Left-wing organization ProPublica attempted a hit piece on Cleta Mitchell, an election lawyer and founder of the Election Integrity Network, on Wednesday, but the roughly 7,600-word tome reads less like a bombshell exposé and more like a litany of Mitchell’s significant accomplishments and influence promoting election integrity. Despite interviewing dozens of people and digging through her childhood and family life, ProPublica’s central accusation is that Mitchell successfully built a grassroots organization that brought together activists and donors and translated their concerns about election integrity into meaningful policy and action.
As ProPublica put it, “No one besides Trump himself has done more than Mitchell, 76, to turn the mundane processes of how ballots are cast and counted in American elections into mortal combat.”
The complaint by ProPublica is that Mitchell took issues (election integrity and security) that many conservatives cared about and organized people to do something about them.
Following the 2020 election, when others moved on without any answers about irregularities and discrepancies, Mitchell founded the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a grassroots organization focused on strengthening election security rules and laws. What started out as a network with chapters in just seven swing states has now expanded its reach to 26 states. According to ProPublica, Mitchell was able to expand the network by establishing chapters where nothing existed and bringing existing organizations already doing “similar work” into the fold.
ProPublica reported that Mitchell continued the organizing and work even after President Joe Biden took office, even while others abandoned the challenges to the 2020 election.
Through EIN, Mitchell ran a multi-state tour training conservatives to learn and understand election rules, to work polls, and to get on local election boards. ProPublica described Mitchell giving out 20-page manuals to attendees and urging them to learn how to become involved in their local elections.
Despite ProPublica’s ominous description of the training and organization, Mitchell gave concerned citizens the tools needed to participate in civic life effectively and, by ProPublica’s own account, Mitchell prioritized such organization and coalition building.
“Mitchell decided she needed an army — a popular movement large and loud enough to tear down what she saw as an election system dominated by Democrats,” the outlet wrote.
Mitchell understood that real change and results would require an organization, so she built one which she describes as “infrastructure to do hand-to-hand combat with the Left, starting at the local level.” Her efforts were so successful that, as ProPublica reported, members of her EIN later secured positions in the second Trump administration related to election integrity and security.
The infrastructure Mitchell built has delivered numerous election integrity wins and efforts. Among some of EIN’s bigger wins is successfully backing legislation barring leftist “Zuckbucks” from influencing elections. As The Federalist’s Matt Kittle reported, “Zuckbucks” was “the nickname for the $400 million-plus that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, dumped into the 2020 elections.” Nonprofits like the Center for Tech and Civic Life received hundreds of millions of these dollars, which were then “poured into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered” and drive voter turnout for Democrats. Twenty-nine states have now banned Zuckbucks.
ProPublica also credited Mitchell with helping renew interest in the Trump administration in probing fraud allegations involving the 2020 election, leading to the FBI’s investigation of Fulton County, Georgia.
This past winter the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of ballots and other materials related to Fulton County’s 2020 presidential election. Notably, post-election audits found “chain of custody issues, ballots left unattended, unsealed bags being used, and auditors not recording seal numbers on ballot bags,” according to the affidavit the FBI used in requesting a warrant that a federal magistrate approved. Further, an independent monitor previously found Fulton’s absentee ballot process was “extremely sloppy and replete with chain of custody issues.”
But Mitchell’s influence for election integrity extends beyond EIN; as ProPublica noted, in addition to raising funds for her own organization, she has also “helped direct tens of millions more to like-minded policy shops, researchers, law firms and advocacy groups.” ProPublica estimates Mitchell has played a critical role in moving more than $70 million into this work over four years — an important feat since any effective movement needs money to sustain such efforts.
Mitchell has also long been an effective coalition leader, with ProPublica pointing out that Mitchell is a “go-to election lawyer for Republican politicians” who is “a masterful and aggressive backroom negotiator and strategist.” The outlet added that Mitchell isn’t scared off by conservative candidates and causes that deflect more squeamish “GOP attorneys.”
ProPublica clearly dislikes Mitchell — something Mitchell herself told ProPublica in response to their comment request. But for an outlet hell-bent on trying to malign Mitchell, ProPublica actually ended up writing an article that sounds like a glowing review of her effectiveness in the conservative movement.
