By Joe Schofstall, Washington Free Beacon (April 11, 2017)
An organization funded by liberal billionaire George Soros and chaired by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s daughter is fighting lawsuits brought forth by election integrity groups in a number of cities.
Demos, a New York City-based progressive public policy organization, is assisting unions in pushing back against election lawsuits filed in North Carolina and Florida. The group is also writing letters of interest in another lawsuit in Pennsylvania. Amelia Warren Tyagi, Warren’s daughter, chairs the board of Demos.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indiana-based legal group that litigates to protect election integrity, filed a lawsuit against Wake County, N.C., on behalf of Voter Integrity Project NC, a research organization dedicated to fair elections, after the county had failed to accurately maintain their voter rolls.
The county also failed to provide records related to the maintenance of their voter rolls and possible noncitizen voting, as required by federal law.
“According to publicly-available data, Wake County has more registered voters on the rolls eligible to cast a ballot than it has citizens who are alive,” PILF wrote. “The complaint states that ‘voter rolls maintained by the Defendant for Wake County contain or have contained more registrants than eligible voting-age citizens. The number of registrants in Wake County, North Carolina has been over 100 percent of eligible voting-age citizens.”
A motion to dismiss the lawsuit was filed February 21 by the Wake County Board of Elections and three attorneys. Senior U.S. Judge W. Earl Britt ruled in favor of the Voter Integrity Project and denied the request.
Cameron Bell, a legal fellow at Demos, is assisting the attorneys on the case. One of the main goals of Demos is to reduce the role of money in politics and to guarantee “the freedom to vote,” according to its website. Demos received hundreds of thousands in funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
Individuals from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a progressive nonprofit in North Carolina, are also assisting on the lawsuit. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice has also received funding from Soros.
PILF filed a separate lawsuit in Broward County, Fla., against Brenda Snipes, the county’s supervisor of elections, for violations of federal roll maintenance. PILF brought the lawsuit forward on behalf of the , an Alexandria, Va.-based legal group that has been described as the conservative ACLU.
Broward County, like Wake County, has more registered voters on their rolls than the number of eligible citizens who can vote in 2014, PILF said.
Cameron Bell, the Demos attorney who is involved in North Carolina, also interjected in Broward County. In addition to Bell, Scott Novakowski and Stuart C. Naifeh, counsel from Demos, are involved in Florida.
Individuals from Project Vote, a nonprofit that formerly teamed up with the scandal-plagued and now defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), are also in Broward County.
Demos and Project Vote additionally wrote amici in a Philadelphia lawsuit but has not intervened.
“Just like when leftist financiers tried and failed to block voter ID laws from coast to coast, the checkbooks are open again to preserve the status quo where poor record maintenance is concerned,” Logan Churchwell, PILF’s spokesman, told the Washington Free Beacon. “When you view vulnerability as currency, it must come natural to want to protect not only the weaknesses in a system, but the actors who exacerbate them.”
Democrats have scrambled to build up a massive network to counter voter integrity efforts after Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.
Marc Elias, the former top campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton, led challenges against voter identification laws in numerous states leading up to the 2016 elections. The effort was bankrolled by millions of dollars from Soros. Elias recently joined the board of Priorities USA Action, the largest liberal super PAC that backed Clinton, to spearhead their nonprofit arm’s efforts against voter laws.
