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If election night and the following days are awash in uncertainty and upheaval, a major culprit could be conservative powerbroker Leonard Leo. Thanks to a conspiracy-laden voter-suppression blitz, Leo’s dark money network has set the stage for postelection chaos. Also: The above message is a paid advertisement. You can read The Lever’s advertising policy here. The Dark Money Kingpin Behind Election-Day Chaos
By Freddy Brewster
[View in browser] Right-wing activist groups with ties to conservative Supreme Court mastermind Leonard Leo have been on a conspiracy-laden voter-suppression blitz ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election, pushing unfounded claims of noncitizens voting and filing lawsuits that are successfully restricting voting rights. Working hand in hand with individuals who tried to overturn the 2020 election, Leo’s billion-dollar dark money network is amplifying election conspiracy theories promulgated by former President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their allies. While such strategies are likely designed to help sway the election for Trump, experts say these efforts could also help set the foundation for distrust and upheaval on election night and in the days to come. The groups are “invested in using scare tactics to sow doubt in the election process, which could help lay the groundwork for partisan actors to challenge the results of the election if they do not like the outcome,” according to a recent report by Issue One, a nonpartisan group dedicated to protecting the election process. Leo, who oversees a dark money political network with more cash on hand than all the top political parties combined, declared in an undated internal memo uncovered in September that his operation would be “operationalizing and weaponizing… ideas and policies to crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society,” including by building “networks of citizen activists” and developing “game-changing litigation.” Leo-connected legal advocacy groups have been filing voter-suppression lawsuits in states across the country, resulting in voters being removed from registration rolls and limiting the deadline for mail-in ballots. Other Leo-tied groups are working outside of the courts to cast doubt on the election process. That includes legal activist group Judicial Watch, which along with filing election lawsuits announced it was sending “election monitors” to polling locations in Wisconsin, a key swing state. Leo, a former Trump judicial adviser and member of the conservative Catholic institution Opus Dei, has made it his mission to refashion the country around a strict conservative economic and social agenda, and in 2022 received a record-breaking $1.6 billion dark money donation to supercharge his operations. Leo has helped install right-wing judges to federal benches and played a key role in building the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. He’s also helped spearhead pivotal cases before those judges, and some of the recent voter-suppression lawsuits are being heard by right-wing judges and justices who Leo helped install. “This is a multipronged effort,” said Michael Beckel, research director for Issue One. “You’ve got people who are advancing certain narratives, who are filing lawsuits, and who are reshaping the judiciary that will be hearing those lawsuits. All of those parts are interconnected and are going to be playing really pivotal roles in the days and weeks ahead, and if things end up in the courts, some of these players have been working to shape those courts for years.” Nonprofits affiliated with Leo have also poured money into organizations that are members of a newly formed group called the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a bloc of more than 80 member organizations and individuals who played a key role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. The coalition, which has deep ties to the former Trump White House and the Project 2025 plan to reshape the government if Trump wins, has been spreading claims that noncitizens are trying to vote in federal elections. In September, the group held a “National Only Citizens Vote Week,” in which volunteers helped push “conspiracies about immigrants, planning to post threatening signs at polling places, and blaming the ‘evil left’ for stealing the election even before a vote has been cast,” news outlet Wired reported. The coalition was launched in July by Cleta Mitchell, a former adviser and attorney for Trump who took part in a January 2021 phone call in which Trump asked Georgia officials to “find” more than 11,000 votes to swing the election in his favor. Mitchell and Leo have direct ties dating back to at least 2009, when Mitchell helped Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, establish a nonprofit that named Leo as one of its directors, legal filings show. Since 2020, more than $590 million has flowed to nearly three dozen organizations that are members of the coalition, according to the Issue One report.
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Leo is connected to three of the top 15 donor groups involved. The Leo-backed group Donors Trust donated $80 million to coalition groups, the Concord Fund gave $24 million, and the 85 Fund provided $2.5 million. And since tax-filing delays meant some 2023 and all 2024 payments weren’t included in Issue One’s report, total contributions to coalition members may be considerably higher. The Republican Party, meanwhile, has been involved in more than 130 election-related lawsuits nationwide in the run-up to Election Day, claiming their lawsuits are geared toward preserving “election integrity.” Consovoy McCarthy, a small but influential conservative law firm with deep ties to Leo, has represented the Republican National Committee in a number of these lawsuits in Mississippi and Georgia, while Judicial Watch has been involved in election-related lawsuits in California, Mississippi, and Oregon. Studies have shown that voter fraud is “extraordinarily rare,” according to a recent report from the Brennan Center For Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. In 2016, the center conducted a study asking election administrators in 42 jurisdictions across 12 states about noncitizens voting and found that out of the more than 23.5 million voters overseen by those officials, they referred “only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizens voting for further investigation or prosecution.” Experts say many of the current election suits were filed without any intention of succeeding. Instead, they say they’re designed for election deniers to use as fodder to discredit the voting process. “Judicial Watch has a track record of trying to basically bully election officials into more aggressively purging their rolls in ways that are not really necessary and also potentially illegal, because they result in excluding eligible voters,” said Kate Titus, executive director of the Oregon branch of Common Cause, a national watchdog group dedicated to a variety of voting issues. “They’re throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and then [other groups] are copying to see what can get traction to expand that [process] across the country.” Millions Of Dollars “To Fight Government Overreach”Legal groups tied to Leo all scored significant wins in recent weeks in district courts and at the Supreme Court, meaning thousands of people might not be able to vote in the election thanks to the Leo-funded groups. Late last month, the Leo-backed Honest Elections Project successfully urged the U.S. Supreme Court to allow Virginia to purge voters from its rolls. In August, the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order to purge the voter information of anyone who was “unable to verify that they are citizens.” The order affected roughly 1,600 people, some of whom were eligible to vote. In early October, the Justice Department sued the state to block the purge, claiming that it violated the National Voter Registration Act that calls for a 90-day “quiet period” that bars states from a “systemic” removal of voters on the roll. A district court ruled in the Justice Department’s favor, but Youngkin’s administration appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. In its amicus brief supporting Youngkin’s legal big, the Honest Election Project said that the district court’s ruling “needlessly undermines democracy and public faith in the electoral process,” and that the “ruling incentivizes foul play by creating an opportunity for non-citizens not only to register to vote, but also to cast illegally obtained ballots, so long as they register to vote within 90 days of an election.”
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The high court agreed, ruling on Oct. 30 that the voter purge was allowed to go through. The Honest Elections Project, which played a crucial role in the disputed election theory that the Trump legal team pushed to overturn the 2020 election, is a registered business alias in Virginia for the 85 Fund, which has business and financial ties to multiple Leo operations. In a 2022 tax filing, the most recent on record with the Internal Revenue Service, the 85 Fund spent more than $137 million on “activities to educate the public about the importance of constitutionalism, limited government, religious liberty, the role of the courts, education policies, and election reforms.” Leo-linked activists also played a role in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ Oct. 25 ruling that mail-in ballots received after Election Day in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas will not be counted. The appeals court, which is known to be friendly to business interests and conservative viewpoints, hinted at preserving the “status quo” ahead of the current election and did not order immediate changes to a 2020 Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted within five days post-Election Day. The appeals court left the final decision on how to address the remedies up to a lower court, though the decision is not likely to affect the current election. Any court ruling would likely only affect Mississippi voters because both Louisiana and Texas have laws requiring local officials to only count mail-in ballots that were received on Election Day and prior. The case stemmed from two lawsuits filed by the Republican National Committee and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, which were represented by Virginia-based law firm Consovoy McCarthy and conservative legal activist group Judicial Watch, respectively. Consovoy McCarthy and Judicial Watch both have financial and business ties to Leo. From 2020 to 2022, Consovoy McCarthy received more than $3 million from Leo’s 85 Fund for legal services, according to tax records reviewed by The Lever. Consovoy McCarthy represented the 85 Fund during a 2023 Supreme Court case that would have granted state legislatures greater control over redistricting and election maps. In August, Consovoy McCarthy, representing the Republican National Committee, won a Supreme Court case that significantly limits when voters in Arizona can register to vote without proof of citizenship.
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The ruling did not remove more than 40,000 registered voters in Arizona who didn’t provide proof of citizenship, as the conservative operatives had requested; these voters now cannot vote in state and local races, but can still cast ballots in federal elections. Consovoy McCarthy also represented the Republican National Committee in election-related lawsuits in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, and Nevada that sought to purge voter rolls, set strict deadlines for mail-in ballots, and to install legal rules that would allow partisan actors greater control of the election results, among other issues. Conservatives won their cases in Mississippi and Virginia, litigation in Florida is still ongoing. “Stunts” To Undermine The ElectionJudicial Watch, a conservative activist group that has been filing voter-suppression lawsuits, sending election monitors to swing states, and promoting statistics demonizing the Biden administration’s immigration policies, received more than $674,000 from 2020 to 2022 from Donors Trust, a Leo-backed nonprofit dubbed the “dark-money ATM” for conservative groups. During that same period, Donors Trust gave $300,000 to the Council for National Policy, a conservative nonprofit led by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton and member of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition. Fitton has been a Trump ally since at least 2016, when Trump began using Judicial Watch information to claim that millions of ineligible voters voted in California during the 2016 election. Judicial Watch used a similar legal strategy in 2020 when it sued Pennsylvania in an attempt to force the state to purge voters in three counties. Judicial Watch recently notched a partial win in a case out of Illinois. The legal activist group sued the state to gain access to voter registration records in an attempt to remove ineligible voters from the roll, arguing that the state has removed an “absurdly small” number of people from its rolls from 2020 to 2022. State officials countered the claim, stating that they have removed more than 600,000 ineligible voters during the time period in question. A district judge ruled that Judicial Watch lacked standing to challenge Illinois’ voter registration maintenance procedures, but granted the group access to voter records. The legal group recently filed a lawsuit in Oregon seeking to force the state to purge its voter rolls, using a similar argument to the one it used in the Illinois case: Too few people have been kicked off voter rolls. A judge has yet to make a ruling in the case, but the group is known to cite faulty data and misinterpret state laws in their legal filings, said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause. Judicial Watch and the other legal groups’ recent efforts have “absolutely been a coordinated effort,” she added. “These things are all stunts to try to undermine people’s faith in the election,” Albert said. “We know that there are safeguards in place. We know that there are backup systems. We know that anybody whose ballot was affected by any bad actors can go to their elections office and have it dealt with.”
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