Democrats Have a New Electoral-Campaign Partner

T he federal government under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is slipshod and dilatory, except in one area of activity — mobilizing federal resources to get more people to vote this November and keep Democrats in power.

In March 2021 — only six weeks after taking office — President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14019, “Promoting Access to Voting,” which directed every one of the 400 or so federal agencies to register and mobilize voters — particularly “people of color” and others who, the White House says, face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further directed the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits, which in reality are a politicized stew of progressive, labor, and identity-focused groups.

A recent report by a coalition of such groups concluded that if federal agencies “integrate a high-quality voter registration opportunity for the people they serve, . . . they could collectively generate an additional 3.5 million voter registration applications per year.”

Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration has ordered federal employees to provide members of the public with voter-registration and mail-in-ballot applications, thereby politicizing election processes as no other administration has ever done. As I show in a forthcoming report for the think tank Unleash Prosperity, it has also gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the “strategic plans” it has required from every federal agency to implement the executive order. The administration has even ignored or rejected Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and actively fought congressional subpoenas.

The Biden-Harris order is clearly unlawful and creates a real danger of partisan interference in our elections. “With few exceptions, the executive branch has no constitutional or statutory authority to engage in voter registration and absentee ballot activities,” says Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “This executive order violates multiple federal laws and could cause members of the public who interact with federal agencies to feel intimidated and coerced.”

The Biden-Harris executive order closely followed the recommendations of a December 2020 report prepared by Demos, a group aligned with Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. Demos was intimately involved in drafting the order, and former Demos executives are seeded throughout the Biden administration implementing it. According to von Spakovsky, “Demos provided a ‘road map for the use of executive power’ to reach liberal constituencies, particularly black and Hispanic voters.” The nonpartisan Capital Research Center has characterized Demos as a “left-wing public policy advocacy group . . . that advocates a staunchly liberal agenda” and “receives substantial funding from labor unions and progressive foundations.” “‘Nonpartisan’ and ‘charitable’ voter-registration and get-out-the-vote groups are the Democratic Party’s electioneering superweapons,” Parker Thayer, an analyst at the Capital Research Center, told me.

By asserting executive privilege and refusing to comply with FOIA requests, the Biden-Harris administration has done everything it can to not reveal how its order is being carried out. The only time the Biden administration has publicized the executive order appears to have been when it has wanted to alert liberal groups to the resources the government can provide. A prime example: In February, Vice President Harris held a closed-door meeting with leaders of left-wing groups, after which she announced a “four-part strategy” to use the full force of the federal government to create an election-year voter-turnout operation. Consider that the Biden Education Department is now using college work–study funds to pay students for “get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, . . . or serving as a poll worker.”

In this, as in many other cases, the Biden-Harris team is simply flouting the law. A 2022 letter from the Education Department makes clear that federal work–study funds “cannot be used . . . for work involving partisan or nonpartisan political activity, including party-affiliated voter registration activities.” Now the agency claims that it had misread the law. At the same time, however, it is suggesting that universities provide drop-box locations and early-voting sites for students, the vast majority of whom vote Democratic.

Other federal agencies are pitching in. The Department of Homeland Security will register voters during naturalization ceremonies, something private groups used to do. The Department of Agriculture is also working with left-wing advocacy groups to boost voter turnout.

The clearly partisan tilt of federal agencies can be seen especially in places such as Michigan. Congressman Pete Stauber of Minnesota noted that “approximately 91 percent of Michiganders are registered to vote.” Why, asked Stauber, would the Small Business Administration be concentrating on Michigan “rather than states with lower registration numbers if the executive order is meant to increase voter registration in a nonpartisan way?”

Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation’s Government Oversight program scoffs at public claims of neutrality by the voting groups that the Biden administration is partnering with. “If they were truly interested in an informed participatory constitutional Republic, they would have an even-handed approach to registering voters,” he told RealClearInvestigations. “Call me when they show up to a NASCAR race, Daughters of the American Revolution event, or a gun show.”

There is a strong legal case against the Biden-Harris order and its opaque alliance with left-wing pressure groups.

In March, Mississippi secretary of state Michael Watson sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice asking it to stop enforcing the Biden order because it is being used to register ineligible convicts and illegal immigrants. Watson told me that federal agencies are being misdirected “from their historical missions of law enforcement to voter registration and get-out-the-vote operations.”

Unfortunately, any legal efforts to thwart the Biden executive order are likely to be ruled on after the voting is finished. For conservatives who are determined to win this November, they will simply have to use the Biden-Harris administration’s poor record, and their own hard work, to counter the disparity in resources between them and the Left.

The old adage of electoral politics used to be “Vote early and vote often.” To that, the Biden-Harris administration has added “and with the help of taxpayer dollars.”

This article is based on a forthcoming study of voting in the 2024 election by the think tank Unleash Prosperity.