The Sconi

Ron Heuer, president of the Wisconsin Voter Alliance, said that he was on board with a recent letter from 15 Republican Secretaries of State asking President Joe Biden to rescind a year-and-a-half old executive order that directs the federal agencies to formulate plans to encourage voter registration and participation.

Heuer told The Sconi that Biden’s March 2021 executive order was effectively a way of incorporating the scheme devised by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to manipulate election procedures in battleground states in 2020. Zuckerberg donated an estimated $400 million to CTCL, a nonprofit headed by former Barack Obama operatives, to pump money into the offices of local and state election officials in a get out the vote effort disguised as a safe voting campaign.

“Basically it's using our tax dollars to implement a lot of the activities the Zuckerbucks paid for in the 2020 elections,” Heuer said. “This is totally wrong and this executive order needs to be rescinded.”

The letter from the secretaries to Biden said that “the supreme law of the land, the Constitution clearly says the state legislatures shall (emphasis added) prescribe the way elections are run, and that if any adjustments need to be made, such adjustments are the province of Congress, not the Executive branch,” the secretaries wrote in an Aug. 3 letter to Biden. “Therefore, Executive Order 14019 was issued without Constitutional authority nor Congressional approval.”

The signers include the Ohio Secretary of State Steve Barnette, West Virginia’s Mac Warner, Wyoming’s Ed Buchanan, Montana’s Christi Jacobsen, and 11 others. Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette, a Democrat, was not a signee.

The secretaries also charged that Biden order was another attempt by Washington to federalize the nation’s elections.

“Executive Order 14019 calls for federal agencies to develop plans that duplicate voter registration efforts conducted at the state level and ignores codified procedures and programs in our state constitutions and laws,” they wrote. “Involving Federal agencies in the registration process will produce duplicate registrations, confuse citizens, and complicate the jobs of our county clerks and election officials. If implemented, the Executive Order would also erode the responsibility and duties of the state legislatures to their situational duty within the Election Clause.”

Multiple congressional attempts over the past two years to effectively turn the constitutional authority of the states to enact their own election procedures have failed.

The most recent attempt was last November when the Senate failed to advance S. 4, or the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

“If enacted, S. 4 would erode voter integrity safeguards and force state legislatures to seek permission from the federal government to pass or change state election laws through a constitutionally questionable process called preclearance,” the Election Transparency Initiative said in a statement at the time.