Imagine my surprise when I opened my email to find an invitation from the MI State Department to an all-day, “non-partisan” voting event at Oakland University in Rochester, MI, for high school and college students, featuring ONLY elected Democrat members of Congress. The event, which is “hosted” by MI SOS Jocelyn Benson’s State Department, is also being sponsored by two far-left organizations.
Join us at the 2023 Student Voting Summit!
This nonpartisan event is held annually for high school, college, and university students, educators, administrators, and individuals in the civic engagement and student voting space!
The event is hosted by the Michigan Department of State in partnership with Campus Vote Project.
Event Details
Date: Friday, October 6
Time: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. (lunch provided)
Where: Oakland University
Oakland Center
312 Meadow Brook Road
Rochester, MI 48309
Individuals must register to attend.
The event, which is being billed as a “non-partisan” event that will be funded with MI taxpayer dollars, features an “Elected official panel” that will discuss “youth voter engagement.” The only problem is, in addition to featuring MI Dem SOS Jocelyn Benson, who oversees the State Department funding the voter event, and MI Dem AG Dana Nessel, the panel ONLY includes Democrat members of Congress.
The student “breakout sessions” will also be led by an ALL-DEMOCRAT team of elected members of Congress.
At some point in the promotion of their event, MI Rep. Cam Cavitt’s (R) photo appeared in an advertisement alongside nine Democrat members of Congress. The Gateway Pundit contacted Rep. Cavitt’s office to inquire about his participation in the voting event at Oakland University. We were told by an aide working for his office that Rep. Cavitt would not be participating in the voting event, leaving only Democrats to run the voter event for the young voters.
A deeper dive into the groups sponsoring the event reveals that the voting event may not be quite as “non-partisan” as billed.
The leadership at Campus Vote, which bills itself as a non-partisan group, is filled with Democrat Party leaders and radical activists.
Here are just a few of the individuals running the “non-partisan” group that’s sponsoring the ALL-DEMOCRAT voting summit:
Mike Burns, the National Director at Campus Vote Project – According to his bio, Mike Burns spent over five years working in electoral politics prior to law school, including two years as the Executive Director of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee.
Amanda LaRoche, the North Carolina State Coordinator for the Campus Vote Project, was an executive committee member with the Baldwin County Democrats and a campaign coordinator for the 2018 mid-term elections.
And then there’s Bianca Avery, the Campus Vote Project Coordinator for Texas, who, in her bio, states that she is a “proud mom of three beautiful and very woke children.”
If it’s not reasonably clear that the individuals in leadership roles at Campus Vote
The Campus Vote Project (or Campus Vote Legal) is one of the primary sponsors of the “non-partisan” voter event. They are also part of the Fair Elections Center.
On the first sentence on the first page of their 2022 Annual report, the Fair Elections Center condemns “election deniers who continue to denigrate the US electoral system and intimidate exhausted election officials,” a sentence that could have been written by MI Democrat SOS Jocelyn Benson or MI Democrat AG Dana Nessel, who have both parroted this popular condemnation of anyone who dares to question the results of the 2020 or 2022 election and are listed as two of the elected officials who will be part of the panel at the upcoming Oakland University Student Voter Summit.
The Fair Elections Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that got its funding from the New Venture Fund, a fiscal sponsorship and pass-through nonprofit created and administered by the for-profit consultancy Arabella Advisors in Washington, DC.
In 2021, the New Venture Fund posted total revenues of $964 million.
Arabella Advisors is America’s most powerful, far-left, dark money network responsible for funneling hundreds of millions into Democrat Party campaigns from anonymous donors.
Hayden Ludwig of Capitol Research explains how Arabella funds leftist non-profits – Three of the four “sisters” in this “dark money” family rely heavily on foundation grants to fund their political activities, which includes funneling money from wealthy philanthropies to the controversial leftist causes they’d rather not be directly associated with.
To date, we’ve traced $356 million in grants to Arabella’s three in-house (c)(3) groups from a handful of major left-of-center donors. While most of the grants we’ve uncovered don’t specify which cause they were intended to support, some shine a light on how these foundations used Arabella’s nonprofits as a pass-through to fund overtly political activities.
Arabella sent almost $174 million in 2020 to America Votes, a massive get-out-the-vote operation targeting Democratic voters. Is that charity?
They also gave $25 million to the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life, which repackaged the money as grants to government elections offices nationwide in order to privatize the 2020 election in battleground states.
On its website, the Fair Elections Center boasts its involvement in several elections-related lawsuits where they are fighting against safeguards put in place to secure our elections across multiple states. In one of the cases they feature on their website, the leftist group explains how they’re fighting to make it possible for college students to bypass statewide voter ID requirements in Wisconsin. As part of their argument, the Fair Elections Center says the valid ID requirement to vote is “a pointless barrier for casting a ballot in Wisconsin.” They warn that the “unnecessary requirements” to force students to provide a valid ID “can confuse and deter” them from voting. In other words, the Fair Elections Center lawsuit suggests college kids are smart enough to provide a valid ID to get into a local bar near their campus, but somehow, they aren’t smart enough to provide a valid ID to vote.
The Fair Elections Center lawsuit also claims “the signature requirement is unnecessary,” an issue MI SOS Benson is very familiar with since she was successfully sued in 2020 when a judge ruled that she had no business telling clerks across the state of Michigan to ignore signature matching on absentee ballots.
The far-left group “Promote the Vote” is another sponsor of the all-Democrat Party event.
According to the Fair Elections Center website, which is being used to sign up students for the event, Promote the Vote will pay for “travel stipends” for the students who register to attend the one-day event.
Promote the Vote was instrumental in getting the unconstitutional vote-cheating Proposal 2 on the ballot in Michigan in 2022. Together, with nearly 30 partner organizations, including the NAACP Michigan State Conference, the George Soros-funded Michigan League for Conservation Voters, and the Michigan Farmers Union, the far-left group was able to convince voters through a campaign of lies and deceit that Proposal 2 would make voting more secure.
The parent organization of Promote the Vote is the National Council of Jewish Women. The (NCJW) supports left-of-center policy goals in Israel and the United States. NCJW focuses on four advocacy causes: expanding gender equality in Israel, blocking conservatives’ federal judicial appointments, supporting abortion access, and mobilizing voters.
Welcome to Michigan, where MI SOS Jocelyn Benson plays by her own rules and MI AG Dana Nessel makes sure no one on her team is ever punished. Even when she’s a guest speaker at an event advertised as “non-partisan,” that only includes Democrats and leftist so-called “non-partisan” groups, Dana Nessel keeps her head down and remains laser-focused on finding ways to punish her political enemies.
