Leftist Organization Selected To Conduct Williamson County Election Study At Double The Original Cost (Op-Ed)

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By Katherine Makinney –

On February 1st , the Williamson County Election Commission (WCEC) approved a firm to perform the hand-marked paper ballot feasibility study for Williamson County. It was the only firm that applied.  Are there reasons for that?

A look into this group is deeply troubling.

The Elections Group (TEG) is completely left-of-center. There are many non-profits formed in the last couple decades and funded by Soros and Zuckerberg whose sole purpose is to make elections easy to manipulate. And many of the “partners” with whom TEG works and with whom they share their business are among these non-profits.  Research here.

The WCEC didn’t tell citizens this at their Feb. 1 meeting.

Request For Qualifications (RFQs) that the County used to search for a vendor are meant for a company to provide information that transparently shows off its expertise, abilities and qualifications to a prospective client.

That usually means listing all customers, providing case studies that demonstrate how the agency has taken a problem or challenge and solved it for clients, even providing customer references so the prospective client could check how well the agency performed and what it was like to work with them.

The Elections Group offered none of that in their response… probably because it would allude to their left-wing, anti-election-integrity efforts.

Well, there was something they might have called case studies on their website, but you had to dig for that.        

The firm has many ties to “Progressive” Left clients and partners and seemingly no ties to center or center-to-right clients or partners.

In that research, I’ve learned that the firm is associated with the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based center-left election reform advocacy group that pushes for left-of-center voting policies and election administration. It was also the recipient of Mark Zuckerberg’s $350M gift of “Zuck bucks” in 2020 that the group donated to Democrat groups and candidates nationwide.

They’re also close with the National Vote at Home Institute, an advocacy organization that advocates for a nationwide vote-by-mail electoral system. 

Study after study, including the 2005 Carter-Baker Election Commission, affirmed vote-by-mail as the most fraud-prone method of voting. The reason:  ballots can be mailed to null addresses, for dead people or those that never vote, filled out and conveniently mailed in.  Many analyses after 2020 showed this to be the case in key swing states such as AZ and GA.  The left finds elections useful as they provide cover for a “selection” instead of a real choice of the voters.  This is also why usually Democrat counties refuse to clean voter rolls–the more extra people on the rolls–the more “ballots” can be created.

Other questionable associations include the Center for Civic Design, an election-administration policy organization that frequently partners with left-of-center organizations like The Democracy Fund;  and U.S. Digital Response,, a member of the newly formed U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a collaboration between the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), Center for Civic Design (CCD),  Center for Secure and Modern Elections (CSME) (a dark money pass-through funder), and other leftist groups.

One researcher found this email here from another county that was considering a project with The Elections Group.  As you can see, they had many of the same reservations.

According to TEG’s “Our Approach” statement on their website, it appears there will be no in-person meetings and the work will mostly be done by their “partners,” all of whom seem to be from a far different viewpoint than Williamson County…  It also seems that WCEC will have no idea — or input — into what leftist partners TEG would assign to our study.

Interestingly, the budget for this study has now doubled or even tripled from $30k-$50k (a number Jonathan Duda told citizens the project could cost) to $100k (per TEG’s RFQ response). 

Why couldn’t the WCEC simply pull together a bi-partisan group of citizens with elections experience and together with the WCEC travel to several counties that have brought in hand-marked paper ballots as another option in their voting system, such as Maury County? 

Learning best practices doesn’t take an expensive Chicago firm. Rather, learning from fellow election commissions that have already accomplished what the WCEC wants to implement makes a lot more sense. Given our county’s $1.2B debt, do we need to spend money on something our election commission can research themselves?

There is no doubt in my mind the conclusions that will be reached with a “progressive” organization that advocates for mail-in-ballots and other methods that increase cheating.  Do we need to spend $100K for that?

Is there a reason the WCEC is doing this?