Thursday, March 21, 2013

mission
Vision
History
The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation was established in 1936 as a memorial to the youngest son of the founder of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In that year the brother and two sisters of Z. Smith Reynolds - R.J. Reynolds, Jr., Mary Reynolds Babcock, and Nancy Susan Reynolds Bagley - provided that their inheritance from his estate would go to the establishment of a trust for "charitable works in the State of North Carolina." One of the initial trustees of the Foundation was Z. Smith Reynolds' uncle, William Neal Reynolds, who at his death in 1951 created a trust that now provides a portion of the Foundation's annual income.

In its history, the Foundation, as the beneficiary of the income from the Zachary Smith Reynolds Trust and the W. N. Reynolds Trust, has made grants to organizations in all of North Carolina's 100 counties.
In 1946 the Foundation entered into a contract with Wake Forest University to move the college from the town of Wake Forest in Wake County to Winston-Salem. The Foundation has continued to have a special relationship with Wake Forest University over the years and provides annual support to it.
The Trustees of the Foundation established focus areas for the first time in the early 1980’s, recognizing the need to target the Foundation’s dollars in order to achieve a greater impact.  The focus areas have changed through the years and, thus, what may have been a priority in the past may no longer be an emphasis of the Foundation’s funding.  We recommend that all applicants review the focus area information listed on this web site in order to determine whether or not their work meets the Foundation’s desired results within the current focus areas, Community Economic Development, Strengthening Democracy, the Environment, Public Education, and Social Justice and Equity.
The Foundation makes grants only to nonprofit, tax-exempt, charitable organizations and institutions that are exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code or to governmental units. No grants are made to individuals for any purpose. Organizations that operate both within and outside of the State of North Carolina may be eligible for consideration for programs operating in North Carolina. However, this Foundation is restricted to making grants supporting projects in North Carolina with the purpose of benefiting residents of North Carolina.
Publication Archives: Blog

Another voter registration scandal

Over at PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a piece on two scandals breaking out in North Carolina. The first scandal involves thousands of improper voter registrations in a scam that was duplicated in all 50 states this election cycle. The second concerns left-wing nonprofits in the state, whose secret strategy to attack leading conservative office-holders was leaked. Even the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which is North Carolina’s answer to the Ford Foundation, was gravely embarrassed, and the state GOP has filed formal complaints with the IRS and the State Board of Elections (SBE). Unfortunately, the SBE is at the center of the voter registration scandal:
The SBE general counsel wrote Civitas September 26, 2012, to assure them, “We were not contacted by any campaign, candidate, legislator, or political party” regarding registration. Yet the firm that SBE allowed to conduct “web-based” registrations brags on its website’s front page that its clients include “Presidential campaigns,” and its clients page lists “Obama for President Draft Committee.”
Get the whole story here.

Leaked attack memo could jeopardize group's finances

RALEIGH A group that sent out a memo with tips on how to attack Gov. Pat McCrory and other Republican leaders exercised “bad judgment” that could jeopardize its funding, the director of a foundation that finances the group said Friday.
Leslie Winner, executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, said she was “surprised and disappointed” by the actions of Blueprint North Carolina.
“(Z. Smith Reynolds) believes in robust debate on issues of public importance, (it) does not support attacking people,” Winner said. “We were disappointed to learn that Blueprint is advocating this strategy…
“We are taking this seriously. We are determining our options and our obligations. We will get to the bottom of it.”
The Foundation is providing $400,000 of Blueprint’s nearly $1 million budget, Winner said.
The memo was forwarded by Stephanie Bass, then Bluprint’s communications director, to the group’s nonprofit allies. The Observer obtained a copy.
Describing the control Republicans hold on North Carolina state government, it gave progressives a list of recommendations. Among them:
• “Crippling their leaders (McCrory, Tillis, Berger etc.).”
• “Eviscerate the leadership and weaken their ability to govern.”
• “Pressure McCrory at every public event.”
• “Slam him when he contradicts his promises.”
• “Private investigators and investigative reporting, especially in the executive branch…”
Those were among the talking points and action steps in a memo forwarded by Blueprint North Carolina, a partnership of advocacy and policy groups based in Raleigh.
The memo was emailed to groups last week with a warning: “It is CONFIDENTIAL to Blueprint, so please be careful – share with your boards and appropriate staff but not the whole world.”
Bass referred questions to the group’s executive director, Sean Kosofsky.
“If you want to impact the effectiveness of a lawmaker … one way to do that is to find out where they’re weak and use that to your advantage,” he said.
Among other things, the talking points memo said that “McCrory is extremely thin-skinned.” It also mentioned House Speaker Thom Tillis of Cornelius and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger of Eden.
It recommends a “staff of video trackers that follow targets’ every move (McCrory/Tillis) and also capture as much video of committee hearings as possible looking for opportunities to feed our overarching narrative (McCrory and the Legislature are out of control…)”
The memo included slides of progressives’ arguments. There’s some suggestion that they may have already had an effect.
When House Minority Leader Larry Hall of Durham gave his response to McCrory’s State of the State address last week, he talked about how McCrory’s plan for charter schools “lacks accountability and would allow out-of-state corporations to create online, for-profit virtual charter schools.”
Those remarks, and ones about charters that followed, were identical to language in the memo forwarded by Blueprint.
Hall said Thursday he’s not sure where his language came from, that he researches a variety of sources. He said the memo may have taken the language from earlier speeches he gave on the subject.
Blueprint is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. According to its website, it is “strictly prohibited from participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.”
“All Blueprint activities will be strictly non-partisan,” it says. “Blueprint activities will not be coordinated with any candidate, political party or other partisan entity.”
Kosofsky said the talking points don’t cross the line.
He said the group, which acts as a “back office” to other nonprofits, isn’t trying to influence an election. “Office holders, not office seekers,” he said, “are fair game.
IRS spokesman Mark Hanson declined to comment on the specific case.
Winner, of the Reynolds Foundation, said she’d talk to her attorney.
“I don’t know whether it was improper under their tax-exempt status,” she said, “I just know it was bad judgment.”
Morrill: 704-358-5059

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/02/22/3869144/leaked-memo-outlines-liberal-attack.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy
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FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Blueprint NC: How A Shadowy Left-Wing Hydra Plans A Targeted Attack On NC Republicans

Confidential memo outlines a plan to

Blueprint NC - Organizations
On Thursday, the Charlotte Observer ran a story about a leaked confidential memo released by a below-the-radar shadow group called Blueprint NC. The confidential memo revealed a left-wing plan to attack North Carolina’s governor and other conservative leaders. According to the Observer’s piece, the confidential memo was from Bluepint NC’s Communications Coordinator Stephanie Bass and addressed to its “partner groups.”
As part of a two-year plan to “Eviscerate, Mitigate, Litigate, Cogitate, and Agitate,” the memo outlines a strategy to target Republican Governor Pat McRory and other conservative leaders:
  • “Crippl(e) their leaders (McCrory, Tillis, Berger etc.)”
  • “Eviscerate the leadership and weaken their ability to govern.”
  • “Pressure McCrory at every public event.”
  • “Slam him when he contradicts his promises.”
  • “Private investigators and investigative reporting, especially in the executive branch…”
If you’ve never heard of Blueprint NC, you’re not alone. The semi-private group seems dedicated to keeping a low public profile, according to its website:
Blueprint has been created as a strategic initiative – focused on creating collaborative change and not focused on a public identity beyond our partners. Blueprint does not seek recognition for itself, but prefers that its partners be recognized for the good work that they do. [Emphasis added.]
In 2010, Blueprint NC’s “partners” were  identified by the Civitas Institute which revealed a conglomeration of national and state “progressive” organizations—including the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, as well as the anti-life group NARAL.
  • Read Blueprint NC’s secret memo in its entirety here (or below).
In fact, Blueprint NC’s Director, Sean Kosofsky, is a NARAL alum, according to this bio:
Sean Kosofsky is currently the Director of Blueprint North Carolina. He is the former Executive Director of NARAL Pro-Choice NC, and has been an active visible LGBT leader since 1994. He was the Director of Poliyc for 12 years for Michigan’s leading LGBT rights organization, Triangle Foundation.
Blueprint NC also appears to be very well funded. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which was established in 1936 as a memorial to the youngest son of the founder of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, gave Blueprint NC $850,000 for “general operating support” in 2010.
The Foundation is apparently still giving Blueprint NC money—to the sum of $400,000, according to a report in Friday’s Observer.
However, due to the light being shined on Blueprint NC’s strategy (and, consequently, the Foundation), that support may now be in jeopardy:
Leslie Winner, executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, said she was “surprised and disappointed” by the actions of Blueprint North Carolina.
“(Z. Smith Reynolds) believes in robust debate on issues of public importance, (it) does not support attacking people,” Winner said. “We were disappointed to learn that Blueprint is advocating this strategy…
“We are taking this seriously. We are determining our options and our obligations. We will get to the bottom of it.”
The Foundation is providing $400,000 of Blueprint’s nearly $1 million budget, Winner said.
It is hard to fathom how a progressive foundation that doles out hundreds of thousands of dollars to an organization like Blueprint NC to coordinate Left-wing activist strategies and tactics can claim ignorance to Blueprint NC’s tactics.
It is even harder to fathom when it appears Blueprint NC and its “partners” appear to be simply carrying out the “social jusctice and equity” goals of the Foundation.
According to Civitas Institute, the Foundation’s executive director is indirectly tied to Blueprint NC:
It should also be noted that the Z Smith Reynolds Foundation which has given $425,000 to Blueprint and $2.7 million to the Justice Center which housed Blueprint, was headed succesively by Tom Ross the current UNC system President and Leslie Winner a former Democratic state senator and UNC VP.
Amid the controversy, Blueprint NC’s director Kosofsky is blunt as to the strategy the secret memo revealed:
“If you want to impact the effectiveness of a lawmaker … one way to do that is to find out where they’re weak and use that to your advantage,” [Kosofsky] said.
Here is how the group describes itself on its website:
Blueprint NC is a partnership of public policy, advocacy, and grassroots organizing nonprofits dedicated to achieving a better, fairer, healthier North Carolina through the development of an integrated communications and civic engagement strategy. Ultimately, Blueprint aims to influence state policy in NC so that residents of the state benefit from more progressive policies such as better access to health care, higher wages, more affordable housing, a safer, cleaner environment, and access to reproductive health services.
We are determined to change the public policy debate in this state, and are dedicated to becoming more effective and prolific speakers and writers about progressive ideas and values. We are determined to engage more citizens in the public dialogue, because we believe that the strongest democracy hears from all people, not just those with the loudest voices or the shiniest megaphones.
[Perhaps it would be much easier for the group to simply state its goals as: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."]
Regardless of what transpires with Blueprint NC, if it suddenly disappears off the radar screen, one thing is certain, much like the “downfall” of ACORN, more groups like it will spring up to replace it…until they too have the light shed on them.
Related:
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“Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth.”
Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)

Nonprofits behaving badly

Boy, was Jane Mayer of the New Yorker wrong about North Carolina’s donors and nonprofits. Before we look at the latest news from the Tar Heel state, recall that, after her famous attack on the Koch brothers, Mayer wrote a hit piece on donor Art Pope with the subhead, “A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina.” An accompanying cartoon showed Pope – who has since been named the state’s deputy budget director – with a mountain of cash spilling out of one pocket and the state of North Carolina stuck in the other.
Though Mayer copiously catalogued donations by Pope and other conservatives, and the nonprofits they supported, she refused to explain that North Carolina's left-wing donors and activists outweigh their conservative counterparts in money, in number of groups, and especially in their nonprofits’ willingness to “advocate,” i.e., electioneer.
I’m proud of my rebuttal to Mayer’s dishonest piece; John Hinderaker of Powerline was kind enough to say,
Walter’s article was perhaps the most devastating refutation of a magazine article I have ever read. In a calm, dispassionate manner, he laid waste to Mayer to a degree that in a more just world would end her career in journalism.
 But now I’ve been outdone. Civitas, a conservative group whose mere existence scandalized Mayer, has now described, twice over, how powerfully the Left fights in North Carolina, and just how far the Left will go in what it’s pleased to call “building the base of socially responsible voters.”
Mayer claimed to be shocked by Pope’s funding of Civitas:
Though Civitas is ostensibly nonpartisan, its sister organization, Civitas Action … is organized under a different part of the tax code, which allows it to sponsor hard-hitting election ads.
In other words, Civitas is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that also has a (c)(4) arm, a practice so commonplace across the political spectrum it’s boring. It’s even a cliché for the (c)(4) to have “Action” in its name.
But now Civitas has its revenge.
The group has recently dug into two scandals in North Carolina, one involving voter registration and the other 501(c)(3) nonprofits that have gone far beyond any possible bounds of mere “advocacy” (which can be legal) into not-so-legal electioneering so harsh it would make a partisan hack blush.
Scandal #1
Let’s look first at the voter registration scam. Registering voters, of course, is a favorite activity of “advocacy” nonprofits, which claim they conduct registration in nonpartisan fashion.
Civitas discovered that in the recent election, when as always North Carolina forbade online voter registration, State Board of Elections (SBE) officials nonetheless helped groups connected to the Obama campaign register over 11,000 (and counting) persons by online means.
Read Civitas’s complete report. Here are some highlights:
●  The SBE “coordinated with partisans behind closed doors, lied about the NC Attorney General’s Office concurring with the SBE staff on the issue, and dodged oversight by their own board and the legislature.”
● Forced to respond to Civitas, the SBE repeatedly denied it allowed online voter registration, eventually saying it had merely permited “‘web-based voter registration’ instead, as if there could be a ‘web-based’ process that wasn’t online.”
● The Pew Center on the States helped North Carolina’s executive branch officials confer with officials in states that had legalized online registration.
● The SBE general counsel wrote Civitas September 26, 2012, to assure them, “We were not contacted by any campaign, candidate, legislator, or political party” regarding registration. Yet the firm that SBE allowed to conduct “web-based” registrations brags on its website's front page that its clients include “Presidential campaigns,” and its clients page lists “Obama for President Draft Committee.”
● When SBE staff approved online registration, they knew the company they had OK’d to conduct it was used only by the Obama campaign (at GottaRegister.com) and by the left-of-center Rock the Vote (see this internal email Civitas obtained). The firm, Allpoint Voter Services, “uses remote-control pens to transmit ‘signatures’ over the Internet.” After a voter enters information in an online form, he “signs” it with a stylus or finger on his screen. Allpoint transmits the “signature” to an autopen in California or Nevada, which transcribes the signature on to a paper voter registration form. Allpoint then mails the document to local election boards.
● Except that Civitas found cases where, if a voter appeared to lean Republican, Allpoint did not mail the document but instead emailed the registrant a form that would then have to be printed out and mailed in.
● Federal Elections Commission data show the Obama campaign made 12 separate and differing payments to Allpoint from October 2, to October 24, 2012, which suggests the payments varied according to how many registrations Allpoint collected. North Carolina law forbids paying for voter registration. SBE says it never asked Allpoint if it received payment per registration.
● In mid-August 2012, the SBE had election officials from across the state attend its Annual Training for Election Officials. It never mentioned the new form of “web-based” registration to them.
● The next month, a county-level election official stumbled upon GottaRegister.com and objected to SBE that this was illegal; plus, “I didn’t hear anything about electronic registrations in NC being allowed” at the SBE conference held the previous month.
● A few days later, another county official complained to SBE he had received “a good number of registration forms from Allpoint,” all of whose signatures were “immediately suspect.”
● The following day, September 18, 2012, the SBE suddenly emailed all county election officials, telling them to expect this new kind of registration. More counties’ officials subsequently expressed grave concerns, especially over the “similarity of all the signatures.” One county compared a signature against the same voter’s DMV registration and found it didn’t match.
What’s the scope of this, uh, innovative approach to voter registration? Nationwide, over 100,000 online registrations in all 50 states were made by Allpoint this cycle, according to a politics and technology website. Civitas has officially requested registration records from all 100 North Carolina counties. Four of the ten most populous counties have yet to respond, and in three of those four, Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one. But with the limited data so far, Civitas’s count is already approaching 12,000 improper registrations, and the partisan breakdown is
68% Democratic
10% Republican
21 % unaffiliated
Now let’s compare that to the state as a whole:
43% Democratic
31% Republican
26% unaffiliated
In Mayer’s wildest nightmares, does she imagine Art Pope & Co. concocting a scheme to register voters by the thousands in a way that cuts the less-liked party’s representation by more than two-thirds and increases the preferred party’s representation by almost two-thirds? (and will left-wing groups in NC promise never again to claim they suffer from a “digital divide”?)
Scandal #2
North Carolina’s second current scandal involves leaked documents from the state’s sprawling left-wing nonprofit world, a world whose existence Mayer did her best to suppress. The Charlotte Observer broke this story a few days ago, after someone leaked documents from Blueprint North Carolina, a powerful left-wing collaborative that coordinates the work of dozens of politically active nonprofits.
Here’s how the IRS describes what a public charity may not do:
all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office … public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. 
Now here are selected tidbits from an elaborate, three-page memo that was leaked with other material from Blueprint North Carolina; it’s labeled “North Carolina 2013 Legislative Strategy: DRAFT”:
The most effective way to mitigate the worst legislation is to weaken our opponents’ ability to govern by crippling their leaders ([Gov.] McCrory, [House Speaker] Tillis, [Senate President Pro Tem] Berger, etc.).
Staff of video trackers follow the targets every move (McCrory/Tillis)….
Private investigators and investigative reporting: especially in the executive branch….
Pressure McCrory at every public event….
Some kind of tracking site like “XXX Days into the McCrory administration and still no jobs” or some ongoing ticker
Potential Two Year Vision: Eviscerate, Mitigate, Litigate, Cogitate and Agitate (“Lose Forward”)
Eviscerate the Leadership and weaken their ability to govern.
[Pay for] polling that identifies the weaknesses of our opponents….
Direct action [i.e., protests] at the legislature and other appropriate targets (Days of Action, etc.)
Organizers focus on year round voter registration….
Develop a core group to identify policy objectives that articulate our vision: if we controlled the legislature, what would we introduce? …This group feeds this to electeds and the earned media folks.
The memo was so embarrassing that the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the leading and largest of North Carolina’s numerous left-of-center foundations, had to tell the Charlotte Observer it was “surprised and disappointed” by Blueprint North Carolina. (If you believe they were surprised, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.) The foundation’s executive director, Leslie Winner, said the foundation provides $400,000 of Blueprint’s less than $1 million budget. Winner added that the foundation
believes in robust debate on issues of public importance, [but it] does not support attacking people. We were disappointed to learn that Blueprint is advocating this strategy…. [I will talk to our attorney;] I don’t know whether it was improper under their tax-exempt status. I just know it was bad judgment.
Initially, the head of Blueprint did not disown the memo and told the Observer that “office holders, not office seekers are fair game.” The Observer had a hard time understanding how the memo squared with Blueprint’s claims on its website that it is
strictly prohibited from participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office…. Blueprint activities will not be coordinated with any candidate, political party or other partisan entity.
After Z. Smith Reynolds expressed its concern, however, Blueprint’s head said that he “misunderstood” the Observer’s questions, that Blueprint did not send out the memo, and he “suggested it was appended to the other documents” – whose Blueprint origin he did not dispute – “by someone hoping to tarnish his organization.” After examining the materials, I’m willing to believe the memo was not part of the multi-document email Blueprint blasted out to all its nonprofit allies. But even when Blueprint’s head was distancing himself from the memo, he told the Observer that it was given to a meeting of over 50 “progressive” groups at a December meeting, which the memo says lasted two days.
As we go to press, America Votes, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit linked to George Soros, has claimed authorship of the memo. But Blueprint’s head still admits attending the December meeting where the memo was discussed; he just asserts, “only 501(c)(3)-compliant activities were discussed.”
If Jane Mayer wonders how the other side of North Carolina’s political debates operates, she should study the memo. I recommend she also peruse the documents Blueprint admits sending to the state’s left-wing network. One is a fancy (and expensive) “Key Messaging Points” presentation prepared by a national polling firm. It, too, is overtly attuned to personal political targeting; e.g., this  directive: “Despite his winning the election, the jury is still out on McCrory, and now is the time for progressives to define him.”
Still not sure if this is electioneering? The Charlotte Observer points out that a paragraph from the pollsters’ work, distributed by Blueprint, “appeared verbatim in House Democratic Leader Larry Hall’s rebuttal to the governor’s State of the State address.”
The pollsters’ “messaging” is also full of truthiness. For instance,
Seven-in-ten voters (71 percent) believe that funding for North Carolina public schools has gone down in the past few years…. And, certainly, these perceptions should be readily applied to McCrory and his allies….
In fact, state funding for schools dipped in 2009-10 and 2010-11, but before that, funding had continually increased from 1992-93 onward. This school year the state will spend $590 million more than in 2010-11, with federal funding essentially unchanged.
And pardon me if I chuckle that the pollsters urge the Tar Heel Left to include in all their arguments appeals to “hard work” and “personal responsibility.” Another chuckle: When “framing support for Medicaid expansion,” you must sing the praises of “online insurance markets.” But when it’s time to manipulate the voters who don’t know the truth about the state’s education funding, you must attack efforts to allow “online charter schools.”
Then there are the pollsters’ findings on North Carolinians’ political philosophy:
Conservative   41%
Moderate        35%
Liberal             18%
Do you think Blueprint and its allies want the state’s policies to reflect those numbers? I think especially of “Democracy North Carolina,” which “uses research, organizing, and advocacy to increase voter participation.” Shouldn’t that “nonpartisan” 501(c)(3) re-name itself something more honest – say, the Democratic Party of North Carolina?
FOOTNOTE: Don’t miss Civitas’s reporting on a Raleigh-Durham media conglomerate whose TV and radio stations have reported on the Blueprint scandal without mentioning that the family who own the conglomerate have extensive ties to Blueprint and its allies, including seven-figure funding of them through the A.J. Fletcher Foundation. For more background on the many funders of these nonprofits, including George Soros and his Democracy and Power Fund, the Proteus Fund, et al., see my earlier response to Jane Mayer. The North Carolina GOP has filed complaints against Blueprint with the IRS and the State Board of Elections. Redstate reported on the scandal here, and Ron Nehring blogged on it here. He wisely pointed to the similar effort in Colorado by George Soros’ Democracy Alliance, as well as to Fred Barnes’ definitive analysis of that effort. Rick Cohen has an even-handed reported on the Blueprint story for Nonprofit Quarterly. (Disclosure: when I wrote my first post on North Carolina, I had no connection to Pope Foundation funding; now I'm at CRC, which has received funding.)

6 Responses to “Nonprofits behaving badly”

  1. [...] on Philanthropy Daily, Scott Walter reviews the recent revelations about leftist “charitable” partisanship in [...]
  2. Scott Walter says:
    Responding to Tim S.:
    I don’t understand why you say I didn’t name a source for the polls I quote. Before my first qt. from the polls, I write that I’m quoting “the documents Blueprint admits sending to the state’s left-wing network. One is a fancy (and expensive) ‘Key Messaging Points’ presentation prepared by a national polling firm.” Earlier, I gave a link to those documents — it’s http://www.wral.com/asset/news/state/nccapitol/2013/02/21/12136671/packet1.pdf
    Second, you don’t seem to understand that House Democratic Leader Larry Hall did not “quote” a paragraph from the pollsters’ messaging memo; he plagiarized it, speaking the very words the pollsters had secretly urged the Left to use to maximize the chances their policies would be adopted.
    Third, you say that I am “niave” (sic) to think even one (c)(3) exists that is “not partisan,” and that “being partisan is not the same thing as operating illegally.” Both claims are incorrect. Plenty of nonprofits simply don’t go near anything partisan or even politically ideological. And it most certainly is illegal to operate a (c)(3) as a partisan organization, as anyone in the sector should know, and as I quote from the IRS website. Such legal prohibitions explain why even Blueprint North Carolina takes the vow of nonpartisanship on its website that I quoted (however dubious their claim may be).
    As for the broader point you seem to want to make, i.e., that nonprofits “working on social change” are likely to lean to a left or right ideology, that’s true, but it doesn’t change the fact that a (c)(3) public charity, and the donors who receive tax deductions for their support of it, should not violate the law’s limits on how such a group may translate its left or right ideology into political partisanship.
  3. Drew Anderson says:
    A thoughtful, compelling analysis of serious problems. Thank you for staying on this matter and educating us.
  4. Tim S. says:
    This article lacks some basic journalistic standards such as naming a source for quoted (yet uncredited) polls. Why can’t an elected leader quote a nonprofit, or vice versa? I don’t see the harm there. Are nonprofits not to be in touch with elected leaders?
    And it seems niave that the author would think there are c3 nonprofits out there who are not partisan or that partisanship per se is taboo among nonprofits. How can one not be partial to a left or right ideology when working on social change? Being partisan is not the same as operating illegally. Or even unethically, unless you vow to be nonpartisan.
  5. [...] The controversy over Blueprint North Carolina’s distribution of a politically charged memo has gotten the attention of Philanthropy Daily. Scott Walter of the Capital Research Center references the kerfuffle in this post: [...]

The SBE general counsel wrote Civitas September 26, 2012, to assure them, “We were not contacted by any campaign, candidate, legislator, or political party” regarding registration. Yet the firm that SBE allowed to conduct “web-based” registrations brags on its website's front page that its clients include “Presidential campaigns,” and its clients page lists “Obama for President Draft Committee.”

Clients

Corporate/Non-Profit


  • AT&T
  • Goodwill of Silicon Valley
  • GreenWaste Recovery
  • PG&E
  • San Francisco 49ers
Technology
  • Cisco Systems
  • Progeny Linux Systems
  • Propel
  • Wave Systems
Political
  • Dean for America
  • East Side Union High School District
  • Friends of West Valley-Mission Community College District
  • Bob Hertzberg for Mayor — ChangeLA.com
  • Zoe Lofgren for Congress
  • Obama for America Draft Committee
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  • Steve Westly for Governor
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Public Policy


  • Barry Swenson Builder - Teacher Housing Efforts
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  • Baseball San Jose
  • Regional Medical Center San Jose
  • SanJoseInside.com
  • San Jose-Silicon Valley Chamber Of Commerce
  • San Jose State University
  • Santa Clara-San Benito County Building Trades Council
  • Silicon Valley Health Trust
(Partial list)

Restore Partisan Judicial Elections – A Good Bill By Susan Myrick | Posted in Elections & Campaigns | Mar 20 Tweet This ArticleTweet Share on FacebookShare Email This ArticleEmail We know you read Civitas’ “Bad Bills of the Week,” so I thought it would be nice to look at a few good bills introduced by the House and Senate for a change. Today’s good bill is: HB 65 / “SB39 - Restore Partisan Judicial Elections”. The bill’s primary sponsors are Representatives Frank Iler (R-Brunswick), Rayne Brown (R-Davidson), Dennis Riddell (R-Alamance), Bert Jones (R-Rockingham), Senators Jerry Tillman (R-Randolph) and Thom Goolsby (R-New Hanover). While the bill makes some changes to residency requirements for judicial candidates, the focus is to put the party designation back on the ballot for judicial candidates. You may remember that in 2002 the Democratic legislature passed legislation that removed party affiliation from judicial candidates on all ballots in North Carolina. This is a key piece of information that helps voters make their decisions when voting for judges. The 2002 legislation hurt voter participation, in the 2010 General Election, there were 2,700,383 total votes cast, only 2,012,869 voters voted in the first judicial race on the ballot – a 25 percent drop. Tags: election reform

Restore Partisan Judicial Elections – A Good Bill

We know you read Civitas’ “Bad Bills of the Week,” so I thought it would be nice to look at a few good bills introduced by the House and Senate for a change.
Today’s good bill is: HB 65 / “SB39 - Restore Partisan Judicial Elections”. The bill’s primary sponsors are Representatives Frank Iler (R-Brunswick), Rayne Brown (R-Davidson), Dennis Riddell (R-Alamance), Bert Jones (R-Rockingham), Senators Jerry Tillman (R-Randolph) and Thom Goolsby (R-New Hanover).
While the bill makes some changes to residency requirements for judicial candidates, the focus is to put the party designation back on the ballot for judicial candidates.
You may remember that in 2002 the Democratic legislature passed legislation that removed party affiliation from judicial candidates on all ballots in North Carolina. This is a key piece of information that helps voters make their decisions when voting for judges. The 2002 legislation hurt voter participation, in the 2010 General Election, there were 2,700,383 total votes cast, only 2,012,869 voters voted in the first judicial race on the ballot – a 25 percent drop.

Elections Bureaucrats Ran Amok Posted on February 19, 2013 by Susan Myrick in Elections & Voting In a blatantly partisan move, the staff of the North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBE) successfully subverted state law to facilitate online voter registration in North Carolina by the 2012 Barack Obama campaign. In doing so they coordinated with partisans behind closed doors, lied about the NC Attorney General’s Office concurring with the SBE staff on the issue, and dodged oversight by their own board and the legislature. The end result was to add thousands of people to the North Carolina voter rolls illegally. The SBE staff’s audacity is so breath-taking that it’s hard to believe, so let us emphasize: The Civitas Institute has documented how SBE bureaucrats conspired with a private company, working for the Obama campaign[i], to facilitate a form of online voter registration for the 2012 General Election – in violation of state law. It’s a classic example of how bureaucrats ignore the democratic process and hijack an agency for partisan purposes. Breaking the Law Civitas initiated a series of public records requests to uncover this scheme concerning online registration in defiance of state law. NCGS 163-82.6(b) clearly states that the only form where an electronically captured signature can be used is one offered by a state agency: NCGS 163-82.6 (b) Signature – The form shall be valid only if signed by the applicant. An electronically captured image of the signature of a voter on an electronic voter registration form offered by a State agency shall be considered a valid signature for all purposes for which a signature on a paper voter registration form is used. [Emphasis added] The major use for this is for voter registration when people get their drivers licenses. Yet the SBE staff set in motion a scheme that in the last two months of the election resulted in more than 11,000 people being allowed to register online. Civitas has confirmed this by a public records request to all 100 counties and is still compiling the total number of registrations as counties comply with the request. Thus far, 68 percent of the registrations we have received were Democratic voters, 10 percent were Republican voters and 21 percent from unaffiliated voters. Don Wright, SBE General Counsel, played word games when answering inquires about the Obama campaign’s own re-election site Gottaregister.com, which utilized the technology that SBE staff approved. Wright repeatedly denied that the SBE allowed online voter registration, insisting that it was “web-based voter registration”[ii] instead, as if there could be a “web-based” process that wasn’t online. The technology from Allpoint Voter Services uses remote-control pens to transmit “signatures” over the Internet, according to techpresident.com[iii]. After entering voter information in an online form, the citizen “signs” it with a stylus or a finger. The Allpoint technology records the signature and then transmits it to one of two autopens – one in California, the other in Nevada[iv]. One of the pens transcribes the signature on to a paper voter registration form. Allpoint then mails the documents to local election boards – or is supposed to, a point we’ll come back to. To say this is not “online” registration but “web-based” is like saying a certain vehicle is not a car, it’s an automobile. The point of having a “wet signature” – one in ink – is to provide a universally accepted way proving that a prospective voter is affirming in person all the facts on the form. To have an auto pen inserted at one point in this long computerized process is a far different thing. Even the Obama campaign called it online voter registration. Because, no matter how you twist words around, that’s what it is. North Carolina law does not authorize any kind of online voter registration, however “wet” or “web-based” it might be. Neither the term “wet signatures” nor the phrase “reduced to paper” appear in the NC General Statutes. The term “wet signature[v]” was put in use in the context of elections by Allpoint Voter Services promoting the product it was providing to the Obama campaign. “Wet signature” is a term that Wright returns to often, even in the legal opinion he authored to support the staff decision. Following the Paper Trail timeline Click the image above for a larger version. The scheme appears to go back at least three years, beginning with cautious probes into the topic. The oldest document found pertaining to online voter registration was uncovered in a previous, unrelated Civitas records request to the SBE. It is a letter to Attorney General Roy Cooper[vi] from Gary Bartlett, Executive Director of the SBE, dated September 11, 2009, formally requesting an advisory opinion of the “effect NCGS 66-311 Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) upon possible electronic voter registration.” That in itself is a bit odd, as UETA is the state law governing commercial transactions in general, and is in a totally different section of the state’s legal code from the election laws. Bartlett asked specifically whether UETA would make it permissible for a county board of elections to accept an electronically submitted voter registration application that has been electronically signed. Bartlett also asked the AG if voter registration is outside the scope of UETA. Since we did not have a reply to Bartlett’s request, we submitted a records request on January 16, 2013, to the Attorney General’s Office. In answer to our request, Special Deputy Attorney General Susan Nichols informed Civitas that Bartlett orally withdrew the written request in question before a response was prepared. The next documents[vii] in the timeline can be attributed to the Attorney General’s Office also. Nichols forwarded to Civitas a string of emails dated April 12 – 13, 2010. The emails were a conversation between Nichols and David Becker, Director of Election Initiatives for the Pew Center on the States. Nichols, on behalf of Gary Bartlett, was seeking contact with other states that had adopted UETA. Bartlett wanted to know if the other states chose to also adopt new legislation to facilitate electronic voter registration. Yet why would Bartlett need the AG’s Office to be the go-between? Did he want to keep his profile low? This inquiry into UETA also appeared to die after an email from Becker to Ms. Nichols. He included a list of states that had passed some form of online voter registration: Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Oregon, Utah and Washington. We could surmise from these two tentative inquiries that the SBE was hoping UETA would supersede NCGS 163-82.6, the only North Carolina election statute that speaks to the use of electronic voter registrations. We might also suspect that the conversation stopped abruptly with both these inquiries because the SBE could not risk a written decision that would prevent it from forging ahead with its online voter registration scheme. Party Politics The SBE staff’s following move shows their deep collaboration with Obama allies. The next document pertaining to online voter registration was dated more than a year later, on August 23, 2011. Gary Bartlett was forwarded an email from Veronica Degraffenreid[viii], SBE Elections Liaison, with the link to consulting firm Catapult Strategies, specifically the page that introduces Jude Barry. Barry is Catapult’s CEO and co-founder and is co-founder of Verafirma and Allpoint Strategies. Jude Barry’s political credentials would be considered stellar in Democratic/liberal circles. According to the Catapult site; “In December 2006, he created the Obama for America Draft Committee, the first political committee to raise thousands of dollars online to encourage then-Senator Obama to run for the Presidency.” The Catapult website elaborates on Barry’s political accomplishments[ix] by noting that he began his career in politics as Senator Edward Kennedy’s press aide and later deputy political director. He also worked on presidential bids by liberal Democrats Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean. The next day, August 24, 2011, Peter Allen, Lead Organizer for Verafirma, contacted Gary Bartlett by email[x] in reference to a phone call he had with the SBE staff. Note that Allen is also an Associate on the Catapult Strategies team. Catapult Strategies, Inc. describes itself as “a Silicon Valley-based social media, public relations, and political consulting firm with strong ties to and extensive knowledge of Silicon Valley business and political communities.” Verafirma is a technology company whose projects include the use of electronic signatures for politics. The firm is featured on Catapult Strategies’ website as a “related company.” On the Catapult site, Allen’s bio refers[xi] to Democratic connections too, “Peter has dedicated the past few years developing a rich understanding of online social media tools and how they can be used to empower and mobilize people on behalf of a candidate or cause. He saw this potential come to fruition as an organizer on Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign ….” Allen was on the Obama campaign’s payroll in May 2008. It is important to note that in a September 26, 2012 email to Civitas[xii], Don Wright insisted that the SBE had not been contacted by any campaign, candidate, legislator, or political party. That looks like another word game. Catapult Strategies could easily pass for the outreach and new media wings of the Obama Campaign. There’s a money trail too: from October 2, 2012 to October 24, 2012, according to Federal Elections Commission data, there were 12 separate payments from the Obama campaign to Allpoint Voter Services, Inc. (See table below.) Moreover, the number of payments raises another question. That is, there isn’t a single fee or two, but a series of fees of varying sizes as Allpoint collected signatures. Was the Obama campaign paying Allpoint Voter Services for each registration collected? Doing so would be a violation of NCGS 163‑82.6 (a) (2), which states “To sell or attempt to sell a completed voter registration form or to condition its delivery upon payment” is a class 2 misdemeanor. SBE attorney Don Wright, in response to inquiries as to whether there was any discussion with Allpoint Voter Services in reference to payments for registrations, said that he had no direct contact with the company but Gary Bartlett, Veronica Degraffenreid and Marc Burris were the staff members who talked directly with the company. According to Wright, the company was never asked if they were being paid for each registration delivered. We do know that not all forms completed on the site were accepted. Some users were told to print and mail the form on their own. This shows that they were not intending to serve all citizens, but only ones that met a preselected criterion. After a few short emails over a matter of a few days, but without ever having talked to the company himself, Wright produced a legal opinion approving the Allpoint Voter Services voter registration technology in North Carolina. His opinion dated September 16, 2011 [xiii] claimed it was reviewed by the North Carolina Attorney’s General Office, which concurred in it. That statement is untrue (as you will see later), but since this appears to be an internal SBE staff document it went unchallenged at the time. On September 19, 2011, Bartlett forwarded Wright’s opinion to Peter Allen. The same day, Allen emailed back and asked for the point person they will be working with to make the SBE’s part “as painless as possible.” Bartlett responded that Degraffenreid and Burris would be the points of contact going forward.[xiv] Election Year Revelations A year went by without evidence of discussion about the new voter registration technology, however. No documents for the period from September 19, 2011 to September 11, 2012 were turned over as part of our public records request, almost a year of silence on this by the SBE staff. This silence was broken with less than two months to go before the General Election. Betsy Meads, a former Pasquotank County BOE member, was the first person to ask about the online voter registration process. It was a happenstance that her son ran across the gottaregister.com website. The next day, September 11, 2012, Betsy Meads sent an email[xv] questioning Don Wright as to the legality of the President’s online voter registration site. She wrote, “This is contrary to the Statute as I read it, and as I was just in Chapel Hill at training for local board members August 14th, I’m sure I didn’t hear anything about electronic registrations in NC being allowed.” The SBE held the Annual Training for Elections Officials on August 13-14, 2012.[xvi] On September 13, 2012, Wright delivered an answer to Meads – which was also the answer he gave later to Civitas and one other person who would ask the question about registering to vote online in North Carolina: “There is no online voter registration[xvii] allowed in North Carolina ….” He also forwarded Ms. Meads the legal opinion he had written in 2011 which stated that the North Carolina Attorney’s General Office had concurred in it. As previously referenced, the statement that the AG’s office had concurred is false. In an email I received from the Attorney General’s office, dated September 18, 2012, Susan Nichols informed Don Wright that she did not concur[xviii] in that decision. In fact, before she had taken her post with the AG, the AG’s office ended the procedure of allowing attorneys to state they concur in an opinion they did not author. By the time Wright received Nichols’ email, revelations about the online registrations were breaking into the open. In what appeared to be a move to head off any problems at the local level, on September 18, 2012 the SBE notified the 100 counties to expect a new kind of voter registration. Veronica Degraffenreid sent the email to the County Directors[xix], explaining, describing and defending the new registrations. This email explanation went out just over a month after the SBE had election representatives from across the state at a training session in Chapel Hill – at which they never mentioned this new kind of registration. Her email went out a day after Gary Bartlett received an email from George Gilbert, Guilford County BOE Director, reporting that they had received “a good number of registration forms from Allpoint Voter Services.” Gilbert went on to say they contained signatures that were “immediately suspect.[xx]” The timing of the responses to Meads and to the counties raises the question of when, if ever, the state SBE would have brought the online registrations to the notice of the counties. Were SBE bureaucrats hoping no one would bring up the online registrations until after all the votes were certified? Subsequently other counties questioned these forms and offered some observations about problems with them. For example, the Duplin County BOE Director said, “The part we find the most questionable is the similarity of all the signatures ….” Rockingham County wrote, “The forms have info typed in and the signatures all resemble each other and it appears the envelope was addressed with the same marking pen.” Rockingham County also noted one signature did not match the voter’s registration with the DMV. There are many problems and questions about the decision that the SBE bureaucrats’ made in relation to registering to vote online. For instance, Betsy Meads used gottaregister.com to change her party affiliation from Republican to unaffiliated. Once she “signed” her iPhone, she was informed that her registration would be forwarded to her local BOE. That didn’t happen: 36 hours later she received an email with a link to her registration. She was told to print the form, sign it and then mail it to the SBE. Did the Obama Campaign prioritize registrations? Did they send some registrations directly to the elections board and decide that others could be sent to the voters? Perhaps most disturbing, the SBE staff apparently tried to keep this all from the view of the public and even county elections boards until mere weeks before the election, which raises the disturbing question of whether those involved were aiding a last-minute registration surge planned by the Obama campaign. This is not an isolated incident[xxi], but just one more example of how the SBE staff flouts the law, the legislature and their own board in order to further a partisan agenda. All North Carolina citizens should be aware of the importance of reforming the SBE so that it carries on its duties in a transparent manner, with full regard for the democratic process and in a way that instills trust in the North Carolina election system. cand_nm recipient_nm disb_amt disb_dt recipient_city disb_desc Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $5,932.50 10/2/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $4,886.00 10/2/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $7,091.00 10/5/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $10,076.50 10/5/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $10,591.00 10/10/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $7,840.00 10/12/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $9,355.50 10/15/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $9,345.00 10/18/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $11,725.00 10/18/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $15,512.00 10/18/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $1,568.00 10/22/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC. $973.00 10/24/12 OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE [i] August 2011 – SBE introduction to Allpoint Voter Services [ii] September 13, 2012 email from Don Wright with initial explanation of online voting [iii] “Tech President” October 26, 2012 [iv] Email from Veronica Degraffenreid about the location of the two pens [v] “Government Technology” September 21, 2012 [vi] September 11, 2009 letter from Gary Bartlett to Attorney General asking for “Advisory Opinion” [vii] Susan Nichols letter to Civitas, email to Don Wright and email string to Pew Center on the States on behalf of Gary Bartlett [viii] August – September 2011 – SBE and Allpoint Voter Services communications [ix] Catapult Website – Jude Barry [x] August, 2011 – Peter Allen emails [xi] Catapult Website – Peter Allen [xii] Don Wright Email to Civitas in response to inquiry [xiii] Don Wright’s legal opinion dated September 16, 2011 – Susan Nichols concurs [xiv] August 2011 – SBE introduction to Allpoint Voter Services [xv] September 11, 2012 email from Betsy Meads to Don Wright [xvi] August 13-14, 2012 Annual Training for Elections Officials –Agenda [xvii] September 13, 2012 email from Don Wright explaining that there is no online registration in North Carolina [xviii] September 18, 2012 email from Susan Nichols to Don Wright explaining that she did not concur in his legal [xix] September 18,2012 email from Degraffenreid to 100 County BOE Directors registrations from Allpoint Voter Services [xx] September 17, 18 and 24, 2012 emails from local Boards reporting that they had received suspicious registrations

Elections Bureaucrats Ran Amok

In a blatantly partisan move, the staff of the North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBE) successfully subverted state law to facilitate online voter registration in North Carolina by the 2012 Barack Obama campaign. In doing so they coordinated with partisans behind closed doors, lied about the NC Attorney General’s Office concurring with the SBE staff on the issue, and dodged oversight by their own board and the legislature. The end result was to add thousands of people to the North Carolina voter rolls illegally.
The SBE staff’s audacity is so breath-taking that it’s hard to believe, so let us emphasize:  The Civitas Institute has documented how SBE bureaucrats conspired with a private company, working for the Obama campaign[i], to facilitate a form of online voter registration for the 2012 General Election – in violation of state law. It’s a classic example of how bureaucrats ignore the democratic process and hijack an agency for partisan purposes.

Breaking the Law

Civitas initiated a series of public records requests to uncover this scheme concerning online registration in defiance of state law.
NCGS 163-82.6(b) clearly states that the only form where an electronically captured signature can be used is one offered by a state agency:
NCGS 163-82.6 (b) Signature – The form shall be valid only if signed by the applicant. An electronically captured image of the signature of a voter on an electronic voter registration form offered by a State agency shall be considered a valid signature for all purposes for which a signature on a paper voter registration form is used. [Emphasis added]
The major use for this is for voter registration when people get their drivers licenses.
Yet the SBE staff set in motion a scheme that in the last two months of the election resulted in more than 11,000 people being allowed to register online. Civitas has confirmed this by a public records request to all 100 counties and is still compiling the total number of registrations as counties comply with the request. Thus far, 68 percent of the registrations we have received were Democratic voters, 10 percent were Republican voters and 21 percent from unaffiliated voters.
Don Wright, SBE General Counsel, played word games when answering inquires about the Obama campaign’s own re-election site Gottaregister.com, which utilized the technology that SBE staff approved.  Wright repeatedly denied that the SBE allowed online voter registration, insisting that it was “web-based voter registration”[ii] instead, as if there could be a “web-based” process that wasn’t online.
The technology from Allpoint Voter Services uses remote-control pens to transmit “signatures” over the Internet, according to techpresident.com[iii]. After entering voter information in an online form, the citizen “signs” it with a stylus or a finger. The Allpoint technology records the signature and then transmits it to one of two autopens – one in California, the other in Nevada[iv]. One of the pens transcribes the signature on to a paper voter registration form. Allpoint then mails the documents to local election boards – or is supposed to, a point we’ll come back to.
To say this is not “online” registration but “web-based” is like saying a certain vehicle is not a car, it’s an automobile. The point of having a “wet signature” – one in ink – is to provide a universally accepted way proving that a prospective voter is affirming in person all the facts on the form. To have an auto pen inserted at one point in this long computerized process is a far different thing. Even the Obama campaign called it online voter registration. Because, no matter how you twist words around, that’s what it is.
North Carolina law does not authorize any kind of online voter registration, however “wet” or “web-based” it might be. Neither the term “wet signatures” nor the phrase “reduced to paper” appear in the NC General Statutes. The term “wet signature[v]” was put in use in the context of elections by Allpoint Voter Services promoting the product it was providing to the Obama campaign. “Wet signature” is a term that Wright returns to often, even in the legal opinion he authored to support the staff decision.

Following the Paper Trail

timeline
Click the image above for a larger version.
The scheme appears to go back at least three years, beginning with cautious probes into the topic. The oldest document found pertaining to online voter registration was uncovered in a previous, unrelated Civitas records request to the SBE.  It is a letter to Attorney General Roy Cooper[vi] from Gary Bartlett, Executive Director of the SBE, dated September 11, 2009, formally requesting an advisory opinion of the “effect NCGS 66-311 Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) upon possible electronic voter registration.”  That in itself is a bit odd, as UETA is the state law governing commercial transactions in general, and is in a totally different section of the state’s legal code from the election laws. Bartlett asked specifically whether UETA would make it permissible for a county board of elections to accept an electronically submitted voter registration application that has been electronically signed. Bartlett also asked the AG if voter registration is outside the scope of UETA.
Since we did not have a reply to Bartlett’s request, we submitted a records request on January 16, 2013, to the Attorney General’s Office. In answer to our request, Special Deputy Attorney General Susan Nichols informed Civitas that Bartlett orally withdrew the written request in question before a response was prepared.
The next documents[vii] in the timeline can be attributed to the Attorney General’s Office also. Nichols forwarded to Civitas a string of emails dated April 12 – 13, 2010. The emails were a conversation between Nichols and David Becker, Director of Election Initiatives for the Pew Center on the States. Nichols, on behalf of Gary Bartlett, was seeking contact with other states that had adopted UETA.  Bartlett wanted to know if the other states chose to also adopt new legislation to facilitate electronic voter registration. Yet why would Bartlett need the AG’s Office to be the go-between? Did he want to keep his profile low?
This inquiry into UETA also appeared to die after an email from Becker to Ms. Nichols. He included a list of states that had passed some form of online voter registration: Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
We could surmise from these two tentative inquiries that the SBE was hoping UETA would supersede NCGS 163-82.6, the only North Carolina election statute that speaks to the use of electronic voter registrations.  We might also suspect that the conversation stopped abruptly with both these inquiries because the SBE could not risk a written decision that would prevent it from forging ahead with its online voter registration scheme.

Party Politics

The SBE staff’s following move shows their deep collaboration with Obama allies. The next document pertaining to online voter registration was dated more than a year later, on August 23, 2011. Gary Bartlett was forwarded an email from Veronica Degraffenreid[viii], SBE Elections Liaison, with the link to consulting firm Catapult Strategies, specifically the page that introduces Jude Barry. Barry is Catapult’s CEO and co-founder and is co-founder of Verafirma and Allpoint Strategies.
Jude Barry’s political credentials would be considered stellar in Democratic/liberal circles. According to the Catapult site; “In December 2006, he created the Obama for America Draft Committee, the first political committee to raise thousands of dollars online to encourage then-Senator Obama to run for the Presidency.” The Catapult website elaborates on Barry’s political accomplishments[ix] by noting that he began his career in politics as Senator Edward Kennedy’s press aide and later deputy political director. He also worked on presidential bids by liberal Democrats Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean.
The next day, August 24, 2011, Peter Allen, Lead Organizer for Verafirma, contacted Gary Bartlett by email[x] in reference to a phone call he had with the SBE staff. Note that Allen is also an Associate on the Catapult Strategies team.
Catapult Strategies, Inc. describes itself as “a Silicon Valley-based social media, public relations, and political consulting firm with strong ties to and extensive knowledge of Silicon Valley business and political communities.”  Verafirma is a technology company whose projects include the use of electronic signatures for politics. The firm is featured on Catapult Strategies’ website as a “related company.”
On the Catapult site, Allen’s bio refers[xi] to Democratic connections too, “Peter has dedicated the past few years developing a rich understanding of online social media tools and how they can be used to empower and mobilize people on behalf of a candidate or cause. He saw this potential come to fruition as an organizer on Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign ….” Allen was on the Obama campaign’s payroll in May 2008.
It is important to note that in a September 26, 2012 email to Civitas[xii], Don Wright insisted that the SBE had not been contacted by any campaign, candidate, legislator, or political party.  That looks like another word game. Catapult Strategies could easily pass for the outreach and new media wings of the Obama Campaign.
There’s a money trail too: from October 2, 2012 to October 24, 2012, according to Federal Elections Commission data, there were 12 separate payments from the Obama campaign to Allpoint Voter Services, Inc. (See table below.)
Moreover, the number of payments raises another question.  That is, there isn’t a single fee or two, but a series of fees of varying sizes as Allpoint collected signatures. Was the Obama campaign paying Allpoint Voter Services for each registration collected? Doing so would be a violation of NCGS 163‑82.6 (a) (2), which states “To sell or attempt to sell a completed voter registration form or to condition its delivery upon payment” is a class 2 misdemeanor.
SBE attorney Don Wright, in response to inquiries as to whether there was any discussion with Allpoint Voter Services in reference to payments for registrations, said that he had no direct contact with the company but Gary Bartlett, Veronica Degraffenreid and Marc Burris were the staff members who talked directly with the company. According to Wright, the company was never asked if they were being paid for each registration delivered.
We do know that not all forms completed on the site were accepted. Some users were told to print and mail the form on their own. This shows that they were not intending to serve all citizens, but only ones that met a preselected criterion.
After a few short emails over a matter of a few days, but without ever having talked to the company himself, Wright produced a legal opinion approving the Allpoint Voter Services voter registration technology in North Carolina. His opinion dated September 16, 2011 [xiii] claimed it was reviewed by the North Carolina Attorney’s General Office, which concurred in it. That statement is untrue (as you will see later), but since this appears to be an internal SBE staff document it went unchallenged at the time.
On September 19, 2011, Bartlett forwarded Wright’s opinion to Peter Allen. The same day, Allen emailed back and asked for the point person they will be working with to make the SBE’s part “as painless as possible.” Bartlett responded that Degraffenreid and Burris would be the points of contact going forward.[xiv]

Election Year Revelations

A year went by without evidence of discussion about the new voter registration technology, however. No documents for the period from September 19, 2011 to September 11, 2012 were turned over as part of our public records request, almost a year of silence on this by the SBE staff.  This silence was broken with less than two months to go before the General Election.
Betsy Meads, a former Pasquotank County BOE member, was the first person to ask about the online voter registration process. It was a happenstance that her son ran across the gottaregister.com website. The next day, September 11, 2012, Betsy Meads sent an email[xv] questioning Don Wright as to the legality of the President’s online voter registration site.  She wrote, “This is contrary to the Statute as I read it, and as I was just in Chapel Hill at training for local board members August 14th, I’m sure I didn’t hear anything about electronic registrations in NC being allowed.” The SBE held the Annual Training for Elections Officials on August 13-14, 2012.[xvi]
On September 13, 2012, Wright delivered an answer to Meads – which was also the answer he gave later to Civitas and one other person who would ask the question about registering to vote online in North Carolina: “There is no online voter registration[xvii] allowed in North Carolina ….” He also forwarded Ms. Meads the legal opinion he had written in 2011 which stated that the North Carolina Attorney’s General Office had concurred in it.
As previously referenced, the statement that the AG’s office had concurred is false. In an email I received from the Attorney General’s office, dated September 18, 2012, Susan Nichols informed Don Wright that she did not concur[xviii] in that decision. In fact, before she had taken her post with the AG, the AG’s office ended the procedure of allowing attorneys to state they concur in an opinion they did not author.
By the time Wright received Nichols’ email, revelations about the online registrations were breaking into the open.
In what appeared to be a move to head off any problems at the local level, on September 18, 2012 the SBE notified the 100 counties to expect a new kind of voter registration. Veronica Degraffenreid sent the email to the County Directors[xix], explaining, describing and defending the new registrations. This email explanation went out just over a month after the SBE had election representatives from across the state at a training session in Chapel Hill – at which they never mentioned this new kind of registration.
Her email went out a day after Gary Bartlett received an email from George Gilbert, Guilford County BOE Director, reporting that they had received “a good number of registration forms from Allpoint Voter Services.” Gilbert went on to say they contained signatures that were “immediately suspect.[xx]” The timing of the responses to Meads and to the counties raises the question of when, if ever, the state SBE would have brought the online registrations to the notice of the counties. Were SBE bureaucrats hoping no one would bring up the online registrations until after all the votes were certified?
Subsequently other counties questioned these forms and offered some observations about problems with them. For example, the Duplin County BOE Director said, “The part we find the most questionable is the similarity of all the signatures ….” Rockingham County wrote, “The forms have info typed in and the signatures all resemble each other and it appears the envelope was addressed with the same marking pen.” Rockingham County also noted one signature did not match the voter’s registration with the DMV.
There are many problems and questions about the decision that the SBE bureaucrats’ made in relation to registering to vote online. For instance, Betsy Meads used gottaregister.com to change her party affiliation from Republican to unaffiliated.  Once she “signed” her iPhone, she was informed that her registration would be forwarded to her local BOE. That didn’t happen: 36 hours later she received an email with a link to her registration.  She was told to print the form, sign it and then mail it to the SBE. Did the Obama Campaign prioritize registrations? Did they send some registrations directly to the elections board and decide that others could be sent to the voters?
Perhaps most disturbing, the SBE staff apparently tried to keep this all from the view of the public and even county elections boards until mere weeks before the election, which raises the disturbing question of whether those involved were aiding a last-minute registration surge planned by the Obama campaign.
This is not an isolated incident[xxi], but just one more example of how the SBE staff flouts the law, the legislature and their own board in order to further a partisan agenda. All North Carolina citizens should be aware of the importance of reforming the SBE so that it carries on its duties in a transparent manner, with full regard for the democratic process and in a way that instills trust in the North Carolina election system.

cand_nm recipient_nm disb_amt disb_dt recipient_city disb_desc
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$5,932.50
10/2/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$4,886.00
10/2/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$7,091.00
10/5/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$10,076.50
10/5/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$10,591.00
10/10/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$7,840.00
10/12/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$9,355.50
10/15/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$9,345.00
10/18/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$11,725.00
10/18/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$15,512.00
10/18/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$1,568.00
10/22/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Obama, Barack ALLPOINT VOTER SERVICES, INC.
$973.00
10/24/12
OAKLAND COMPUTER SOFTWARE


[x] August, 2011 – Peter Allen emails
[xiii] Don Wright’s legal opinion dated September 16, 2011 – Susan Nichols concurs