The Battle for Free and Fair Elections

Liberals hate millionaires and billionaires….except when they help skew elections.

Northland Freedom Alliance has chosen a mission to strengthen our communities through the freedoms prescribed in the Bill of Rights. We acknowledge that many of our supporters wish NFA would take a more active role in the battle surrounding election integrity. It isn’t that we aren’t aware of these issues, don’t take them seriously or aren’t concerned about free and fair elections and allegations of impropriety. We are equally worried about fraud and a waning lack of trust among voters. In the end, NFA chose to focus on the bedrock of our republic; the first ten amendments of our Constitution. We can’t be all-things to all-people. Many groups already exist in Wisconsin that focus exclusively on voter integrity.

Yet we can’t help but raise the warning flag regarding ongoing efforts to undermine free and fair elections. Readers are probably familiar by now with ‘Zuckerbucks’. The term is in reference to ‘grants’ funded by the billionaire Facebook founder that poured into Wisconsin ahead of the 2020 presidential election to assist communities to ‘get out the vote’.

Traditionally the running of municipal elections is a public matter, funded by taxpayers under the guidance of state statute. Ideally, all municipalities operate their elections in the same manner, with similar access, voting hours and availability to voters to cast their ballots. No community should be given an upper hand due to private influence.

Predictably, these ‘private grants’ disproportionately benefited the five largest and not-so-coincidentally most liberal cities in the Badger State including Milwaukee, Madison, Racine and Green Bay. The result was a clear advantage in large liberal communities to turn out liberal voters. Meanwhile more conservative areas of the state including rural counties did not benefit from this infusion of private money.

Clearly the use of private grants to run elections skewed the result in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. Not surprising, it’s also evident that the effectiveness of grant dollars from the likes of liberal Zuckerbucks are the reason Tony Evers vetoed a bill to outlaw the practice. In Northwest Wisconsin, 73^rd Assembly Candidate Laura Gapske has also publicly supported the use of private dollars from millionaires and billionaires to fund the operations of our elections.

Evers and Gapske are on the wrong side of this issue. The most recent Marquette University poll showed that 56% of voters are very concerned about election integrity. This isn’t a partisan issue. Many county boards have passed resolutions opposed to private funding and several have placed the issue on the ballot as an advisory question to the voters this November.

Despite these efforts, the issue still looms. The City of Racine is still using a $200,000 Zuckerburg-funding ‘mobile voting van’ instead of drop-boxes.₁ The city of Milwaukee and its mayor face challenges for their most recent privately-funded get-out-the-vote scheme.₂

Perhaps the greatest irony is that those now in favor of electioneering help from the wealth are generally those most opposed to millionaires and billionaires. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be fuming. Evers and Laura Gapske supporters should be outraged that their candidate has made a deal with corporate greed. Apparently if so-called corporate greed finances their efforts, they are silent. Imagine the fury if Elon Musk, who recently professed his distrust of the current administration, poured a portion of his fortune to ramp up the vote in targeted conservative wards? The left would be apocalyptic.

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