With just days before one of the most contentious elections of our lifetime, George Mason University, a Virginia school funded by taxpayers, sent all students and staff an email urging them to go to the polls.
Fair enough. But the email included links to lefty get-out-the vote efforts with a biased presentation of the issues.
The email instructed recipients to click on “MasonVotes” if they required information on what to do. Those who do have access to videos and other election-related activity on the Northern Virginia campus.
They are also offered five other sites to peruse: One is the Virginia Department of Elections and two are other Mason sites (one related to how to cope with “election stress”), but the other two are lefty get-out-the vote outfits that frame issues from the perspective of only one party contesting the election, the Democratic Party.
The email itself has other links leading directly to these two left-leaning organizations, Vote.org and Guides.vote. There were no links to conservative sites that may offer a different perspective.
Vote.org touts itself as “the largest 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan voting registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) technology platform in America.”
It is, however, a progressive nongovernmental organization funded by the far Left and takes Mason’s would-be voters to a page with its partners. They are a veritable who’s who of woke America.
By who’s who, I mean groups such as Black Voters Matter; the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union and one of the Democratic Party’s main support groups; the far-left Service Employees International Union; Mijente, a radical “Latinx” group, etc.
Who funds vote.org? According to 990 IRS forms, vote.org is also funded by the usual suspects of the far Left: the Tides Foundation, the New Venture Fund, League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, the Hopewell Fund, and others.
The founder of Vote.org, LGBTQ activist Debra Cleaver, told an interviewer in 2021 that she was moved to create the group after Republican George W. Bush beat Democrat Al Gore for president in the contested election of 2000.
“Watching the process unfold, I felt unnerved on so many levels,” she protested.
Vote.org may promote itself as a champion of voting, but in fact has fought all attempts to give voters confidence that voting is fair.
In 2021, it joined Michelle Obama and Stacey Abrams in their fight against voting laws in Georgia, endorsing a federal takeover of elections that went nowhere in a then 50-50 split U.S. Senate. Liberals said laws such as the one passed in Georgia would restrict the right to vote, but in fact, voter turnout in the Peach State has grown since.
In 2020, Vote.org sued the state of Maine to force it to accept online voting, one of the practices—another is ballot harvesting—that used the COVID-19 scare as an excuse to introduce practices that make voting suspect and have not gone away since.
“We believe at Vote.org that every state should go ahead and allow people to register to vote online. That’s a no-brainer, pandemic or not,” Vote.org’s current CEO Andrea Haley said then.
And Vote.org has also sued Florida officials over its decision that voters without a state ID provide a handwritten signature to prove that they are who they say they are.
To Vote.org, the NAACP, and other left-wing plaintiffs, “This restriction serves no purpose other than to impede some Floridians’ right to vote.”
“We’re fully committed to a democracy building movement, because the opposition has formed a robust and insidious voter-suppression movement,” writes Haley on the site’s “CEO Letter” page.
As for Guides.vote, it is another lefty get-out-the-vote outfit that continually cries from the rooftops that it is “nonpartisan”—bringing to mind the joke that the man who has to go around insisting he’s a gentleman is no gentleman. Its main targets appear to be universities.
The Federalist explained in September that it is a “left-wing ‘voter guide’ group is contacting professors, attempting to place biased content in universities.”
Guides.vote’s comparison of the policy positions adopted by former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is a blatant attempt to persuade voters to vote for Harris, the Democrat.
Harris, says the page, wants to “expand the child tax credit. Give tax credits for affordable housing builders and subsidize first-time homebuyers. Restrict price gouging on groceries and lower drug costs.” Trump? He wants to “[i]ncrease taxes (tariffs) on imported goods. Cut housing demand with mass deportations.”
On crime, it gets no better. Harris believes “police are dedicated public servants. As a prosecutor increased felony convictions by one-third.” Trump? Well, he “admires Chinese approach of quick trials and a death penalty for drug dealers so there will be a ‘zero drug problem.’”
It is that ridiculous, on issue after issue.
In other words, those in the Mason community that click on these links that the university sent to its entire community would find issues and an overall framing that support Harris.
One Mason student who received the email and forwarded it to me said it was “awful to see taxpayer money being spent for campaign purposes. I don’t want Mason to spend money on lefty get-out-the-vote efforts—or conservative ones for that matter.”
The Mason email was sent by Rose Pascarell, vice president for university life. I reached out to ask why she included two lefty and biased groups.
Pascarell defended the inclusion of vote.org and guides.vote as organizations that “have been recommended to help students understand voting and provide information on the candidates. Both are listed as non-partisan.” She however went out of her way to label my employer, The Heritage Foundation, as “a partisan organization.” We are conservative—I am myself conservative—but we are nonpartisan. We find fault with both parties, and have worked with presidents of both parties.
I personally would have loved for the Biden administration to have taken up my policy suggestions, one of which, for example, has long been withdrawing taxpayer support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CBP, like Mason, is funded by taxpayers, and thus cannot engage in partisan behavior. That’s why it was unbecoming for Mason to have listed vote.org and guides.vote—two lefty get-out-the-vote outfits, in its spam email to the entire Mason community.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include Pascarell’s response, which came about 24 hours after Gonzalez reached out for comment.
