The Washington Free Beacon posted an article today about a group called “Priorities USA” which seeks to expand voter rights. Kamala Harris’ top campaign lawyer is one of their board members. The group is planning a massive $30 million effort to “expand voter rights” leading up to the 2020 elections.
The article reports:
Priorities USA Action, a Washington, D.C.-based group that threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 presidential cycle, announced that it will put tens of millions of dollars behind an effort to “fight Republican-backed laws that restrict ballot access,” the Associated Press reports.
Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, told the AP that most of the money will go towards litigation and that the group will begin its efforts by focusing on Texas and Georgia. “We will look at where is the biggest harm being done and where our work can have the most impact,” Cecil said.
Marc Elias, a partner at the D.C. office of the Perkins Coie law firm who acted as Clinton’s top campaign lawyer, and who is now the top lawyer for the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, quietly joined the board of Priorities USA’s nonprofit arm in early 2017 to help the group lead its voter-related efforts. Elias was brought in as the group began to shift its focus to fighting state-level voter identification laws.
It is interesting to note that one of the main people behind this effort is George Soros.
The article reports:
“We hope to see these unfair laws, which often disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in our society, repealed,” Soros told the New York Times in 2015.
Soros had identified expanding the electorate by 10 million voters at a top priority, according to hacked documents released the next year. Soros was also the first funder of a large voter mobilization effort for the 2016 elections led by a coalition of progressive organizations.
Soros was one of the top donors to Priorities USA Action throughout the presidential cycle, giving $10.5 million to the group. Soros added $5 million to Priorities during the 2018 election cycle.
Priorities USA and Elias did not respond to inquiries on Elias’s potential upcoming involvement with the multi-million-dollar campaign by press time.
Why are they fighting voter ID laws? An article I posted back in 2011 might provide a clue.
In 2011 I reported on some of the findings of True the Vote in Houston, Texas:
“Vacant lots had several voters registered on them. An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address,” Engelbrecht said. “We then decided to look at who was registering the voters.”
“Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.
“Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who formerly worked for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.”
This illustrates why we need voter ID (and why the Democrats are fighting it). Every fraudulent vote cancels out the vote of a legal voter. Eliminating voter fraud is the best way to expand voter rights.