Demos, the latter of which drafted Executive Order 14019 before Biden took office, according to The Daily Signal.
The Education Department’s FWS guidance appears even more partisan when considering that college students are more likely to support Democrat candidates over Republican ones. During the 2022 midterms, for example, young voters (age 18-29) broke for Democrat House candidates over Republican ones by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, according to estimates by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
Democrat election officials in battleground states such as Arizona and Nevada have recently adopted the Biden administration’s approach of using taxpayer dollars to expand voter outreach to college students.
What’s evident is that Democrats will not stop in their efforts to interfere in elections and unfairly boost their candidates’ electoral prospects. Only now, they’re using your tax dollars to do it.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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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