Jenny Beth sits down with the Jason Snead to talk about election integrity and ranked choice voting. Jason is the Executive Director of Honest Elections Project and has over a decade of experience working in the public policy space. Jason's focus is to advocate for policy that makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Isn't that what all of us should want?
Jason Snead is the Executive Director of Honest Elections Project. Prior to that he spent over a decade at The Heritage Foundation as an expert on public policy.
More information on Jason and Honest Elections Project can be found here: https://www.honestelections.org/about/
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Jason Snead
Honest Elections Project
Jenny Beth Martin
Tea Party Patriots
Jason Snead: Well, we're facing a shadow takeover of election offices. This is the new version of Zuck Bucks. We call it Zuck Bucks 2.0, but it's all the same actors that were behind the original version of Zuck Bucks in 2020. They've just morphed into this new coalition and they're expanding as we speak.
Narrator: Keeping Our Republic is on the line, and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of Time Magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she is most proud of is mom, to a boy-girl twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade.
Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin: America Feast is a crisis when it comes to our elections. For the past few election cycles, rules have been broken, irregularities have gone through the roof, and trust in the results have plummeted. This is a major problem because at the end of the day, we have to be able to trust the results no matter who wins the election.
During the COVID pandemic, many laws that were meant to safeguard our elections were changed, thrown out, or just flat out not followed. And now left wing activists are pushing something called ranked-choice voting, which would be an absolute disaster for our elections. In fact, we've already seen this play out in Alaska. My next guest is here to explain what ranked choice voting is and why it would be so bad if more places adopt this method.
Jason Snead is the Executive Director of Honest Elections Project, a nonpartisan group devoted to supporting the right of every lawful voter to participate in free and honest elections. Jason, thanks so much for joining us today. Oh, it's
Jason Snead: Great to be here, Jenny Beth.
Jenny Beth Martin: So when did Honest Elections Project start?
Jason Snead: So believe it or not, we are about three years old now. We started in early 2020, formally launched then, and it was right before the COVID pandemic and all of the election issues that ensued. So it was in many ways a good time to start, but also of course a rough time.
Jenny Beth Martin: Right. And you did election integrity type work even before you started this. So you've been involved in this space for several years now, correct
Jason Snead: That? That's right. I was at the Heritage Foundation. I was working in the me center there with the Inestimable, Hans von Spakovsky, and of course Attorney General [inaudible 00:02:27]. So it was an excellent time out there. I was there for a number of years before starting HEP.
Jenny Beth Martin: Very good. So right now as we are looking at 2023 and 2024, one of the things that we've seen is that Zuckerbucks that we saw in 2020 have kind of changed and evolved. What is it that we're facing now? Well,
Jason Snead: We're facing a shadow takeover of election offices. The US Alliance for Election Excellence is the new version of Zuck Bucks. We call it Zuck Bucks 2.0, but it's all the same actors that were behind the original version of Zuck Bucks in 2020. They've just morphed into this new coalition, which is designed to surround local election offices, give them money if they can, but more importantly, influence the way that they conduct elections down to a very granular level.
So because they've got this coalition of left-wing organizations that are fighting against voter ID laws, fighting against clean voter rules, in many cases, fighting to expand voting to non-citizens and even youth, these are organizations that are now going to be pumping what they term best practices directly into local election offices, gathering data from them and reshaping everything about the way they conduct elections. And they're expanding as we speak.
Jenny Beth Martin: Okay. So let's unpack some of what you just said. You said that it is the same players as before. Who were the players involved?
Jason Snead: Well, of course, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which was the main organization that funneled Mark Zuckerberg's dollars to local election offices in 2020. This was the group that took $350 million of his money and send it disproportionately to jurisdictions that ended up voting democratic in the 2020 election. So they have started this organization and they are now joining ranks with groups like the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and the Institute for Responsive Government, which are actually popup projects of everyone's favorite left-wing dark money group, Arabella Advisors, we've got The Elections Group and others, all of them have deep, deep ties to either the Democratic Party to partisan politics or to left wing funders. So these are all organizations that are of the left and they are pushing a left wing agenda.
Jenny Beth Martin: And then when the average person hears best practices, they're going to think, well, that doesn't sound bad, but of course we want our elections to be run with the best practices. You and I both know that that doesn't really mean best practices, it means practices that the left prefers. So what are those practices?
Jason Snead: Well, we're still looking to see exactly what's getting pumped into these offices, but you can bet that it is not going to be anything that relates positively to election integrity. In fact, if you want to go onto the website for the Institute for Responsive Government, they have a scorecard on their website where they are scoring states on the basis of whether their laws are as they term them, Provo or anti-voter. And if you can believe it, having almost anything that actually secures elections is deemed anti-voter, including having a ban on receiving private dollars, which when you consider that this is a group that is now going to get paid through the use of private dollars that are getting funneled through these elections jurisdictions, that doesn't sound so much anti-voter as you kind of self-serving, if you will, from the perspective of these organizations.
But they are pushing an agenda that is designed to loosen the protections and safeguards around elections, particularly those that states have adopted over the last couple of years in response to problems that we've seen in recent election cycles. So these organizations are very much pushing this agenda, get rid of voter ID, make it harder to clean up voter rolls, expand election day, push people to all-mail elections, and they are using every possible avenue to do this right down to how you design your websites as a local office. And you're right, they will put these packets in front of the people running elections and they will say, these are the best practices that you should adopt. And a lot of them will just take it at face value.
Jenny Beth Martin: And they even tell what their website should look like.
Jason Snead: That's right. So one of the things that they have done when they structured this coalition was actually to set it up so that the various organizations within it can provide consulting fees ... or excuse me, consulting services for fees that are then waived in the form of additional scholarships. So it's all a nifty little kind of money laundering operation in many ways, but they offer various services including designing your website, designing public-facing documents that voters will see and receive directly from their election officials, even writing columns that appear in newspapers in the name of election officials.
But the web template is really interesting because if you look at it seems designed to nudge people towards requesting mail ballots or getting on permanent early voter lists. Again, one of those very little things, but the left is going to take advantage of every touchpoint that they can in order to push elections in the direction that they want them to go, which is very much not the direction that most Americans want them to go
Jenny Beth Martin: In 2020, Justice Gableman from Wisconsin did a lot of research into the Center for Tech and Civic Life. I got that right.
Jason Snead: That's right. Yeah.
Jenny Beth Martin: That's CTCL. And one of the things that he was pointing out is that there were two things that I noticed from what he was saying that I didn't hear other people talking about. One was he thought that the local election officials wound up violating the Haval law because they were encouraging people to vote. They were trying to increase turnout rather than just simply administering elections. And I am certain that the new version of this with the Alliance for Election Excellence is going to be doing something along that same kind of lines.
And then he also, I believe that he said, and may be misquoting this, and you can correct me if I'm wrong if you know, but he was concerned that there wound up being back end website access or data access sharing in between the outside organization and the local election office. And sometimes that kind of information would be available, but it might be available for a fee, so they might have been getting things back that other groups like your group or my group, if we were asking for a list of people who requested absentee ballots, we'd be paying for it.
Jason Snead: Well, we know that exchanging data is central to the alliance. In fact, when we did public records requests for all of the offices that are involved, at least in the initial cohort, but this seems to be carrying into the new offices that are getting added, one of the conditions is that you have to provide functionally in-kind services back to the alliance, including giving over a large amount of data from how your office operates, what your procedures are, anything that's not personally identifiable information on the part of individual voters they want to get access to. And then what the alliance does with that data is every bit is important because they use that to shape what they term improvement plans. And those improvement plans are essentially blueprints to re-jigger election operations in each individual office, specifically to meet their demands, but also of course, to turn them into essentially outposts for the left.
So that's what they're trying to do, and there's a lot more that we're going to learn in future weeks and months as we continue to dive into this. But one other thing that's really interesting about the data side of this and backdoor access, if you will, I mentioned that the Alliance is all about offering itself as consulting on various services. They offer technology and website design and all this stuff. Well, they also offer things like poll worker recruitment tools and web design that allows you to track wait times at polling places, for instance.
Now, I haven't seen anything that says what controls are going to be put on the back end to make sure that all that data doesn't get immediately funneled into other left-wing organizations. But just imagine if left-wing attorneys were to get access to real-time information about wait times at polling places, so then they could go in and engineer lawsuits to keep particular sites open as part of an electioneering strategy. It's almost a ripple effect if you will, but there's a lot that could go wrong with this, and that's why we've been all over this because it's not just what they're saying they're doing and what you think they're going to do, there's also second, third, fourth order consequences to this as well.
Jenny Beth Martin: Yeah, the wait times in Georgia, in 2022, a couple of the counties had websites somehow that had ... I remember seeing glimpses of these that had dashboards of each precinct and how long the wait time was at each precinct. And I find a little bit odd. There is this quest that there's basically a zero wait time or that it essentially takes no time at all to vote. And as Americans, we seem to be pushing and pushing and pushing more and more and more for that. What I want to make sure of is that the process itself is done so well that there are not problems. And if that means I'm waiting a little bit longer, two days out of every two years, I think I can do that for my country. It's not a huge sacrifice to make, but I understand I may be in the minority on that.
Jason Snead: Well, as we always say, we want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. The left wants to make it effortless to vote. And so that's the standard that they're using. And so they go after reasonable rules that secure the process, to your point, add a few extra minutes here and there to the process, but it's nothing substantial or burdensome. And most voters don't perceive it that way, but they're trying to get rid of all of those protections for various reasons because they ultimately want voting to be effortless-- so much so that you don't even have to request a ballot or even think about returning it because it'll get mailed to you automatically and-
Jenny Beth Martin: Someone will come take it from you.
Jason Snead: And someone will come and take it from you. Exactly.
Jenny Beth Martin: They'll probably fill it out for you in some states if you have trouble filling it out.
Okay. Now, I just heard very recently that in DeKalb County, Georgia, they've taken a $2 million grant from the Alliance for Election Excellence. And Georgia is one of the states that passed a law saying that you couldn't take Zuckerbucks.
Jason Snead: That's right. So we had theorized all the way back in May of last year when the alliance was announced that it was designed to get around the bans that were getting put in place in 24 states now that prevent private funding from going directly into election administration. It's so corrosive that even some states with Democratic governors like Pennsylvania or Democratic legislatures like Virginia have passed these laws. And now we are getting the proof that our original theory was correct because they've moved in just the last week into two counties in Utah, which has a private funding ban in place. And now in DeKalb County, Georgia, which has a private funding ban in place.
In Utah, the counties are saying they're not taking the money. But $2 million going into DeKalb County in apparent violation of a private funding ban is an astounding test of that law and it's very likely illegal. So I think that we need to be looking at that very carefully and making sure that we're fighting to preserve the integrity of our elections, which means no private funding, especially if that violates a state law.
Jenny Beth Martin: So what can individuals do to help make a difference with this?
Jason Snead: Well, I think that we need to educate ourselves on the alliance and make sure the public officials understand what's going on. To a certain extent, CTCL and the other organizations in the alliance are counting on either flying under the radar or being misperceived as a good-government nonpartisan organization just handing out gold stars for election excellence. And when you read the press releases, all of the jurisdictions, including DeKalb, make note of the fact that we are delighted to be recognized as a center for election excellence. That's the terminology that the organization uses. But in actuality, what this is a partisan effort with the veneer of nonpartisan non-profit on top of it, but it is a partisan effort that is designed to get into these offices pump money, millions of dollars into them if they can. But ultimately, the number one goal is to influence election administration. So they want to essentially act like a shadow Secretary of State and manipulate the way that offices conduct elections in ways that will be designed as we have seen in 2020 with Zuck Bucks 1.0 will be designed to benefit one party over the other.
That's incredibly dangerous. So we need folks engaged on that issue. We need folks alerting the public and we need folks alerting their public officials to make sure that we are holding these offices to account and holding them to the law. And if you look at what's going on in Greenwich, Connecticut where there is a big public fight over whether that office can join this program, that's what we need to see more of public engagement and advocacy against this.
Jenny Beth Martin: I think that all of that makes sense. I think that one thing that a lot of people don't realize is that you can go to your state legislative level, they understand you can call Congress and make a difference with Congress, but you also can go to your state legislative level. But also, we have to treat the election boards just like we do school boards locally. So whether it's an election board or your county commission or your election supervisors, whatever it may be called, most of the time, they have public meetings that the public can go to. So they need to be going, they need to attend, figure out what kind of motions are being made where the board is approving and research their contracts because I guarantee you, Jason, there's more of this going on right now that we are not aware of and we need our activists around the country going to their meetings and alerting us when they find out that it's happening so that we can try to help prevent this kind of an election takeover locally in their area.
Jason Snead: Oh, that's a hundred percent correct. I do think there's a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about just yet. And the fact that we've added three or four additional offices just in the last week to the alliance indicates that's absolutely correct. So we do need folks engaged. We need them going to those meetings, and we need them to make sure that particularly election directors or their equivalents in your state understand that CTCL is a partisan organization because a lot of them, and we see this in the correspondence, genuinely think that this is a nonpartisan group, it's just there to award them a good housekeeping seal of approval.
And then the other shoe drops when they accept admission into the alliance. We're going to give you an enormous grant that we never told you anything about, and we're also going to then give you this membership agreement which says, we can charge you for joining, and there are certain expectations that we have of you and all these sorts of things, getting access to the data, the improvement plans, all of it. So we need to make sure that they understand what's going on. And we've got a great report on my organization's website, honestelections.org that focuses on North Carolina where there's the potential that we could actually get a private funding ban passed this year, but what we have highlighted in that report applies equally to every state and every jurisdiction that's getting targeted for this alliance. So I encourage folks to check that out.
Jenny Beth Martin: Okay, that makes sense. And then one other thing I want to ask you if you have paid attention to: I know that as we have researched school boards locally, then one of the problems that activists around the country have run or parents or people who care about their schools they may not even consider themselves activists, they've run into is that they'll say, oh, the school board has entered into a contract with a corporation to provide training, especially training. It seems to be really a big deal with training and even in states that have open record laws where normally everything should be available for the public to read and review, the contract will not allow the public to read and review it. You can't see what is being [inaudible 00:17:58], it becomes very, very opaque, and there's basically this curtain drawn and you don't know what's going on behind the curtain.
Have you encountered that at all as you were researching this and thought about ways that maybe state legislatures also need to make sure that their open record laws, they might need to be updated if they are protecting those kinds of contractual relationships?
Jason Snead: Well, we definitely think there are changes that need to be made to state laws as it relates to the ability of election offices to engage in these sorts of activities. But by design, the alliance is meant to create that level of opacity. So think about the way that you join the Alliance. There's a membership fee. You pay about $5,000, I think it's $4,800 for the premium level of admission.
Most of that gets converted into what they call credits behind the scenes. They can be used to buy services from CTCL, CSME, et cetera. So all those different relationships that would otherwise have contracts and invoices and things that you could easily FOIA now is behind the veil, right? It's a black box. It makes it a lot harder to see what's actually getting pumped into these offices-- not just the money of course, but I'm talking about the trainings, the standards, what are the procedures that they're pushing. It makes it harder to track exactly what the alliance is doing. That's all by design to get around the Zuck Buck brand, but also to make it harder for the public to learn what's actually going on in their election offices. So, we are continuing to push, but there are definitely going to need to be changes made to state laws as it relates to not just FOIA, but also I think the ability of organizations or offices to join this alliance in the first place.
Jenny Beth Martin: I keep going back to the school board example because I think that there's so many people across the country, millions of people who've been researching what's going on with schools. So, there's a similarity that the kind of will help them make a connection with this. You've got the National School Board Association and state school boards associations, and we've learned that there was a bizarre alliance between the National School Board Association and the White House that they created, possibly the FBI saying that parents who go to school board meetings might be homeland terrorists.
Jason Snead: Domestic terrorists.
Jenny Beth Martin: Domestic terrorists. But I'm not suggesting that that's what is about to happen, but there's a similarity there in that they would go to these National School Board Association meetings and state school board association meetings that the public could not get into because weren't a member of a school board. And then training is happening behind that. Materials are being handed out. The way to talk about things is being taught and trained and coached. And some of it, the very best meaning election boards may not even realize that there's something going on in those trainings that is designed to shift the way that they may think about elections altogether and they don't even realize it, and they come out defending everything without understanding that it's partisan.
Jason Snead: Oh, that's 100% right. In fact, just a few days ago, Ottawa County, Michigan decided that they were going to withdraw from the Alliance, which I think every office should withdraw, but they made the point over and over again in every article that I read to say nice things about what the Alliance was doing and what its intentions were. So it was a little bizarre that they were basically saying, we are tremendously uncomfortable being a part of this, we are not going to accept one and a half million dollars in free money, that's how uncomfortable we are, but we're still going to continue to say nice things about the alliance and its partners and its intentions.
So I think that there is a need to educate, starting with the grassroots and then the public and then election officials, what this is and what it is not. And I think the school board analogies is incredibly apt here because we've seen how much difference a few engaged parents can make when it comes to education. We've also seen how important it is not to take our eye out the ball. One or two pages of training material can have an incredible amount of damaging stuff in it. It's the same thing with elections. And so you can imagine, just like with all the CRT trainings and things like that that have been pushed out over the last few years, just imagine that in an election office, think about the ways that could have tremendous negative impact.
Jenny Beth Martin: Yes, which you and I both have, which is pretty scary, but we need all the people who are listening to start thinking of it in those same kind of terms.
Jason Snead: That's right.
Jenny Beth Martin: And parents who've been engaged in school board fights could take the same knowledge that they use to engage in school board fights and engage also with these election officials. One thing I think is very important to remember, and even with DeKalb County Georgia, who has now we know is going to be a recipient of $2 million, or they think that they are at the moment-
Jason Snead: I hope not.
Jenny Beth Martin: I've met some of the people who work in that election office, and I think that they truly want to run excellent elections. I actually don't think that they're bad Americans. They probably are on a different side of the political aisle than I am, but they're not bad people, they're not trying to harm the public. And I think that that's why it's so important to make sure they understand it is partisan. Their job should be nonpartisan. It must be nonpartisan because if you are running an election and you are actually running in an election in a partisan manner, your finger is on the scale. And that's just not right.
Jason Snead: That's right.
Jenny Beth Martin: And that's right in our representative democracy. But we also have to remember that they're humans and they're our neighbors and our fellow Americans, and we can't demonize or dehumanize them.
Jason Snead: No, I agree with that a hundred percent. These are not the enemy or anything like that. But like I said, we need to make sure that they are educated in what they're getting engaged with. And I think that for the most part, most of these folks do work hard, they want to do a good job, which is why it's so clever of CTCL to use language like Centers for Election Excellence and hold themselves out in that way because a lot of these folks do run very good election offices, they deserve commendations, and then an organization comes in and offers them that, that's going to be very enticing, very appealing. So I think you're a hundred percent right about the way that we need to engage this. It needs to be forceful and determined, but these are not bad folks necessarily-- we shouldn't make that presumption.
But I will say that if you do start pushing back and you do start getting led on target as it were, I fully expect that you're going to see some heat trying to get directed at the activists that are fighting against this.
Jenny Beth Martin: Absolutely.
Jason Snead: So it hasn't quite got to the domestic terrorism level of acrimony yet.
Jenny Beth Martin: It'll come.
Jason Snead: But we already see multiple states talking about making it harder to do FOIA requests because they don't want the transparency and they call it harassment conduct and so forth. So we know that's coming.
Jenny Beth Martin: Well, they call it harassing conduct. And they'll say things like it's voter intimidation or they'll throw out their regular words that they use against us, adjectives they use against us. So we just have to expect that that's coming. But I always try to start out, especially when you're dealing with local people--local elected officials, local government employees and government officials-- you've got to remember, those are the people who might be at the grocery store with you. They're not your enemy, they really are your neighbor, and we may be on different sides of an issue, but we still have to remember that it's very ... I think it's very important to do that. So I always try to point that out.
Okay. So is there anything else that I did not cover that you think we should be covering about this topic today?
Jason Snead: Well, I think we've covered a lot of issues. We do have that report on honestelections.org, which really dives behind the scenes into what's going on. I hope folks will take a look at it. We tried to make it as easily digestible as possible, but we can't take our eye off the ball because this is coming for as many election offices as they can bring in. And we've seen the consequences in a prior election, and we are right around the corner from another very significant presidential election cycle, and that's why they're doing this right now. So I hope that folks will get engaged. This is a big kind of a slow burn fight up until now. But as the Alliance continues to expand, there's going to be more opportunities, I think, for activists to get involved in their own communities, making sure that they don't come in to an election jurisdiction near you.
Jenny Beth Martin: Well, that is very good. So it's Honest elections.org.
Jason Snead: That's right.
Jenny Beth Martin: So everyone, make sure you go check out honestelections.org. This is Jason Snead who joined us today. He's the Executive Director of Honor Selections Project. I'm Jenny Beth Martin. This is a Jenny Beth Show. Thanks so much for joining us.
Narrator: The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Moony Han and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots: Action. For more information, visit teapartypatriots.org.
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