The Election Trust Initiative is a $100 Million Leftist Plot in Disguise

More election “reforms” from the leftists at Pew Charitable Trusts.

The Left’s solution to every policy problem is to create a new activist front, many of them disguised as “nonpartisan” good government projects. So it is with the latest election “reform” group: The Election Trust Initiative, a Pew Charitable Trusts project launched in September with a staggering $100 million budget over the next five years.

The initiative wants to ensure elections are “accessible and trustworthy” by “increase[ing] capacity and innovation in America’s election administration systems.” In other words, the same people who’ve done so much to damage Americans’ confidence in elections now claim they’re hard at work repairing it.

Recall that Pew gave us some of the worst “reform” groups active in politics. This mega-funder almost single-handedly gave us the ugly 2005 campaign finance bill McCain-Feingold by running an astroturf campaign designed to fool Congress into believing there was a national demand for more First Amendment spending restrictions. One Pew vice president later admitted on tape that “The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot . . . [that] everywhere people were talking about reform.”

And Pew’s responsible—with funding from George Soros—for spawning the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the supposed voter roll maintenance organization hailed by its founder as “the single most effective voter registration drive in the history of the United States.”

Election Mistrust Initiative

The initiative is headed by Ashley Quarcoo, a former scholar and fellow for the left-wing Carnegie Endowment and Aspen Institute. From 2021 to 2022, she was a senior official for the Partnership for American Democracy (now “More Perfect”) which advocates against “toxic polarization” and election disinformation. More Perfect couches its causes in unity and patriotism—yet all of them are supported exclusively by “progressive” or left-leaning groups, such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), RepresentUs, and Brennan Center for Justice.

Besides Pew, the project is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Klarman Family Foundation, and Peter G. Peterson Foundation—each of which has pledged $25 million over the next five years to the Election Trust Initiative to see that agenda through.

Hewlett’s money comes from the late co-founder of the PC manufacturer Hewlett-Packard (HP), himself a liberal Republican. Today the Hewlett Foundation is one of the leading funders of global warming alarmism and abortion advocacy, and is perhaps the top donor to NeverTrump “conservative” groups, including Bill Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together (whose acronym is, appropriately, DDT).

The Klarman Foundation is funded by Democratic mega-donor Seth Klarman, brother of liberal constitutional law scholar Michael Klarman, one of the Left’s favorite pro-courtpacking academics. The foundation is a major contributor to Arabella Advisors’ $1.7 billion “dark money” network, specifically in support of its election “reform” project the Center for Secure and Modern Elections.

The Peterson Foundation is the most moderate of the three, created by Nixon administration Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson and now run by his son, Michael. The foundation supports some center-right causes like deficit reduction, but is best described as a Rockefeller Republican group—lax or liberal on abortion and other social issues.

Put simply, these are not middle-of-the-road charitable groups, but funders with an agenda.

Pushing Policy

Functionally, the Election Trust Initiative pools money from its donors and redirects it to policy shops pushing vote-by-mail, opposition to voter ID laws, and ways to fetter conservative speech by casting it as “disinformation.”

The Elections Group is one such grant recipient. This private consultancy is run by Noah Praetz, a former elections official from that bastion of election security, Chicago, and Jennifer Morrell, an advisor to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.

The Elections Group is a CTCL ally closely involved in the latter’s ongoing Zuck Bucks 2.0 scheme to buy influence in counties. The firm offers “guidance” on mail-in and absentee ballot processing, drop boxes, ballot-curing procedures, and “communications strategies” for election officials to combat conservative critics.

R Street, another recipient, is a moderate libertarian group that unfortunately serves as a conduit for leftist schemes to undermine conservative organizations in Washington. As the initiative explains, “the R Street Institute . . . will convene ideologically diverse thought leaders to identify shared principles for nonpartisan election administration as well as leaders, institutions, and policies that instill trust in elections.”

While R Street often supports excellent causes (such as defending free speech rights), this isn’t the first time that I’ve documented R Street’s mercenary work for the Left. George Soros’ Open Society Foundations provided 26 percent of R Street’s contributions between 2012 and 2017. The institute has also received oodles of cash from the Hewlett Foundation and others to promote policies such as a carbon tax to combat global warming and vote-by-mail policies in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

On the disinformation front, the initiative funds the Election Integrity Partnership created by the University of Washington and Stanford University to stop “attempts to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters, or delegitimize election results without evidence”—in other words, mime the Left’s talking points about conservative election integrity advocates. Given that the funds will “contribute to the [partnership’s] ongoing real-time analysis capabilities of online narratives and rumors,” how does that not lead to internet censorship?

There’s also MIT’s Election Data and Security Lab, which uses its academic clout to cloaks attacks on Republican election integrity bills. The lab claims Georgia’s SB 202 law, passed in early 2021, may “suppress voter turnout.” It also “tests . . . best practices to combat misinformation.”

The Long View

Conservatives must understand that in the battle over how our elections are run, the Left will always try to steal the moral high ground and robe itself in authority. But this sophistication masks ideologues’ contempt for anyone who doesn’t share their extreme views about the country’s past and future. They only have authority if we cede it to them.

Before 2016, the Democratic Party was comfortable with voting on Election Day, keeping absentee ballots the exception, and blocking private money from our election offices—norms we’ve enjoyed for centuries. That only changed when Democrats decided they could no longer reliably win a majority of Americans’ votes. So they changed the rules.

We know that 2020 was the most corrupt election in modern American history, unworthy of our trust or respect. It got that way because partisans changed laws last-minute and ignored procedures when it suited their candidates… while too many obsequious Republicans complied.

The time for groveling is over. This is a fight that patriots can win, but only if they first win it in their hearts.