The left has a “staggering infrastructure” of hundreds of millions of dollars, a hundred or more groups and even whole think tanks devoted to tipping elections its way – and has even infiltrated local election offices through the promise of helping them run “secure” elections.

Those are some of the stunning finds by InfluenceWatch.org, which tracks liberal dark money and organizations.

Indeed, The Heartlander has reported that Missouri’s Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon paid a membership fee of $1,600 to the nonprofit U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence – “an $80 million left-wing initiative launched to target local election offices and systematically influence every aspect of their operations while pushing left-wing voting policies,” according to the Honest Elections Project (HEP).

Lennon also contributed to an email thread obtained by The Heartlander in which activists at the left-wing Center for Secure and Modern Elections (CSME) were apparently seeking to “tweak the language” of an election-related bill in the Missouri Legislature a year ago. The activists appeared worried the bill would restrict online voter registration availability in the state.

Boone County may be just the nose of a massive left-wing camel that has entered local election tents across the nation – even in deep-red Missouri.

“These records show how the left’s election-industrial complex works – lobbyists, ‘dark money’ groups, and progressive elections officials working together to push liberal voting policies and shape the debate on election integrity issues,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, wrote in a statement to The Heartlander.

“The records show Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon working with another organization called the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, a group sponsored by the left-wing Arabella Advisors network, the largest ‘dark money’ network in the country.

“Their collaboration makes it even less surprising that Boone County secretly joined the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence earlier this year. CSME plays an integral role in the Alliance, which is intended to reshape election administration by pushing liberal voting policies directly into election offices nationwide.”

According to InfluenceWatch, hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan helped fuel untold and hard-to-follow mail-in and drop-box votes in the 2020 election. Much of the money went to Democrat strongholds in key swing states – such as Wisconsin, the first to receive the “COVID relief grants” through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which advocates for left-of-center election priorities such as drop boxes and mail-in balloting.

Some of InfluenceWatch’s key findings:

• In Wisconsin the money came early, and especially to Democratic bastions in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha, and Racine. About 84% of all “Zuck Bucks” going to Wisconsin went to those five cities.
• In Georgia, counties that Joe Biden won in 2020 received “over 94 percent of all CTCL funds” doled out in the state.
• In Pennsylvania, “CTCL gave grants to 10 of the 13 counties Biden won statewide (comprising) over 83 percent of all CTCL grants to Pennsylvania.” In contrast, Trump-won counties received “a mere 7 percent of all CTCL funds in the Keystone state.”
• Also in Pennsylvania, “Emails obtained through Right-to-Know requests revealed that officials in the Democratic strongholds of Delaware, Chester, and Montgomery Counties were already discussing the existence of CTCL funding in August 2020 even though most other counties were not sent an invitation to apply for a grant until September 1, 2020.”

Capital Research Center, which launched InfluenceWatch, has similar data for a total of nine battleground states, which seems to lay bare a pattern of partisan intent among the interconnected left-wing election groups.

Most voters have no idea how extensive and pernicious the liberal groups’ reach has become, says Capital Research Center President Scott Walter. He says voting seems like such a simple process to most folks but it is, in fact, quite complex and rife with opportunities for skullduggery.

First there are all the issues surrounding how people are registered – and how voting rolls are maintained or cleaned up, if they ever are. Then there’s voting itself, which was always complicated but has become more so since the COVID pandemic. What are the rules for absentee and mail-in votes? Can others help you apply for, fill out and send in your ballot? What about drop boxes; are they monitored and secured?

Moreover, the rules vary from state to state.

“In fact, it’s a wildly complex process,” Walter tells The Heartlander. “I mean, it’s wildly complicated stuff. And there are literally dozens, even hundreds of left-wing groups that specialize in trying to game the system to help themselves and their preferred political candidates as much as possible.

“And the tiniest little tweaks and nudges in all of the rules and practices surrounding all these complicated things, these people have studied. In fact, the left has, literally, multiple think tanks that do nothing but study how to win elections by the tiniest little increments, the tiniest little tweaks in all of this process and laws and regulations. And that is how they win elections. That, and using so-called charities to register the right demographics and localities to, again, nudge their odds of winning. 

“Most Americans have no idea all this is going on. The left has staggering infrastructure surrounding all of this. The left works very, very, very hard to tweak, adjust, manipulate every aspect of the voting process in ways that will raise the odds of their preferred political candidates winning.  

“And that’s why it matters that there are all these efforts to insidiously infiltrate local election offices.”

Walter says the Alliance for Election Excellence, which partners with CSME, and which Boone County is a member of now, “is not an independent organization; it is just a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which was the main recipient of Zuck Bucks in 2020, which received roughly $350 million from Zuckerberg.”

CTCL, which sponsors the Alliance for Election Excellence, also received $25 million from the Arabella Advisors network in 2020 – the latter of which Walter says even liberal media have repeatedly acknowledged as “the 800-pound gorilla of left-wing dark money.”

“In the 2020 cycle Arabella Advisors raised $2.4 billion through its nonprofits. So, this is an enormous network of left-wing political operatives trying to adjust American elections in ways that tilt things in their favor.”

Is it all legal? Well, no, Walter says: 501(c)(3) nonprofits aren’t allowed to indulge in partisan activities.

“We have internal documents from various groups that show them explicitly saying, you know, ‘This is the best way to win elections for Democrats, is to have our groups register the right people in the right places.’ That’s not legal,” Walter says.

And in Wisconsin, where Capital Research Center says drop boxes “were essential for gathering the unprecedented ocean of mail-in ballots generated in the 2020 election,” the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled the unmanned bins unconstitutional last year, though decidedly after the fact.

In Green Bay, a private Democrat operative was literally given the keys to the storeroom holding mail-in ballots. The Democrat operative, says InfluenceWatch, “helped to decide the specifics of ballot handling and transportation rules” in Green Bay, and claimed to have “helped write the ballot curing rules for the city of Milwaukee as well.” Curing is the process of finding ways to approve otherwise invalid ballots.

The Democrat operative “in many ways became the de facto city elections chief,” with one report concluding that, “The city of Green Bay literally gave the keys to the election to a Democratic Party operative from New York.” By the end of 2020, the actual city clerk had resigned in apparent frustration.

Since the 2020 election and all the left-wing money injected into government operations, at least 24 states have banned the private funding of government election offices, according to Capital Research – including Missouri and Kansas. The latter’s legislature had to override the veto of it by a Democrat governor.

Every one of the half-a-dozen governors who vetoed such a bill is a Democrat.

Still, left-wing influence, if not money, continues to flow into government election offices, Walter warns.

In DeKalb County, Georgia, in the Atlanta area, “The elections office went to the county government and said, ‘You take the money and then give it to us, because we can’t take it directly,’” he says. “That’s a legal dispute – can they cheat that way? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see what the courts say.”

Walter says there’s a clear pattern of partisanship that shows up in the money and influence flowing from the left.

“For most things in politics, both sides basically do the same things, for almost everything,” Walter says. “But in this case, that’s not true, and it’s especially not true in the case of voter registration by what are, legally speaking, charities forbidden to do partisan work.”

The left, he says, has “hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of years and a hundred or more groups all working in this way. And the other side does not.”