Georgia has partnered with an absentee ballot tracking service backed by Democracy Works, an organization that is funded by left-wing groups including Democracy Fund.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Monday that Georgia “has partnered with Enhanced Voting to bring the Ballot Scout tool to voters across the state.” The platform is said to “provide Georgia voters with real-time updates on their absentee by mail ballots, enhancing transparency and confidence in the voting process.”
“Ballot Scout represents a major advancement in how we manage and track ballots,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “With this tool, voters in Georgia can stay informed and confident about their voting experience, knowing where their ballot is throughout the entire process.”
Voters who use Ballot Scout and send in an absentee ballot will be notified from the platform “via text, email, or voice call” as to when their ballot is marked “as issued” and when it is received by county election officials after the voter has cast his vote, according to the press release.
Enhanced Voting celebrated the partnership in a post on X, claiming they are “committed to fostering transparency and security in the voting process,” and that Ballot Scout would offer “reassurance and certainty” to voters.
But Ballot Scout is a project of TurboVote, according to Democracy Fund. TurboVote is a subsidiary of Democracy Works, which “provides grants to organizations that prioritize voter registration and mobilization within communities likely to vote for left-of-center candidates and policies,” according to Influence Watch.
Democracy Works also receives funding from Democracy Fund, which focuses on “contribut[ing] to center-left and left-wing media organizations, groups seeking to infringe on campaign speech rights, left-of-center voter registration organizations, and nominally non-aligned public policy organizations,” according to Influence Watch. Its founder, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, reportedly donated “$450,000 to Super PACs advocating against Trump’s election in 2016.”
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) also promoted Ballot Scout in 2020 ahead of the presidential election, listing it among other “training” resources for election officials. In 2020, CTCL and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) received hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, dubbed “Zuckbucks,” which they poured into election offices in predominantly left-wing areas nationwide, effectively creating a massive get-out-the-vote operation for Democrats.
Georgia previously used Ballottrax to track absentee ballots, and several other states still use Ballottrax. Raffensperger’s office did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiry as to why the state switched to partner with a leftist-backed organization.
Democracy Works states that individuals who use one of their services, like Ballot Scout, may have their information shared by Democracy Works with third-party service providers, “partners,” and law enforcement, amongst others.
“State election officials telling voters they should use a service [should be] telling them exactly what that service is going to do,” Ned Jones, director of the Citizens Election Research Network, told The Federalist. “Nobody ever reads the privacy policy.”
While the Peach State has had no-excuse absentee voting for more than a decade, the system became overwhelmed during the 2020 election, in part due to “remote electioneering,” as research director at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute William Doyle explained for The Federalist.
“Remote electioneering” is an “attempt to influence or solicit votes among absentee voters between the time they receive their absentee ballot and the time they submit it to their election office,” Doyle explained. One group that encouraged this practice in 2020 was CTCL — a promoter of Ballot Scout.
CTCL, which doled out Zuckbucks via its Covid-19 Response Grant Program, expected recipients to “Encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” via expansion of ballot drop boxes and “assistance” in the ballots’ completion.
