How the Left Fooled States Into Boosting Democratic Turnout—and How to Stop ItBY Hayden Ludwig In elections, good data separates the winners from the losers. Left-wing operatives understand this better than anyone, which is why they’ve built the world’s most impressive machine to find, register, and turn out their preferred voters—all using tax-exempt nonprofits created to encourage charity, not politics. Activists label it “civic participation” because they’re benignly registering people to vote. In reality, they’re cynically helping just Democrats vote. Conservatives have witnessed the awesome power of this election machine in states like Georgia and Arizona. But there’s one component they’ve yet to reckon with: the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as “ERIC.” ERIC is a 501(c)(3) public charity, not a government agency; yet this privately run organization has incredible access to sensitive information on 208 million Americans—62 percent of the total population—across 31 states. ERIC claims it uses this data strictly to help its member states maintain clean voter rolls by tracking when voters move, die, or fall off the registration list. The more states that join the compact, the theory goes, the more accurately ERIC can funnel information to them. Yet shocking new discoveries about the compact’s origins reveal ERIC’s true purpose: Compiling a near-perfect picture of where America’s voters—and potential voters—live nationwide, driving Democratic victories in battleground states. Amazingly, ERIC’s membership agreement forces states to conduct expensive voter registration campaigns, yet does not require states to clean their voter rolls, the very reason most states enrolled in the compact. This is ERIC’s value to the Left, the best data money can’t buy. Of course, ERIC doesn’t operate alone—and that’s the point. Through its founder, partisan super-lawyer David Becker, the compact acts as an acceptable, nonpartisan face for activist groups bent on undermining America’s elections. Becker heads the controversial Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which aims to expand voting-by-mail while falsely accusing conservative critics of threatening election officials and spreading “election denialism.” In 2020, CEIR spread nearly $70 million in funds from liberal billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to the states, funding Maryland’s get-out-the-vote effort targeting Baltimore and counties bordering Washington, D.C. Becker himself is a former senior activist for the far-left People for the American Way and ex-U.S. Justice Department litigator, where colleagues identified him as an “unethical,” “hard-core leftist” who “couldn’t stand conservatives.” Yet Becker remains a non-voting board member for ERIC, which funnels valuable voter data to CEIR, and acts as an informal spokesman for the ostensibly neutral group. In some ways, Becker didn’t so much leave the organization he founded a decade ago as rolled it into his growing activist network. What’s clear is that ERIC needs to go—and fast. The alternative is electoral suicide for the Republican Party. Expanding the Electorate While ERIC was created in 2012, its roots begin with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United in 2010. Many on the Left feared that the decision protecting money as free speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution would seal the Democratic Party’s fate unless radical steps were taken to bolster turnout. As the Brennan Center, a source of many proposed left-wing election “reforms,” put it in an April 2010 report: Citizens United shook all who care about American democracy. But even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical ruling handed vast new power to corporations and their allies, it was plain: our political system is broken. The forces of the status quo are greater than anyone could have imagined. Congress is dysfunctional. Special interests have generated gridlock and blocked change. This past year showed that unless we repair our democracy, the progressive agenda will stall [emphasis added]. The Brennan Center’s solution was to bring “millions of new voters onto the rolls through a modernized registration system—starting in 2010.” Amazingly, these organizations began using the phrase “voter registration modernization” simultaneously whenever they discussed the now-pressing need for a central data warehouse to “fix” state voter rolls, a sure sign of close coordination. The left-leaning Bipartisan Policy Center, for instance, bragged in 2016 about Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s new “voter registration modernization” system allowing residents to register online, an early Pew proposal. The litigation group Common Cause still lists under the banner “voter registration modernization” its suggestions of automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, and even pre-registration for high school students. In short, Democratic strategists had come to believe that they could not reliably win majorities with America’s current electorate, so they proposed creating a new one. Their weapon of choice: Mass nonprofit voter registration campaigns. Microtargeting By 2010 sophisticated microtargeting techniques allowed campaigns to identify and reach highly specific demographics in targeted areas—every single white female college graduate under 30 in a given congressional district, for instance. This thesis—mining data for new voters instead of winning over existing voters—drove the Left’s election strategy for the past decade. With up-to-date data, campaigns need not waste resources on voters who won’t support their agenda. David Plouffe, President Obama’s campaign manager, put it this way: “The perfect list is the aspiration of all political campaigns . . . We must . . . ensure that our lists are as close to perfect as possible . . . This is the only way we can win.” Building those lists was likely one of the reasons billionaire mega-donor George Soros helped found and remains a beneficial owner of Catalist LLC (formerly Data Warehouse), which provides: innovative, consolidated voter data services in the progressive political marketplace . . . that will allow progressives to realize the advantages of data-driven campaigns that increase the precision and power of fundraising and outreach efforts. Source: Catalist LLC Filing with Securities Exchange Commission (archived here).
But Catalist’s formidable “enhanced national voting-age person database” would only work with registered voters. What about low-propensity, left-leaning people not on the voter rolls? Statistics suggest that nearly 80 percent of newly registered voters will vote in the election cycle in which they register. One 501(c)(3) group estimates that it costs them between $44 and $52 to register a new voter; but once that individual votes he’ll typically vote in the next two to three election cycles on his own initiative. The Brennan Center estimated in 2010 that there were perhaps 65 million eligible-but-unregistered individuals nationwide, many of whom fit the Democrats’ traditional constituencies (young, unmarried, LGBTQ, non-white, college-educated, etc.). Operatives labeled these “underrepresented groups” the “New American Majority” or “Rising American Electorate,” pinning all hope for a permanent Democratic majority on their engagement. The Democracy Alliance, which represents the Left’s top donors and foundations, considered their turnout so “central to progressive long-term success” that it dedicated multiple pooled funds to “build[ing] political power [and] organizational capacity” among New American Majority voters. A secret 2015 strategy memo developed for these mega-donors boasted that “large-scale, multi-year voter registration programs” could “fundamentally reshape the electorate in as many as 13 states” by 2020, exclusively by registering “non-white” residents and ignoring unregistered voters who lean right. The budget: $105-$210 million, much or most of it paid for by tax-exempt foundations. The trick is to use 501(c)(3) nonprofits, not party committees (PACs). A 2019 donor memo from the partisan turnout group Mind the Gap explains: The most effective tactic in a Presidential year by a wide margin is nonpartisan voter registration focused on underrepresented groups . . . . Provided that such efforts are well-designed and executed, on a pre-tax basis they are 2 to 5 times more cost-effective at netting additional Democratic votes than the tactics that campaigns will invest in (chiefly, broadcast media and digital buys). Because 90 percent of the contributions we are recommending for voter registration and GOTV [get-out-the-vote] efforts will go to 501(c)(3) organizations and hence are tax-deductible, on after after-tax basis such programs are closer to 4 to 10 times more cost-effective than the next-best alternative. They are also eligible recipients of donations from donor-advised funds and private foundations [emphasis added]. The IRS only permits 501(c)(3)s to conduct nonpartisan registration and GOTV drives (all nonprofits are officially “nonpartisan”), meaning they cannot be biased in favor of one candidate or party or even have the effect of favoring just one side. Leftist groups cleverly use demographics—think the New American Majority—to circumvent this restriction. One such group is the 501(c)(3) Voter Participation Center, which mailed 85.5 million voter registration applications to potential voters ahead of the 2022 midterms explicitly targeting “people of color, young people, and unmarried women,” all likely Democratic voters. If that’s not evidence enough of bias, in his 2012 book The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns liberal journalist Sasha Issenberg described the center’s activities as an end-run around the IRS prohibition: Even though the [Voter Participation Center] was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats [emphasis added]. In part 2, we expose ERIC’s data-driven origins This report was made possible by original research from Heather Honey and Verity Vote. www.restorationofamerica.com/restoration-news/eric/eric-the-best-data-money-cant-buy-pt-1/
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How the Left Fooled States Into Boosting Democratic Turnout—and How to Stop ItERIC’s Data-Driven Origins Yet all this microtargeting machinery is only as good as the voter files that inform it. Critically, while Catalist and others could purchase those voter files, no such list of unregistered people exists. State motor vehicle departments and other agencies collect vital information on potential voters, but that data is inaccessible to companies under federal privacy laws. Worse, the most desirable demographic—young people—typically have no credit history or utilities in their name, making them virtually invisible to political data vendors. What was needed to reach this electoral goldmine was a central database on all 65 million eligible-but-unregistered individuals, but that was impossible with traditional data-collecting methods. Enter ERIC. ERIC began life in 2012 as a project of the Pew Center on the States (an arm of the liberal funder Pew Charitable Trusts) under David Becker, Pew’s director of election initiatives. If the goal was to get states to share valuable voter data with a private organization, ERIC needed a powerful selling point and the guise of political neutrality. So for the next four years Becker led the push to lobby nearly two-thirds of the states into joining ERIC—always marketing it as an opportunity to improve their voter rolls more effectively and affordably than they could do themselves. Early ERIC funding came from George Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society, which granted $725,000 in 2011 “to support the Pew Center on the States’ voter registration modernization initiative” and “expand [its] scope and scale.” The idea for ERIC may even have originated with Soros, who after all had previously helped found the Democrats’ premier data firm, Catalist. In 2010, Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) revealed its goal of using voter registration “modernization” programs as cover to convince states they needed outside help to maintain their voter rolls. OSF termed it “reform dialogue.” OSF rallied two more left-wing organizations to the cause: the Brennan Center and Advancement Project, both of which oppose voter ID laws and lobby for the Left’s usual raft of election “reforms” such as same-day registration and felon re-enfranchisement. (Recall that the Brennan Center had already called for mass voter registration campaigns “through a modernized registration system” to advance the “progressive agenda” beginning in 2010.) Hidden Intentions A Pew Center on the States report in 2010 couched ERIC’s true goal of gathering voter data this way: The private sector consistently draws upon a much wider array of data sources to verify an individual’s information than is currently used by election offices. Bringing this same approach to voter rolls--specifically, comparing registration records against data from multiple sources and multiple states—would enable election officials to ensure that their files reflect the most up-to-date and accurate information on eligible voters in their jurisdiction [emphasis added]. Pew proposed a “common data exchange” in which member states would “submit their current lists and motor vehicle data” to a “data center,” which would “standardize, collate, and match” it with “data such as U.S. Postal Service National Change of Address information, Social Security death index data,” “felon data,” citizenship status for naturalized Americans, “public assistance agency data,” “individual address history,” “military data . . . for military members and their families,” “state tax data,” and “university data [on] student names, ages and addresses.” ERIC uses sophisticated data-matching software developed by Jeff Jonas, a data scientist who developed the product for supermarket chains and casinos to reveal complex consumer relationship information. Becker has called Jonas the “mastermind behind the software and architecture that powers ERIC.” Jonas also sits on the group’s advisory board and is a board member for Becker’s other organization, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). Pew’s proposed data center would supposedly be “controlled by the states.” By 2012, seven had joined. But these states did not conceive of ERIC nor draft the membership agreement. In fact, Pew’s blueprint for ERIC and the technology that powered it were published two years before the first state submitted its membership agreement. ERIC membership requires that states transmit all inactive and active voter files in their registration databases and “all licensing or identification records contained in” their DMVs “at least every sixty (60) days.” These files must include a given individual’s name, address, date-of-birth, driver’s license or state ID number, Social Security Number (last four digits), phone number, and email address—private information no data vendor in America has access to. In a single stroke, ERIC had succeeded in building the most comprehensive, widespread, and valuable voter file the country had ever seen—updated practically in real-time. With it, a campaign could become unbeatable. Amazingly, this feat had been achieved with a tremendous lie, yet Republican lawmakers were only too happy to play along. Feeding the Left’s Election Machine Given ERIC’s shady origins, it’s no surprise that its riches ended up in the clutches of Becker’s newest group, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which he established in 2016. It’s important to point out that, unlike ERIC, CEIR does not pretend to political neutrality. The group has received six-figure grants from the Democracy Fund, a major funder to left-wing causes bankrolled by eBay founder and Democratic donor Pierre Omidyar. In 2020, 99 percent of the $12 million CEIR granted in Michigan to a virtually inactive nonprofit ultimately ended up in the coffers of two Democratic consulting firms, which conducted “nonpartisan voter registration” using ads urging Michiganders to vote. (It’s very likely the firms aimed their messages at likely Democrats.) CEIR is a creature of the Left, which makes its close relationship with ERIC alarming. A September 2020 email from CEIR researcher Jenny Lovell to Georgia elections officials describes a complex process: ERIC data is transferred to CEIR, which generates a list of eligible-but-unregistered individuals to target with registration mailers (paid for by states); that list is then transmitted from CEIR back to ERIC, and finally on to the states. Put another way, a partisan third party is directing taxpayer-funded registration drives using sensitive voter data acquired from ERIC, with no public oversight or accountability. It’s difficult to imagine the Left tolerating such a unique scheme if CEIR was a conservative organization, yet ERIC would have the public believe this is perfectly acceptable. More concerning still is that we don’t know with whom CEIR shares this voter data. Catalist? Left-wing voter registration nonprofits? That lawmakers cannot answer these questions draws ERIC’s trustworthiness into serious doubt. Forced Registration
Hidden in ERIC’s membership agreement is a provision requiring states to attempt to register the eligible-but-unregistered individuals uncovered by the data it accumulates, or else risk being booted from the compact—hence the list generated by CEIR. For obvious reasons, ERIC downplays this requirement in public—its 2020 IRS Form 990 disclosure merely notes that it helps members “educate eligible citizens on how to register to vote”—but the ERIC-friendly Advancement Project puts it very differently: ERIC states are also required to contact eligible, but unregistered people and “educate them on the most efficient means to register to vote.” Registering the unregistered is mandatory. Indeed, ERIC states are required to initiate contact with at least 95 percent of people identified by ERIC who are eligible or potentially eligible to vote [emphasis added]. Failure to comply results in automatic removal [original emphasis] of the state from ERIC membership. It’s unclear what “potentially eligible to vote”—as opposed to merely “eligible to vote”—means. The document also asks, “Does the program [ERIC] result in the reduction of unlawful double voting?” The answer given: “ERIC’s purpose is not to reduce the number of alleged double voters.” Mass registration drives are not inexpensive. The Virginia Department of Elections estimated in 2020 that the total cost of its ERIC membership and “associated mailing costs” average $300,000 per year, just $39,000 of which accounts for dues. To offset the added expense, Pew Charitable Trusts offered grants from 2014 to 2017 to help states “in making the initial outreach to eligible citizens who are not registered to vote”—provided they join ERIC by a deadline set by the foundation. (Pew also subsidized ERIC itself through 2019.) In exchange, Pew demanded information on:
The Red State Exodus Fortunately, Republicans are fighting back in force. In January 2022, Louisiana became the first state to exit ERIC after Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin announced that “possibly partisan actors” may be using “ERIC network data for political purposes, potentially undermining voter confidence.” Louisiana was one of the first states to join ERIC, beginning in 2014, a major blow to the organization’s credibility. Later that year Alabama’s newly elected secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced he would withdraw the state from ERIC as his first act in office, a pledge he made good on in early 2023. Amazingly, Allen campaigned in part on exiting ERIC thanks to the work of grassroots election integrity groups active in Alabama. In February 2023 he visited ERIC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., only to discover “that the location was actually the home of a virtual shared workspace and that no ERIC headquarters existed at the location.” From Allen: What I found was that there was no ERIC headquarters at that address. There were no employees. There were no servers. There was no ERIC presence of any kind. Instead, I found a virtual office that is rentable by the day. What it was missing was people, servers and any sign of the ERIC team. The turning point came on March 6, 2023, when Florida, West Virginia, and Missouri announced they were departing ERIC and would immediately cease to send data to the compact. Their reasons were devastating. Missouri pointed out that ERIC failed to address issues of multi-state voters and required “unnecessary mailings.” West Virginia criticized ERIC’s “partisanship in voter registration and list maintenance, much less in the administration of our nation’s elections.” Florida expressed frustrations over its year-long efforts “to reform ERIC through attempts to secure data and eliminate ERIC’s partisan tendencies, all of which were rejected.” “We have lost confidence in ERIC,” Secretary of State Cord Byrd explained. A few days later elections officials in Alaska and Texas announced they were considering withdrawing her state from the compact, with distraught leftists calling it a “conspiracy theory whirlwind” by “right-wing voting fraud activists.” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose threatened to pull his state out of ERIC if the compact didn’t drop its registration requirements. State officials suggested that they were considering building another version focused on cleaning voter rolls without ERIC’s troublesome requirements. Regardless, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already requires states to maintain accurate voter lists, something they’re already equipped to do without a vulnerable third-party data warehouse. It’s time for the rest of ERIC’s members to follow suit, starting with Republican-led states: Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Toss in Kentucky, a conservative state with a Democratic governor and no shortage of ERIC skeptics, and an exodus of red states would cripple ERIC’s ability to gather effective data and render it practically worthless to the Left. A voter file limited to Democratic strongholds would be far less valuable, though still dangerous. Remember that the “problem” of voter roll maintenance was contrived to enable the “solution”—ERIC—to send valuable voter data to third-party organizations such as CEIR, with little-to-no accountability. Many of ERIC’s claims ring hollow. Interstate sharing of private information on individuals who aren’t registered to vote does nothing to enhance voter roll quality. Voters receive no benefit from states sharing this personally identifiable information, only partisans looking for an election edge. Republicans must understand that they can maintain clean, accurate voter rolls without resorting to a private third-party organization like ERIC. Interstate agreements are already common—in fact, they’re mandated by the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The Social Security Administration shares death records with states through the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) system. State voter rolls are updated when a registered voter submits his change-of-address form to the local DMV. U.S. Postal Service partners submit those change-of-address records to state agencies. And many states mandate the use of other agency data for voter list maintenance. Here’s the bottom line: It’s time the states get serious about exiting ERIC. The future of our elections is at stake. This report was made possible by original research from Heather Honey and Verity Vote. www.restorationofamerica.com/restoration-news/eric/eric-the-best-data-money-cant-buy-pt-2/ UTAH SHERIFFS MESSAGE TO CANDIDATES FOR HIGH OFFICE: STOP DEMAGOGUING ISSUES YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND4/4/2024 “Any candidate blaming local officials for the failures of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is demonstrating to voters that they don’t understand important issues facing our state and country,” said Sheriff Mike Smith, President of the Utah Sheriffs’ Association.
“It’s bizarre that Republican candidates for high office would keep repeating false statements that have been walked back by the Biden Administration,” Smith continued. “It’s even more bizarre that candidates in Utah would malign local law enforcement without first knowing the facts.” Background Last year, a draft memo was put out by ICE’s Salt Lake City Field Office Director Michael Bernacke titled “Sanctuary State Designation for the State of Utah”. In this memo, Bernacke took it upon himself to declare Utah a sanctuary state. He made absurd claims that Utah sheriffs are destabilizing ICE’s law enforcement capabilities in Utah and surrounding states. State leaders joined Utah’s sheriffs in voicing strong objection, and ICE immediately rescinded the draft memo. Historically, not all sheriffs in Utah have been willing or able to house federal detainees in county jails. Those who did contract with ICE have been subjected to unending federal mandates, regulations that are not based upon constitutional rights, legal standards not based on case law, and demands that ICE detainees receive special treatment far exceeding what incarcerated U.S. citizens receive. The demand that ICE detainees receive special privileges is accompanied by audits and threats of lawsuits from liberal Washington DC based special interest groups. The ICE policies and practices under the Biden Administration have made it impossible for Utah’s sheriffs to house their civil detainees. Now some candidates for office are openly citing the rescinded ICE memo and demagoguing on the issue using false information. As the election year continues and the political season heats up, Utah’s sheriffs respectfully request that candidates running for office at least reach out and ask a sheriff before taking positions and issuing statements that are directly related to the work they do. By Otto Krauss There has been some news lately about the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) and what it does, but mostly because a number of states have cut ties with the organization in the last year. Why is ERIC significant and why should Utahns care about this organization? ERIC was founded as a non-profit in 2012 by the Pew Charitable Trusts under the direction of David Becker. The organization collects voter data from participating states and purports to help maintain voter registration rolls. The stated mission is to “help states improve the accuracy of America’s voter rolls, increase access to voter registration for all eligible citizens, reduce election costs, and increase efficiencies in elections”. Utah, along with Colorado, Washington, Nevada, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware were founding member states. Membership grew to 32 states in February 2023 and then quickly shrunk as 9 states left (so far) after discovering the ulterior motives of ERIC. ERIC member states pay an initial $25,000 fee upon joining, and annual dues are between $26,000 and $116,000, depending upon the state’s population. As an example, Utah paid $49,000 for 2023. The arrangement between member states is to provide voter registration and DMV data to ERIC to help identify ineligible or inactive voters. ERIC claims to have found 2.5 million voters who moved across state lines, about 203,000 duplicate voter registrations, and about 65,000 deceased voters. Of these numbers, ERIC identified about 261,000 that moved out/into Utah, 27,000 duplicates, and 6,100 deceased. Encouraging voter registration is also a key focus of the organization, identifying more than 60 million unregistered voters (among member states alone). These goals are seemingly innocuous enough and in a way noble, encouraging people to participate in the voting process. The way these goals are achieved, is questionable however. The data that ERIC requests from the states is to be submitted every 60 days, while information regarding inaccurate voter registrations from ERIC to the member state is to be provided at most once a year. If a state fails to request it, ERIC will send it “automatically” after 425 days have elapsed. ERIC has no teeth with regard to enforcement of voter roll cleanup either. There’s no requirement for a state to actually remove the ineligible voters, only that they initiate contact with the voter in question within 90 days of receiving the data. So what is a member state to do with the data it receives from ERIC? "If I were the devil … If I were the Prince of Darkness, I’d want to engulf the whole world in darkness. And I’d have a third of its real estate, and four-fifths of its population, but I wouldn’t be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree — Thee." "So, I’d set about however necessary to take over the United States. I’d subvert the churches first — I’d begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: ‘Do as you please.’" “To the young, I would whisper that ‘The Bible is a myth.’ I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what’s bad is good, and what’s good is ‘square.’ And the old, I would teach to pray, after me, ‘Our Father, which art in Washington…’" “And then I’d get organized. I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting, so that anything else would appear dull and uninteresting." "WE OPPOSE ILLIGAL IMMIGRATION AND ALL FORMS OF AMNESTY, OR LEGAL STATUS, FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS"3/14/2024 The federal government’s failed policies and inability to protect our country’s border is causing upheaval and strain on states across the nation, including Utah. We are being forced to deal with the public safety, financial and humanitarian consequences of President Biden's failure to enforce immigration law. The result is that over two-thirds of captured illegal aliens are released back into our community here in Utah.
The Biden administration continues to make detention of illegal aliens difficult or impossible for local authorities to handle. Several federal agency's tactics are designed to discourage local jails from cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) threatening the public safety of all people living in Utah. ICE’s detention standards have become more absurd as a reaction to multiple lawsuits filed by many anti-enforcement groups. The Biden Administration’s response has been more stringent federal standards for ICE “detainees.” Whether intended or not, the consequences of these standards are that they cannot be met by our county jails. Much has been said about how SB 54 and the signature gathering path has disrupted our Party’s ability to nominate candidates at our convention. What hasn’t been said is under these new election laws the Party is still in control of holding our convention and setting the parameters necessary to send a convention winner to the States Primary election. The Party makes that determination, constitutionally.
There is nothing in current election law that prohibits how a qualified political party determines its convention winner. And because the signature candidate is already in the Primary with an R behind their name, there is nothing that prohibits the Party from directing their delegates to consider a vote for a signature candidate as a wasted vote to determine the Party’s convention winner. The state runs elections, but we, the Republican Party of Utah, as a private constitutionally independent organization, run our political party and we alone determine how we qualify a convention winner for the state-run Primary. As it is now, I doubt we will ever have another Primary election in Utah without a signature candidate with an R behind their name on the ballot. For this reason, our Party must determine how we can remain relevant in delivering a convention only candidate to the Primary vetted by our elected delegates. Among all the unfair practices within our current election law, nothing prohibits us from exercising our constitutional rights of assembly and association in determining our Party’s approved candidate. We must rewrite our bylaws to protect our caucus/convention process. Or dissolve the Party because nothing matters except declaring yourself a Republican, buying signatures, and spending big money to get elected. Our Caucus/Convention system here in Utah is the closest we will ever get to real self-government. The idea that local neighborhood groups actually have a say in who represents them in the Party business is lost on most Americans. Without the Caucus system, our ability for grass roots participation in the political process will vanish. You will be represented by the big money influencers currently attacking our conservative values and principles.
As a Precinct Vice Chair, I worked hard to ensure participation. I conducted many Caucus training sessions and personally hung 100 door hangers in my Precinct. I reached out to the Party for contact information to communicate with Republican voters in my neighborhood and was surprised to discover that no effort had been made by Party leadership to provide anything other than name and addresses of voters used to register for caucus. I guess in the real world of text and email communications, the Party prefers snail mail. So, we went about our business of running our Caucus with 39 attendees out of 493 registered Republicans. That’s an 8% participation rate so the efforts by the big money liberals to destroy our Caucus system is working full steam ahead. THE AMERICAN STASI CONTROLS WHAT YOU HEAR AND WHAT YOU SEE TO CONTROL WHAT YOU THINK AND DO2/24/2024 Big Tech, federal agencies, and corporate media are working together to undermine the country and control your thoughts.
It’s tempting to look at Big Tech, corporate media, and federal agencies as distinct industries and entities with their own goals and organizational structures, but that’s not the right way to analyze them in 2024. In reality, they are just different systems within the same organism, similar to how eyes, ears, and legs are all part of a human body. They have different roles and functions, but all are subordinate to the same overarching goal: total power. In 2024, these entities all function as part of a single system: the American Stasi. Recall that the Stasi was the oppressive spying and law enforcement regime deployed by the Soviet Union against the people of East Germany. The American regime today is every bit as corrupt and deceitful as the Soviet Stasi was during the Cold War. Big Tech and the federal surveillance system work hand in glove to manipulate what you see, hear, and think. The surveillance state spies on you constantly if you engage in activities it detests: going to church or speaking out at a school board meeting, for example. It develops and deploys complex technologies used to manipulate your perception of reality. WHY DOES THE REPUBLICAN PARTY SIT IDLE WHILE ITS ELECTED MEMBERS LIE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?2/12/2024 Republicans and apparently the Republican Party doesn't care about our southern border or American sovereignty, but they sure love Ukraine. How do I know? Meet The Republican Senators who lied to the American people about prioritizing border security over Ukraine funding.
In a 67-32 vote last week, 17 Republican senators voted alongside their Democrat buddies to advance a $95 billion “emergency security spending bill” that included $60 billion in aid to Ukraine and nothing to protect our border? Ladies & gentlemen...here are 13 of those traitors who lied directly to the American people. Will you do anything about this? According to Senator Rand Paul, auditing the Federal Reserve is a fiscal necessity and a congressional imperative. That is why he has reintroduced the “Federal Reserve Transparency Act” (referred to as “Audit the Fed”) as his first legislation of 2024.
“Imagine a financial behemoth at the center of the biggest economy on the planet. It secretly pulls the strings of America’s fiscal destiny, and the consequences of its actions ripple through the lives of countless individuals, yet its inner workings are almost entirely unknown and not subject to any form of checks or balances. This is not the plot of a dystopian novel but the current reality of America’s Federal Reserve system.” According to the Senator, now is the time to bring this financial giant into the light. While I totally agree, I would advise the Senator to be very careful, as many before him have met a disastrous fate when challenging the Central Bank. Among them, four US Presidents whose lives were cut short by assassins who were killed “before they got their day in court.” History teaches us that the true guardians of democracy are not state supreme courts or rogue lawmakers, but the people themselves.
In a landscape where the law and politics intertwine, Colorado and Maine’s decision to bar former President Donald Trump from their primary ballots resonates deeply within the heart of American democracy. This isn’t a mere legal maneuver; it’s a high-stakes dance on the tightrope of American electoral politics, balancing constitutional law and political strategy. At the heart of these decisions lies the rarely invoked insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment, a relic from the Civil War that now gains newfound significance. Essentially, it prohibits individuals who have actively worked against the Constitution through insurrection from holding any government position. Ultimately, this issue forces us to ponder how, as a nation, we determine who ascends to the highest echelons of leadership and who does not. It’s a question that doesn’t merely seek an answer; it demands profound introspection and contemplation about the very essence of our self-government. If Kirk were alive today, he would agree with those who are now critical of the neocons for having abandoned their conservatism in favor of an imperialistic and globalist ideology.
While a handful of writers and thinkers before him had adopted the term “conservative” and promoted it in their writings, like Peter Viereck in the 1940s, it was the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in 1953 that brought the term into public parlance and prominence. Michael Federici gives a brief but insightful introduction to the newly rereleased version of The Politics of Prudence, Kirk’s collection of essays first published in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The work attempted to present conservatism anew in an age now free from the ideological struggle of the Cold War. Conservative Character Federici notes that Kirk understood conservatism to be “a disposition of character rather than a collection of reified, abstract political doctrines. It is the rejection of ideology rather than the exercise of it.” This, too, is the understanding of conservatism laid out by the champion of conservatism in the 21st century, my former teacher Sir Roger Scruton. This understanding may help one realize why conservatism fails as an ideology — because it is not an ideology. As Kirk humorously notes early on in one of the early chapters of this book, conservatives who attempt to ideologize conservatism make the first and most egregious error in understanding conservatism. “The left’s attacks against former President Trump and America are unprecedented in US history. Drew Thomas Allen has written a powerful and timely book that gives Americans the fuel they need to confront and defeat the threat of tyranny in our time. Honest and unapologetic, Allen sees opportunity rather than despair as he charges a new generation of Americans to rescue America. America’s Last Stand: Will You Vote to Save or Destroy America in 2024 is the right book at the right time.”
We must not let our Temple of Liberty fall. While our enemy recruits an army of our brothers and sisters to join their jihad to reduce America to rubble by appealing to our worst and wildest passions, we must rise and plant our feet firmly in their midst and preach the truth with cold, calculated reason,” What makes Allen’s book so important is its profound sense and clarity of purpose. Christina Bobb, familiar to many as a frequent guest on Newsmax and an attorney to Donald J. Trump, perhaps best identifies this in her own advanced praise for America’s Last Stand, writing: “The left’s attacks against former President Trump and America are unprecedented in US history. Drew Thomas Allen has written a powerful and timely book that gives Americans the fuel they need to confront and defeat the threat of tyranny in our time. Honest and unapologetic, Allen sees opportunity rather than despair as he charges a new generation of Americans to rescue America. America’s Last Stand is the right book at the right time.” This is, indeed, what distinguishes Allen’s book from so many others. Not only is it the right book at the right time but the book we need at this time. 2024 is the most consequential election of our lifetime and Allen is wildly successful in conveying those stakes and leaving no doubt otherwise in the mind of any reader. Allen’s words are direct and honest. “Our present conflict is unprecedented in our own nation’s history and in our own lifetimes and marks the third major test, which will determine whether America survives or dies,” Allen writes. The world is burning yet many of our elected representatives can’t seem to find their voice to effect change. Even the Republican Party seems to be sitting it out. This is a problem of party leadership at the national, state, and even the county levels; and that is why I’m entering the race to be your next Weber County Republican Party Chair.
I’m Bill Olson proud father to two beautiful conservative young women, Alyssa & Haley... I am a retired serial entrepreneur and I have gained my Party experience by holding many elected positions over the last 12 years, including:
Let’s be honest with each other...As Republicans, our stated purpose is to nominate and support the election of Republican candidates for public office and promote the principles set forth in our Party Platform. Did you know, all Republican Candidates seeking the nomination of the Utah Republican Party to run as a Republican for any federal, statewide, state legislative, or state school board office are required to sign a Candidate Certification Form declaring: “I Have read the Utah Republican Party Platform, Constitution, and Bylaws. I support the Republican Party Platform...and accept it as the standard by which my performance as a candidate and as an office holder should be evaluated.” Veterans Day, which was originally founded around the virtue of the cessation of hostilities in World War I rather than the commemoration of any individual, should be a holiday beyond reproach.
Veterans Day had its origin in 1918 at the end of World War I, a conflict that was at that time so horrendous that it was dubbed “the Great War” or “the war to end all wars,” with the United States playing the decisive role in the Allied Powers’ final victory. It was first known as Armistice Day, celebrated on Nov. 11 because that was the day agreed upon by the Allied nations and Germany to begin a total cessation of hostilities. It went into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, after some 20 million people from both sides had given their lives in the war effort. For many years thereafter, Armistice Day was just recognized on a state level. Twenty years later, when the winds of an even greater war were blowing toward what would be known as World War II — with Germany having annexed Austria and making clear preparations to take over Czechoslovakia — the U.S. Congress passed the act to establish Armistice Day as a legal federal holiday on May 13, 1938. Ironically, it was said at that very time to be “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace.” The constitutionality of RCV turns on whether some voters are afforded “an increased opportunity to affect the outcome of an election” than other voters. Among similarly situated voters, the Equal Protection Clause does not permit some votes to carry a greater weight than others. At the heart of this inquiry is whether RCV’s rounds of tabulation function as one election or multiple elections. I believe RCV functions as multiple elections and in so doing inflicts four primary burdens on voting rights.
1. RCV Operates as Multiple Elections RCV operates as more than one election and in doing so, affords some voters a weightier and unequal opportunity to influence electoral outcomes. Strong evidence that RCV systems produce more than one election exists in the text of RCV statutes, interest groups that support RCV, and state officials who have defended RCV in court. Statutes that enact RCV direct election officials to engage in multiple “rounds” of vote disbursement. Moreover, election scholars confirm that RCV is more than one election. According to leading political science professor and voting systems expert, Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, an election is defined as a given set of voters choosing amongst a given set of candidates. Each time the voters and candidates change, there is a distinct and separate election. In practice, RCV does precisely that. If no candidate receives a majority of votes, the lowest candidates are removed from contention and eliminated from the pool of viable candidates. But not only do the candidates change in subsequent rounds of an RCV election, so do the voters. For example, in one San Francisco RCV election, by the final round of tabulation, twenty-seven percent of voters had their ranked ballots exhausted and were no longer actively participating with the other seventy-three percent of voters. Because both candidates and voters change in every subsequent round, RCV is properly considered not one, but multiple elections. Some may argue that RCV’s practical consequence of producing multiple elections is inconsequential. However, this commonly-deployed argument ignores the more serious threat lurking in the background. Although passed off as “subsequent rounds” of a single election, properly understood, RCV’s multiple elections treat some voters more favorably than others. Voters who rank a non-continuing candidate first, and thus have their second or third choice considered, get to morph their ballots into outcome determinative votes. In contrast, voters who rank a continuing candidate are stuck with a single choice and that single vote. Moreover, while some voters have their votes counted again and again, others have their ballots eliminated in RCV’s subsequent rounds. For an example, consider the election data from a San Francisco RCV election. It is illogical to suggest that the twenty-seven percent of voters who had their ballots exhausted by the last round were afforded an “equal chance” to impact the outcome of the election—they did not even have a vote to exercise in the later elections. Thus, contrary to the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning in Dudum, votes are not afforded the “same mathematical weight” in RCV elections. Rather, RCV operates as multiple, unequal elections where some votes are elevated to outcome-determinative status, some are locked in place, while others are exhausted entirely. ''Reagan was the great optimist' — he also said we must 'recognize that evil exists in the world'
Ronald Reagan's values, vision and vibrant personal optimism inspired a rebirth of American pride, growth and exceptionalism in the 1980s, after nearly two decades of social and cultural upheaval. "Reagan was deeply concerned about America in the late 70s," Virginia-based historian and author Craig Shirley told Fox News Digital. "America had gone through 17 long, horrible years beginning with the assassination of JFK." The quagmire of Vietnam, the author added, the failed presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the resignation of Richard Nixon, the Iran hostage crisis and the infamous social and economic "malaise" of the Jimmy Carter administration all created the feeling of a nation in decline. Reagan countered the appearance of cultural decay with pro-growth economic policies and an investment in American muscularity abroad. He also invested political capital in the nation’s spiritual rebirth: Patriotism, faith and family, individualism and the belief that the best days for America were still ahead. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.” --W.B. Yeats Osama bin Laden rightly coached his followers that “the people want to follow the ‘strong horse’ and will abandon the weak one.” We are witnessing our nation now being destroyed by the powerful Democrat demons and betrayed by the pitiable weakness and cowardice of our Republican champions. Unless the Republicans, the Patriots, the Conservatives, the lovers of our Constitution, quickly rise up and display backbone, this great American experiment may well perish from the earth. Providence and our brilliant Constitution have given us a legal pathway to saving this nation, but it must be grasped and pursued with courage and righteous power. While the Democrats dishonored the tool of Impeachment against President Trump by using false and illegitimate reasons for their debauched actions, this must not be the excuse for abandoning this worthy instrument for correcting against corruption and stupidity in our highest public offices. The evidence for Biden’s corruption and betrayal of America mounts by the day. We cannot wait for the situation to ripen further. youtu.be/tIl57cchRqs
Overview shows a straightforward explanation of government systems, basic economics, and timeless moral principles. Because of following them, America became the most unique and prosperous country in history. Barack Obama and Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; the institutions were already weaponized by the Patriot Act. What Obama and Holder did was take the preexisting system and retool it, so the weapons of government only targeted one side of the political continuum. This point is where many people understandably get confused. Elevator Speech: (1) The Patriot Act turned the intel surveillance radar from foreign searches for terrorists to domestic searches for terrorists.(2) Obama/Biden then redefined what is a “terrorist” to include their political opposition. In the era shortly after 9/11, the DC national security apparatus, instructed by Vice President Dick Cheney, was constructed to preserve continuity of government and simultaneously view all Americans as potential threats. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were created specifically for this purpose. After 9/11/01, the electronic surveillance system, that was originally created to monitor threats from abroad, was retooled to monitor threats inside our country. That is when all of our electronic ‘metadata’ came under federal surveillance. That inflection point, and the process that followed, was exactly what Edward Snowden tried to point out. What Barack Obama and Eric Holder did with that new construct was refine the internal targeting mechanisms, so that only their political opposition became the target of this new national security system. Once upon a time, there was a coronavirus. Actually, there were several coronaviruses. The CDC lists 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1. It goes on to note that they are generally mild respiratory viruses that rarely cause serious illnesses. They are...drum roll, please...common cold viruses.
Over the last twenty years, we've been threatened with panic porn about three other coronaviruses: MERS, SARS, and COVID-19. MERS and SARS appeared to be really bad actors, but instead of the infectious holocaust the Feds predicted, they bombed out. SARS killed 11% of its victims but is known to have infected only 8,649 people. MERS was a bit worse, killing 35% of its victims, but as of 2021, there were only 2,600 total cases. At this point, our attention might wander to Zika and Ebola. Wild-eyed acolytes of the CDC shouted that these new plagues would destroy civilization as we knew it. Instead, they made profits for Anthony Fauci as he rented out his patent on Remdesivir. But it didn't work on Ebola. Then, the story goes, Fauci used our tax money to pay for the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make a bigger, badder coronavirus. This one could not be allowed to be a nothing. It had to be catastrophic so that his medicine would be prescribed for everyone. And a vaccine constructed with his help would also be pleasantly beneficial for his wallet. We live in an age of unbelief. The foundations of American life are eroding. America is entering an uncharted, revolutionary time. We are no longer the America of our founders or even the America that existed twenty years ago. We are in trouble, and a cataclysm of ominous events may soon overwhelm us. We need a national spiritual revival.
Two seminal revival movements were such game-changing events in American history that historians were compelled to call them Great Awakenings. The First Great Awakening in the mid-1700s created the moral climate for the Declaration of Independence and the founding of a new country, conceived in liberty, that would truly become a light to the nations. The Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s was even more potent and culminated with Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery. As a result of this movement, the United States has liberated more people economically, politically, and spiritually than any other nation in history. The problems of America today cannot be solved by politicians or our broken culture. We need another Great Awakening on a scale and resolve equal to the first two. There are some hopeful signs this may be happening. "The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened."
The pages of the Bible are a testament to the downfall of those who plot wicked plans, providing a guidepost for our own battles: "Do the right thing, and risk the consequences." Because, in the end, righteousness prevails. When we were children, bullies would throw sticks and stones and call us names. Today, some of those bullies grew up into "Deep Staters" who brand our truth as conspiracy theories and their lies as truth. As Isaiah warned, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20). Intimidation: Goliath, the Philistine giant, was a colossal embodiment of intimidation. Against him, the Israelites felt powerless. But with faith as his guide, David overcame. Today, we grapple with the "Giant of the Deep State," an insidious, unseen force that operates behind the curtains, manipulating political structures. These unelected puppet masters, who wield undue influence, can seem overwhelming, yet we are reminded: "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?" (Psalm 27:1). With God, even the mightiest, most covert enemies like Satan and his Deep State accomplices can be vanquished. Arrogance: Haman's story is emblematic of the consequences of unchecked arrogance. His malicious designs against the Jews were foiled by Esther and Mordecai, leading to his own destruction. Proverbs 16:18 observes, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Seduction and brazenness: Jezebel and her prophets of Baal epitomized seduction and brazenness, drawing Israel away from God. But God's enduring plan saw through their machinations. As it was in 1 Kings 18:39, "The Lord, He is God! The Lord, He is God!" In the time of Nehemiah, as the Israelites endeavored to rebuild their city's walls, they faced adversaries in Sanballat and Tobiah. Yet Nehemiah remained resolute. The people built the wall with one hand and defended with the other, illustrating that perseverance and faith can overcome any opposition. Today's world seems rife with insurmountable challenges. But when we embrace our "spiritual" sight over our "natural" eyes, we perceive the greater cosmic battle. As the Bible reassures, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). Echoing biblical teachings, John F. Kennedy once remarked, "The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened." We must stand unwaveringly against any evil, no matter its form. Gerald McGlothlin "Public opinion in the country is everything" - Abraham Lincoln.
In 1887, eminent thinker Wallace F. Campbell, writing in The North American Review, introduced the often-used term of today: The Court of Public Opinion. As cataloged by the Library of Congress, Campbell wrote: "It is commonly supposed that courts, juries, and counsel constitute the proper tribunal ordained by the people for the trial of alleged criminals. It has remained for the author of the "Court of Public Opinion" to assume that such is not the case, and that the machinery of justice exists merely for the purpose of automatically registering the prejudiced decision of a self-constituted tribunal ... a trial court whose judgment is infallible, and from whose decision no appeal lies, is a very unsafe tribunal for the people of this country to adopt." Campbell may well have had the wisdom to envision what could happen 136 years later - and be talking about President Biden's and the Left's relentless campaign to send former president Trump to jail. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his aggressive prosecutor Jack Smith are expending all federal resources to build a case that, under the right circumstances of a biased jury and a sympathetic bench, could result in a judgment that might appear infallible, as Campbell said. But the eminent thinker warns that such an outcome would be hard for voters to embrace. Indeed, the proceedings in the classified documents case are well underway. Judge Cannon has already set a trial date of May 2024, just six months before the next U.S. presidential election. Some conservatives complained that such a date is too dangerous for President Trump. What if he is found guilty of at least one charge? Democrats could not contain their glee. Running against a "criminal" would be the surest way to return President Biden to a second term. But the Democrats could be miscalculating big time. |
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