Reported BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JULY 07, 2022
Governors and other state officials don’t have to stand idly by as the Biden administration plots a federal takeover of elections. That’s the message being sent by the heads of two good government groups in a new memo to state officials.
“The Biden administration wants to use federal government resources for political, get-out-the-vote purposes, and it’s up to strong leaders in state and local government to stop them,” wrote Russ Vought of the Center for Renewing America and Tarren Bragdon of the Foundation for Government Accountability. “We strongly urge those in positions of power to stop President Biden’s power grab and act soon.”
Biden issued an executive order on March 7, 2021, directing all 600 federal agencies to submit a plan to the White House to increase voter registration and turnout. Many agencies subsequently developed a plan to turn federal facilities, particularly those that deliver federal benefits, into voter registration agencies.
For example, Housing and Urban Development is trying to turn assisted housing centers into get-out-the-vote hubs. Health and Human Services is doing the same with its public health centers. Even as labor problems are out of control, the Department of Labor is turning its American Job Centers into voter registration agencies.
The agencies are allowed to work with voting groups approved by left-wing partisans in the White House, reminiscent of the Zuckerbucks plot to destabilize the 2020 election by running get-out-the-vote operations in the Democrat areas of swing states.
It’s a “backdoor approach that’s designed to ensure Democratic victories at the polls in 2022 and beyond,” Vought and Bragdon wrote.
The two recommend that state officials take action to prevent Biden’s plot. Since the National Voting Rights Act provides states the authority to designate voter registration agencies beyond those already required by federal law, the federal government cannot designate additional agencies without a change to federal law enacted by Congress.
So when federal agencies send “guidance” memorandums to state agencies about turning federal benefit centers into voter registration agencies, Vought and Bragdon recommend state officials contact those agencies and “order them not to implement that guidance because it is illegal at worst and unethical and partisan at best.”
Further, they remind states that they can issue a gubernatorial executive order or the legislature can pass a law or resolution prohibiting state agencies from applying to become voter registration agencies.
“With increasing brazenness, President Biden is taking advantage of a loyal federal bureaucracy to wield the power and influence of the federal government to influence elections by increasing Democratic voter registration and turnout,” write Bragdon and Vought. They say the actions are particularly troubling given recent lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice against conservative efforts to fortify election integrity and make it more difficult to cheat.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com
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