WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) promotes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan bunch of concerned citizens with the pleasant-sounding mission of helping local and state election officials “implement safe, inclusive and secure elections in November.”
What they really are, according to the Washington-based Capital Research Center (CRC), are a bunch of Democratic operatives using donations from left-of-center groups to maximize the use of mail-in ballots - subject to rampant fraud - to steer the election Joe Biden’s way.
Already this year, CTCL has spent over $6 million in the battleground state of Wisconsin, and Scott Walter, president of CRC, says the group’s focus is on those urban areas where Trump defeated Clinton in 2016 by narrow margins.
Yet, Walter says, voters in Wisconsin are largely ignorant of the CTCL’s true mission since the local news reports of the group’s activities in Wisconsin make no mention of its backing or leadership. An August 18 story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for instance, reports a $2.1 million grant from CTCL for 15 lockboxes for deposit of early ballots to be stationed around the city, and “hazard pay” for poll workers, and little else.
“Can you imagine if the Charles Koch Foundation were to become involved with election officials,” Walter said. “It would be front page news in the New York Times.”
Walter said the CRC is also investigating CTCL’s involvement with election officials in other battleground states, including the legality of it in certain jurisdictions.
CTCL’s founder, Tiana Epps-Johnson, was from 2012 to 2015 the election administration director of the New Organizing Institute, a Democratic grassroots election training group.
On CTCL’s board is Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor to the elections program at Pierre Omidyar‘s Democracy Fund. In 2016 Omidyar, founder of e-Bay, donated $100,000 to an anti-Trump PAC.
CTCL backers include the Skoll Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Democracy Fund.
Democrats have cited safety concerns surrounding the pandemic in their push for mail-in voting. But no coronavirus spikes occurred from in-person voting in Wisconsin’s spring election on April 7. And there are numerous instances where the mail-in voting has been an organizational mess, open to court challenges and fraud. On Aug. 20, a judge in New Jersey cited allegations of fraud in mail-in ballot in invalidating a Paterson City Council election.
National Public Radio recently reported that “extraordinarily high number of ballots — more than 550,000 — have been rejected in this year's presidential primaries.”
“That's far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time,” the report said.
In 2005, the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and Jim Baker, a top Republican official under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, in one of its conclusions noted: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”