It’s not the Democrats
Cornel West’s independent presidential campaign is broke. His former campaign manager says he knows nothing about ballot access. And he spent more on graphic design than petition-gathering in his most recent campaign finance report.
But tens of thousands of signatures have been gathered on behalf of the famed left-wing academic in key states thanks to self-organized grassroots volunteers — and some help from outside operatives tied to a Republican consulting firm.
[…]
Emails from elections officials, obtained through a request under North Carolina’s Public Records Law, show the pro-West Justice for All Party authorized three people to pick up and drop off signatures for them statewide — and all three are current or past employees of a Colorado-based Republican political firm called Blitz Canvassing.
Blitz Canvassing has worked for numerous Republican House and Senate candidates and took in more than $14.6 million in payments working for Never Back Down, the main super PAC that supported former GOP presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to campaign finance reports.
“In the same way that Republicans have quietly pushed ballot access for the Green Party across the country for years, there’s concrete evidence — not rumors, but evidence — in North Carolina and in other states of an organized Republican effort to get Cornel West on ballots, using Republican consultants and vendors that the West campaign is not paying for,” said Pete Kavanaugh, who founded Clear Choice Action, a new Democratic super PAC working to combat third-party candidates.
West could do something about this, of course. He could withdraw from the race. But they’d just work for one of the other freedom saboteurs so I’m not sure it makes a difference.
This is not a grassroots operation. Someone is paying for it. And those someones are Republicans. I’d really like to see the press in general take a page out of MSNBC’s book here and do some in depth reporting on GOP shenanigans for once. Trump’s relentless accusations that Democrats are rigging the elections is projection as usual.
Update:
You want rigging? I’ll give you rigging. This one concerns a US Senator– Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. He was up to his neck in the fake electoral scheme and lied about it.