With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of an illegally recorded phone call, defendants might pursue legal recourse.

Democrat Fani Willis’ legal troubles extend beyond recent revelations that she deceptively hired her otherwise under-qualified, secret, married lover to run the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in Georgia. A new book from Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman admits that a widely misunderstood phone call, on which Willis’ political prosecution rests, was illegally recorded. That means the entire prosecution could crumble with defendants having a new avenue to challenge Democrat lawfare.

Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election is a fawning political biography of Willis. For context on the bias of the authors, Isikoff was an original Russia-collusion hoaxer, and his articles to that end were used to secure warrants for the FBI to spy on innocent Republican presidential campaign advisers such as Carter Page.

For years, the media and other Democrats have held up Willis as a brilliant and credible prosecutor of Republicans. The new book suffers from poor timing, with Willis and her lover accused of perjury, subornation of perjury, bribery, and kickbacks related to the prosecution. Willis could be removed from the prosecution as early as this week.

Willis’ Radical Roots

Nevertheless, the book shares interesting details about Willis’ father, John C. Floyd, and his radical past. Described as a “onetime radical activist” who considered the police to be the “enemy” and an “occupying army,” Floyd founded the Black Panther Political Party of Los Angeles and said of it, “Our political philosophy is black nationalism.” He took former Communist Party vice presidential nominee Angela Davis as a lover and lived with her prior to her being placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for purchasing the gun used to murder a Marin County, California judge.

Willis, who was raised by her father, worked for Beverly Hills attorney Howard Schmuckler before he was disbarred and also before he was imprisoned for running a fraudulent mortgage rescue company. She worked for another lawyer in Atlanta who was disbarred for tipping off a drug dealer to an impending DEA raid. At that firm, she represented a crack dealer who “turned out to be the male stripper at her bachelorette party” and worked with Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and now a top domestic policy adviser to President Joe Biden.

Isikoff provides these details to help readers “understand how Willis became the kind of law-and-order DA who would unflinchingly take on Donald Trump.”

Willis ran on pledges to restore professionalism and sexual ethics to the Fulton County district attorney’s office and to begin to deal with a backlog of 11,000 unindicted homicides, assaults, shootings, and other crimes. Instead, the night before her official first day, word leaked of a recent phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The phone call had been dishonestly portrayed by Trump opponents, and Willis hoped that Raffensperger had been in Fulton County for the call, so she could prosecute Trump based on that false understanding of the call.

When she showed up for her first day of work, according to the book, “‘I just remember sitting down and looking at the TV and thinking’ maybe he was in Fulton County, she recalled. Her county.”

A Political Activist in Georgia’s Election Office

However, the person who recorded the phone call wasn’t in Fulton County or even in Georgia. That’s a problem. Jordan Fuchs, a political activist who serves as Raffensperger’s chief of staff, was in Florida, where it is illegal to record a call without all parties to the call consenting to the recording. She neither asked for nor received consent to record.

Fuchs was one of the main sources for Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, they admit in their acknowledgments. While they reward her with effusive praise throughout, she comes off very poorly. For example, she offers a frankly unhinged conspiracy theory that President Trump was planning to lose the 2020 election as early as May of 2020 and was therefore floating a plan with Washington Post reporters to win the election in Georgia through the legislature. She describes how she “invented a new policy” to block public view of an election audit. She indicates such little knowledge of election laws and processes that she seems to think Georgia requires voters to use Social Security numbers to vote.

Fuchs is instead described as a “street-smart deputy” of Raffensperger who is obsessed with personal slights, political payback, and her hatred of Trump, his supporters, and his team. Her previous dabbling in the occult is contextualized, along with her shocking lack of knowledge of election law and processes — which brings us to the illegally taped phone call.

Illegal Phone Call Recording

“Unlike many of her fellow Republican consultants with whom she had worked, Fuchs had a friendly working relationship with members of the Fourth Estate,” Isikoff and Klaidman write before describing Fuchs’ regular leaks to The Washington Post, which conservatives despise for its left-wing propaganda, hoaxes such as the Russia-collusion lie, and smears of conservatives such as Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Fuchs first gave The Washington Post fabricated quotes they later had to retract about a phone call President Trump had with someone in the elections office. Though Fuchs was not busted for her lie until March 2021, months after the fabricated quotes were used to impeach President Trump, the authors of the book say the embarrassment of being found out taught her the importance of recording phone calls such as the early January 2021 phone call that forms the basis of Willis’ investigation. They do not explain how this lesson worked in terms of the space-time continuum.

In any case, Fuchs recorded a phone call between Trump, Raffensperger, and their associates. Fuchs ended the call by saying they should get off the phone and work to “preserve the relationship” between the two offices. Instead, she immediately leaked the phone call to The Washington Post, which published it hours later.

Covering up the Crime

This is where the authors of the book admit that the very recording of the call was a crime:

Fuchs has never talked publicly about her taping of the phone call; she learned, after the fact, that Florida where she was at the time is one of fifteen states that requires two-party consent for the taping of phone calls. A lawyer for Raffensperger’s office asked the January 6 committee not to call her as a witness for reasons the committee’s lawyers assumed were due to her potential legal exposure. The committee agreed. But when she was called before a Fulton County special grand jury convened by Fani Willis, she was granted immunity and confirmed the taping, according to three sources with direct knowledge of her testimony.

Republicans had long suspected Fuchs was the source of the audiotaped call and, further, that she had illegally recorded it in Florida. Fuchs had noted in a Facebook post that she was in Florida visiting family around the time of the call. The book describes the close working relationship and “secret collaboration” of the Liz Cheney-led Jan. 6 committee and Fani Willis’ prosecutorial team. Fuchs should have been a major part of the televised show trial Cheney put on, further convincing Republicans that Fuchs had illegally taped the call and Cheney was helping cover that up. (Incidentally, the book portrays Cheney as the real leader of the Jan. 6 committee, that she viewed it as a “platform for her to resuscitate her political career” and would “provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.”)

The authors go on to say Fuchs would attempt to escape prosecution for the call if a Florida official brought charges by claiming she taped and immediately leaked the call to The Washington Post for “law enforcement purposes.” The authors somewhat hilariously describe this claim as an “effective defense.”

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

The problem for Fani Willis’ political prosecution is that the book convincingly shows the entire prosecution rests on a piece of evidence that everyone now knows was illegally obtained — never mind that the evidence has also been completely misinterpreted.

“And Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors write. “Without telling Raffensperger or Meadows, she taped the call.”

“It was all the evidence Fani Willis needed to get started,” they write of the leaked recording, adding, “The recording was the single piece of damning evidence that had launched the investigation.”

With this evidence provided in the hagiography of Willis, those persecuted by her political prosecution could argue the entire investigation is corrupted by the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine.

“Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained,” according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. “As the metaphor suggests, if the evidential ‘tree’ is tainted, so is its ‘fruit.’ The doctrine was established in 1920 by the decision in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, and the phrase ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ was coined by Justice Frankfurter in his 1939 opinion in Nardone v. United States. The rule typically bars even testimonial evidence resulting from excludable evidence, such as a confession.”

With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of a phone call that was illegally recorded, defendants might pursue legal recourse. It’s the latest challenge for Willis, even if the political ally judge reviewing whether she can continue prosecuting Georgia Republicans rules in her favor.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

New details have emerged on the Nancy Pelosi-Liz Cheney sham J6 committee and it now looks like one of their star witnesses may have been less than truthful.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the day of the so-called “insurrection” electrified the media with her lurid tale that then-President Donald J. Trump nearly choked a Secret Service agent while trying to grab the wheel of “The Beast” the armored presidential limo.

In her star turn before the Democrat-stacked panel, the ex-staffer claimed that Trump demanded “I’m the F**ing president! Take me up to the Capitol now,” and “reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel” and “used his free hand to lunge” at the driver’s “clavicles.”

Now her story is being called into question according to devastating new testimony from the limo’s driver who disputed Hutchinson’s account in testimony to House Republicans, further shredding the credibility of the disgraced former Wyoming congresswoman and the now-defunct Soviet-style tribunal.

In a report released by the House Administration Committee’s oversight subcommittee which reviewed “heavily redacted” transcribed interviews from White House employees, found that their accounts “did not corroborate Hutchinson’s.”

“None of the White House Employees corroborated Hutchinson’s sensational story about President Trump lunging for the steering wheel of the Beast,” the report said.

“None of the White House Employees corroborated Hutchinson’s sensational story about President Trump lunging for the steering wheel of the Beast,” the report said.

“I did not see him reach,” the Secret Service employee who was driving the limo told the panel. “He never grabbed the steering wheel. I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all. You know, what stood out was the irritation in his voice, more than his physical presence.”

The transcript was never publicly released by the committee.

It’s not a good look for Cheney after it was reported that she had buried evidence that would have potentially exonerated Trump who had asked for 10,000 National Guard troops to help provide security on the day when all hell broke loose at the U.S. Capitol.

Not only was Hutchinson’s account dubious, but Cheney sprung her appearance to the rest of the committee as a last-minute surprise….

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Continue reading at American News Wire.

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot

Editors’ Note: Certainly left-wing oligarchs like Zuckerberg have the right to free speech, but we have the right to know what they are funding. If you don’t like the breakdown in law and order, it might be appropriate not to buy products from Facebook/Meta. It is also clear big left-wing money is corrupting some conservatives and libertarians.

Mark Zuckerberg is no stranger to writing big checks for politically charged philanthropy. The $400 million Zuckerberg distributed to local election offices through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (and the Center for Election Innovation and Research) during the 2020 election is his most famous, perhaps even the most infamous charitable contribution ever.

But it’s not the only nine-figure contribution Zuckerberg has made. Mark Zuckerberg made another politically charged philanthropic contribution of $350 million after the 2020 election, and there’s a good chance you’ve never heard about it.

The Just Trust Begins

In January 2021, before the full scope of the original “Zuck bucks” was known, Zuckerberg announced the creation of the Just Trust, a five-year $350 million initiative to “reform” the U.S. criminal justice system. This second wave of Zuck bucks benefiting the common criminal instead of the county election clerk went relatively unnoticed.

It was not Zuckerberg’s first foray into criminal justice policy, but it is the largest to date. As CRC’s research uncovered, Zuckerberg used “dark money” groups as early as 2018 to secretly deliver funds to far-left district attorney candidates in Oregon and Nevada. In all, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic network had already given “164 million in funding to [criminal justice policy organizations] to date” at the time the grant to the Just Trust was announced, but the Just Trust was intended to be a new and improved initiative for all-things criminal justice “reform” in the Zuckerberg-Chan empire.

To lead the organization, Zuckerberg selected his personal criminal justice guru, Ana Zamora, a veteran ACLU employee. She had been recruited to head the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s (CZI) criminal justice reform programs after years of criminal justice policy advocacy in California, where voters are now notably fed-up with“reform.” Zamora also boasts in her bio that her team at CZI “backed key wins like Measure 110 in Oregon to decriminalize all drug possession,” hardly the moderate common-sense position that the Just Trust claims to promote. Since Measure 110 was passed, opioid overdose deaths have increased by 241 percent statewide and just this past week a bipartisan group of Oregon lawmakers passed legislation to recriminalize drug possession.

Common Ground or Classic Misdirection?

Zamora’s and CZI’s records as commonsense nonpartisan actors are not exactly stellar. Yet the Just Trust insists on its website that the group “collaborates across political spectrums” to get things done. This assertion is at odds with CZI’s choice of Arabella Advisors to initially house the Just Trust as a fiscal sponsor during its beginning phases.

The Arabella Advisors fiscal sponsorship network (first discovered by researchers here at the Capital Research Center) is the undisputed heavyweight champion of Democrat-aligned “dark money” operations. Arabella recently landed in a heap of legal trouble for a different fiscally sponsored project that professed to operate across political lines but was ultimately shown by leaked documents and lawsuits to be a scandalous trojan horse for left-wing policy advocacy. Even though the Just Trust quickly spun-out from the Arabella nursery and became its own organization, the Just Trust for Action (JTFA) reported paying Arabella Advisors $350,000 in consulting fees during 2022, making it the group’s highest paid independent contractor.

The Just Trust does at least make an effort to appear bipartisan.

Representing the libertarians on JTFA’s board members is Jenny Kim, former senior vice-president for policy in the libertarian-leaning Koch network and current employee of the Gober Group. Kim’s last appearance in the news was as the incorporator of a “dark money” group in Iowa that sent out “dirty trick” mailers before the 2023 Iowa caucus that seemed designed to provoke infighting among Republican candidates. Supposedly representing conservatives on JTFA’s board is Kevin Madden, who once worked for Mitt Romney and other Republican leaders. Madden more recently spent years in employ of Arnold Ventures, the left-leaning philanthropic empire of John Arnold. Arnold is notorious for using less-than-transparent funding arrangements to pay nominally conservative organizations and pundits to support left-wing policy changes on a seemingly for-hire basis. Then, right next to Madden on the JTFA board is David Plouffe, director of both of Barrack Obama’s presidential campaigns and author of the highly nonpartisan classics A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump and How the Democrats Can Win by Leading America to a Better Future in 2010 and Beyond.

Just “Dark Money”

In 2022, the Just Trust for Action, the 501(c)(4) “dark money” wing of the Just Trust spent just over $21 million—most of it in the form of grants to other “dark money” organizations. The overwhelming majority of them were left-leaning, though a few conservative and libertarian groups appear on the list.

In 2022, the Just Trust for Action (JTFA) granted$3.5 million to Action for Safety and Justice, the 501(c)(4) wing of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. Action for Safety and Justice reported just $5 million in revenue during 2022, meaning 70 percent of its revenue came from JTFA.  Action for Safety and Justice stashed away most of the funding for the future but spent $412,740 on lobbying during the year in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Another “dark money” group, Reform Action Fund, received $2.6 million from JTFA. Reform Action Fund is the lobbying arm of the Criminal Justice Reform Foundation and its board members include rapper Meek Mill, artists Jay-Z, and Patriots owner Robert Kraft. The $2.6 million grant accounted for half of the Reform Action Fund’s revenue for the year. The organization reported spending $1.4 million on lobbying in 2022 but provided no explanation on where or which specific legislation.

The American Conservative Union (ACU), the organization that famously hosts yearly CPAC convenings in DC, also received $1 million from JTFA. Every year the ACU hosts panels and speakers professing to make the conservative case for criminal justice reform that have mystified attendees. Even openly far-left speakers like Van Jones have been given a platform on the main stage. This is largely, some popular commentators have speculated, a result of the millions that the ACU has received from left-leaning funders interested in pushing criminal justice reforms. Both the Arabella network and the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative have given large grants to the ACU in the past.

JTFA also contributed over $1 million to the Yes on 820 campaign of Oklahomans for Sensible Marijuana Laws, an Oklahoma political action committee (PAC). The campaign advocated for a marijuana legalization ballot measure that voters ultimately rejected in 2022. Oklahoma campaign finance records show that JTFA sent Yes on 820 another $1 million in the first quarter of 2023, just before the ballot measure went to a vote. Oklahoma campaign finance records show that Yes 0n 820 raised just over $4.8 million total, meaning that JTFA, and by extension Mark Zuckerberg, provided nearly half of all the funding for the ballot measure.

Drug Policy Action, a long-time favorite of George Soros, received $1.5 million from JTFA and was also a leading funder of Yes on 820, giving the PAC nearly $300,000 between 2022 and 2023. JTFA also made a $3 million grant to the ACLU, which in-turn gave roughly $540,000 to Yes on 820. Coincidentally, JTFA distributed exactly $540,000 worth of grants to the Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and West Virginia chapters of the ACLU during 2022. That’s nearly $3 million worth of funding for Yes on 820 that can plausibly be traced back to Zuckerberg’s JTFA. It’s also about $3 million gone up in smoke (pun intended).

Although the ballot measure to legalize weed in Oklahoma failed, JTFA has plenty of notches in its belt. In fact, the organization keeps a meticulous public list of all its policy wins (though it doesn’t mention the losses). In its 2023–23 annual report database the Just Trust provided a list of wins broken up into four categories: affirmative wins, or the passage of new policy; defensive wins, or stopping left-wing policies from being overturned; implementation wins, or helping advise or manage the actual implementation of affirmative policy wins; and narrative wins, or successfully changing the narratives around left-wing criminal justice reform.

Marijuana isn’t the only drug the Just Trust was working on. Over 109,000 people in the United States died of drug overdoses in 2022, and 70 percent of those overdoses were the result of fentanyl or fentanyl analogs. The worst state for fentanyl overdose deaths per capita was West Virginia, where the Just Trust was doing everything it could to fight legislation intended to increase the penalties for fentanyl dealers. JTFA boasts that its grantees were able to defeat House Bill 2847, which would have imposed a life sentence on those convicted of selling fentanyl.  Meanwhile in Kentucky, the fourth worst state for fentanyl overdoses, JTFA partners “successfully weakened a bill that increased criminal penalties for fentanyl” by providing “testimony, policy analysis and public education, direct lobbying of legislators and talking points.” In Arizona JTFA claims that an unlikely duo of the ACLU and American Conservative Union (ACU) teamed up to defeat House Bill 2167, which would have applied the felony murder rule to deaths resulting from the sale of fentanyl or fentanyl laced drugs. It wasn’t the only time JTFA claimed the ACU helped it secure a win.

JTFA’s database claims that the ACU helped them get certain provisions of Georgia Senate Bill 92 removed that would have made it easier to recall district attorneys and would have limited their ability to use prosecutorial discretion to decide which laws to enforce and (more importantly) not enforce. The Just Trust database also notes that this bill would have “[jeopardized] the independence of investigations” no doubt in reference to a certain high-profile case brought by a left-leaning district attorney in Georgia. In Idaho the ACU was again enlisted by JTFA, credited for working with Right on Crime, a campaign of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, to block House Bill 149, which would have created a mandatory minimum sentence for fentanyl possession and made it a felony.

Soros’ Apprentice

The largest estimates suggest that Soros has spent over $50 million supporting the campaigns of far-left district attorney candidates. He has been so successful with this political arbitrage tactic that the term “Soros DA” has gained a life of its own, now referring less to the man than to the movement he created, but recently Zuckerberg has actually spent much more than Soros on nonprofit policy advocacy.

With the Just Trust commitments and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s prior spending, Zuckerberg has spent north of $500 million advancing the Soros brand of justice. Making matters worse, Zuckerberg has been joined by his Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, who has created a similarly named organizing hub called Just Impact and has spent at least $200 million on left-wing “reform” advocacy. Zuckerberg and Moskovitz, true to their pasts, are trying to create a justice system that looks a lot like Facebook’s content moderation policies; extremely lax, wildly unpopular, and openly biased against conservatives.

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This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

The commitment to GOTV efforts has to be year-round, and conservative ground game leaders are finally waking up to that fact.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more energetic group of go-getters than the army of vote wranglers in the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition. SLSV, which bills itself as the “national hub & largest nonpartisan network in the country dedicated to increasing student voter participation,” is definitely dedicated.

But the coalition, which is at best “nonpartisan” in name only, is just one of a litany of leftist groups tirelessly and cooperatively working around the nation, particularly in the election-deciding battleground states, to elect Democrats.

The mission-focused group is but one working example of why the left is a well-oiled machine in turning out votes, especially among younger voters. But conservatives are waking up and pushing back, using some of the same get-out-the-vote (GOTV) strategies and tactics that Democrats have so effectively employed to win.

SLSV’s monthly meeting in February featured Amanda Fuchs Miller, deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). The bureaucrat gave the clubhouse gang a rundown of DOE’s legally suspect plan to use federal work-study program funds to pay college students to register their peers and work at the polls. It’s all part of the Bidenbucks plan, the Biden administration’s sweeping get-out-the-vote campaign using federal agencies and liberal groups to target Democrat-leaning voters ahead of November’s presidential election.

Yet there was so much more to the coalition’s February Zoom call: a presentation on the output of SLSV’s bee-busy working groups, an update on upcoming Action Plan Workshops, and a detailed discussion of the group’s goals this election year and beyond.

The meeting opened with a partner spotlight of Tevon Blair, co-founder of Xceleader. Blair is a “strategic communicator and social equity advocate in the nonprofit and political sector,” according to his company website bio.

Groups like SLSV and Xceleader are in it to win it all year round.

“Students enjoy that they know that every time a presidential election or governor’s race comes around, they know there’s going to be somebody on that campus trying to get them activated,” Blair told his leftist allies on the Zoom call.

While SLSV’s foot soldiers may be mainly made up of fresh-faced, wide-eyed left-wing college students, the organization and partner groups such as Xceleader are directed by seasoned former Democrat operatives tapped into a vast network of far-left money and resources.  

Blair worked on Democrat Stacey Abrams’ failed Georgia gubernatorial campaign. That fact might suggest how he and his organization get young voters “activated.” SLSV’s co-founder and Executive Director Clarissa Unger is a proud alumna of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“Being a part of the Obama 2008 campaign was an honor and a transformative experience. 15 years later, I love that I still get to spend every day working to help students across the country have a voice in our elections. #ObamaAlumni #Obama08 #YesWeCan,” Unger wrote last November in response to Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s former senior adviser and CEO of the Obama Foundation.

‘We Had to Do Something’

While it may seem the left is light years ahead of the right in driving voters to the polls (by hook or crook), conservative groups across the country have been working overtime to catch up. 

In battleground Michigan, where Biden won in 2020 amid myriad election administration “irregularities,” Michigan Fair Elections and Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) are more than election integrity watchdogs. As election security lioness Cleta Mitchell said on her podcast, Patrice Johnson, chairwoman of the nonprofit organizations, is doing all she can to ensure her state doesn’t “fall prey to the things that happened in 2020.” 

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Johnson and some of her fellow citizens “decided to take action to help restore election integrity in Michigan,” as PIME’s website states.

“There were just several of us sitting around a kitchen table after the elections, and we were grousing and doubtful and skeptical and very upset. And we decided this wasn’t going to do anything. We had to do something,” Johnson told Mitchell last year on the latter’s podcast, “Who’s Counting?“

These frustrated Michiganders concluded, “If we’re going to focus on something, it had better be election integrity because without that we don’t have anything,” Johnson said.

Among its long list of initiatives, PIME launched the Underserved Voter Outreach Team (UVOTE), charged with identifying segments of the voting population the left wants little to nothing to do with. They include people of faith, gun owners, veterans, and others — constitutional patriots, a significant portion of whom have for various reasons sat out elections. Johnson said that often these would-be voters simply haven’t been approached.

“I think it’s very important to show them why, now more than ever, that it’s important to stand up for the Constitution and their constitutional rights and the quality of our elections,” Johnson said. “They’re good people, they’ve just been overlooked.”

The GOTV effort is a natural offshoot of the organization’s “Soles to the Rolls” program, which encourages its growing army of volunteers to use the Check My Vote website to track potential problems in Michigan’s voter rolls. As my Federalist colleague Shawn Fleetwood reported, the free voting history database was created in the wake of Michigan’s leading Democrat election official’s refusal to clean up the Great Lakes State’s rolls.

Soles to the Rolls has been so galvanizing that it’s earned the expected disdain of The New York Times. The Democrat Party’s mouthpiece suspects the election integrity initiative is “an apparent play on Souls to the Polls,” the far-left-funded get-out-the-liberal-vote campaign in Wisconsin. It’s all just more “election-denial movement” stuff, according to the election integrity deniers at the Times.

Getting into the Harvest

In deep-blue California, Republicans are getting wise to one of the left’s more effective vote-capturing tools: ballot harvesting. 

Conservatives have rightly complained about the practice and the election integrity holes in such ballot-collection initiatives by third-party groups. But as CalMatters notes, the California Republican Party is “going big” on ballot harvesting in 2024. Reporter Sameea Kamal wrote in October:

In part, it’s a reflection of political reality: With a few exceptions, the Republican Party has been struggling. On top of Democratic majorities in the Legislature since 1996, no Republican has been elected statewide office since 2006. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, California has sent mail ballots to every registered voter, making it easier for people to cast their ballots earlier and not just at polling places on Election Day.

California is one of 33 states that allow voters to authorize someone else to return their absentee ballot for them, with varying limitations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. California legalized the practice in 2016 but has since prohibited compensation based on the number of vote-by-mail ballots returned. Flat-rate payment is allowed. The left-wing Golden State has also barred ballot dumps at places of employment.

Jessica Millan Patterson, chairwoman of the California GOP, did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment. But she did tell CalMatters that the party is playing by the rules they’ve been given.

“It doesn’t make any sense to only be Election Day voters. That is like only playing three quarters of a football game,” she said, countering conservative purists who don’t want anything to do with ballot harvesting.

‘That Can’t Happen Again’

Conservatives in the critical swing state of Arizona are finding other ways to beat Democrats at their own GOTV game, said Scot Mussi, president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. Mussi said right-of-center Arizonans are assembling a “whole coalition of different organizations so we have a ground game and a get-out-the-vote operation that beats the intensity of the left.” 

The effort begins with the Arizona Liberty Network, dedicated to helping citizens “effectively engage on political, social, cultural and economic issues affecting” the state. Mussi said the ground game initiative includes consistent and sustained Hispanic outreach. 

Hispanics are projected to account for nearly 1 in 5 voters in Arizona in November’s elections, Cronkite News reported. Hispanic voters in the last midterm election continued to back Democrats over Republicans, but a higher rate of Hispanic voters cast ballots for GOP candidates compared to the previous midterms, according to Pew Research. The gap dropped from 72 percent of Hispanics voting Democrat compared to 25 percent supporting Republicans in 2018 to 60 percent and 39 percent, respectively, in 2022.

“Our belief is that Hispanic voters are traditionally conservative on issues like crime, culture, schools for their kids, the economy, even on immigration,” Mussi said, adding that these are the issues that conservative groups are talking about with Hispanic voters.

The data bear out the fact that Hispanics are not some monolithic voting bloc, and their votes cannot be taken for granted. That’s particularly true among younger Hispanics.

Arizona Corporation Commissioner Lea Márquez Peterson told Cronkite News that she started Hispanic Leadership PAC, a political action committee that supports Hispanic Republicans who run for office.

“My parents are Democrats, my brother and I are Republican. I mean, so we’ve seen a lot of shifting and changing and it really depends on the perspective people are looking towards,” Márquez Peterson told the publication.

But Mussi said the commitment to GOTV efforts has to be year-round, and conservative ground-game leaders are finally waking up to that fact. He said failing to get conservative voters engaged and effectively communicate what’s at stake will keep Joe Biden and his disastrous regime in power for another four years, with a majority in Congress to do the far-left’s will.

“When we reviewed 2022, we found we experienced a drop off in Republican voting performance. That can’t happen again,” the conservative leader said. “We need to make sure conservatives and independent voters believe that Biden has led us in a wrong direction and make sure they are showing up.”

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This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.