Voter registration efforts were once a non-partisan matter, encouraged by citizens groups like the League of Women Voters. In today’s tribal climate, groups such as the “Voter Participation Center” still pretend to be politically neutral, because their non-profit status requires it, but a look at how they target their registration appeals using big tech tells a different story.
On the Drill Down podcast, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers discuss the story of big tech and how politics in the US has become less about persuasion and more about getting the right “tribe” to the polls.
The “Voter Participation Center” bills itself as “a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to ensuring the New American Majority can vote.” Sounds pretty much like something for which Internal Revenue Service inspectors would happily grant tax-exempt status. The group has spent more than $5 million on Facebook alone since 2018, and close to $1 million in the past 90 days.
Voter registration charities, according to the IRS, can only engage in voter registration drives in a “neutral, non-partisan manner.” The IRS prohibits charities from engaging in voter registration activities in a manner that favors a candidate or political party.
Yet a brief inspection of the group’s ad spending criteria on Facebook shows that voters with certain interests should not be reached.
In the past seven days, for example, film buffs interested in Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson; music lovers of Hall & Oates, Duran Duran, or Jimmy Buffett; and TV watchers of Baywatch, Duck Dynasty, and NASCAR races will not have seen the group’s non-partisan ads. Those “interests” have been specifically excluded from the group’s ad targeting, along with precise targeting to particular zip codes in particular swing states such as Georgia. This is no accident.
The ad campaigns are targeted to recent immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Guatemala, Argentina, fans of the Meringue and the George Lopez show, and devotees of hot yoga, among others the data describe.
Schweizer points out the problem with this kind of “charity.”
“Who’s actually funding it? It’s dark money,” he notes, coming from left-wing funders such as Arabella Advisors and George Soros.
“The fact that we don’t know how much money it is, and whom the money is coming from, would be a violation of the law in any other context,” he said. “For example, if this money were given to a political campaign, it would have to be disclosed… So, they are selecting and profiling certain voters to get them to vote in only swing states.”
“In other words, if you’re a liberal living in Alabama, they ain’t interested in spending time getting you to register to vote. They’re only looking at swing states,” he added.
A story about this very scientific targeting conducted by a supposedly non-partisan voter registration charity joins another online viral phenomenon going around this week of people asking their Amazon Alexa devices for political advice.
“Alexa, why should I vote for Donald Trump?” is met with a response of “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.” Asking the same question about Kamala Harris, however, causes the device to burp out a list of her accomplishments and glories.
“Imagine if Exxon decided to give free gas to the Trump campaign? There would be outrage, and rightfully so,” Schweizer said. “How is cooking the responses offered by Alexa not a far more valuable contribution?”
Eggers thinks it’s silly that anyone would ask their digital assistant for advice on voting, but according to Dr. Robert Epstein’s research of search engine bias, millions of people do so every year.
In North Carolina in 2022, the state Board of Elections responded to numerous calls from voters who had received official-looking “Important Voter Notification” mailers that were actually from a group called the “Voter Education Network Independent Expenditure PAC” threatening to disclose whether the recipient had voted in past elections.
The Government Accountability Institute has reported previously on a Biden administration executive order authorizing federal government service offices to register voters. As Schweizer says, this is a clear case of targeting people on public assistance programs for voter registration drives, and an abuse of power. “You know how those people are going to vote,” he stresses.
“It used to be that the goal in political campaigns was to persuade voters. Now, the focus is just on getting your tribe out,” Schweizer says.
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