BREAKING: Milwaukee Takes Arabella “Dark Money” to Count Your Ballots in Zuck Bucks Scandal Repeat
The Left is trying once more to privatize the 2024 election in Milwaukee, and they’re using the world’s biggest political machine to do it. It’s up to voters to save their state from D.C. mega-donors.
Wisconsinites couldn’t have a starker choice on April 2: Vote “yes” on Question 1 to ban tainted “Zuck bucks” forever—or let the Left continue selling election administration to the highest bidder.
If you needed any more evidence of the latter, consider the newly announced $800,000 grant from an opaque left-wing nonprofit to Milwaukee’s elections department to “process absentee ballots” and “connect with voters via text messages” mere weeks before voters ban such private funding.
In a bare repeat of 2020’s Zuck Bucks scheme, another shadowy group—Cities Forward—is attempting to privatize the government office responsible for counting voters’ ballots in a city that broke for Joe Biden by 183,000 votes.
Even the Milwaukee Election Commission has no idea what the group is or where its money comes from—merely that it “believes the organization raises funding from several donors,” none of whom are named. Feeling reassured yet?
Cities Forward, which has virtually no online presence, is actually an offshoot of the multi-billion-dollar “dark money” machine run by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C. Tax filings show that the now-independent group obtained its 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in D.C. on May 5, 2023, but “Cities Forward” was registered as a trade name (DBA) as early as Feb. 2022 with the Arabella network’s biggest cog: the New Venture Fund.
Arabella’s “dark money” empire specializes in piping billions in secret dollars from George Soros, the Ford Foundation, and other top Democratic mega-donors through its collection of tax-exempt nonprofits—laundering their identity in the process. In the 2019–2020 presidential election cycle, this nonprofit fleet raked in $2.4 billion, nearly twice as much as the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined.
That secret money flows to virtually every lobbying group on the Left pushing for things like D.C. statehood and marijuana expansion, or fuels Arabella’s other specialty: Spawning pop-up advocacy groups just like Cities Forward. In the past, those in-house campaigns have lobbied for packing the Supreme Court, curbing free speech, and other “progressive” pet projects.
(DON’T MISS: Arabella—The Left’s “Dark Money” Monster)
Partisan Job
The Cities Forward campaign bears all the hallmarks of an Arabella sting, down to the generic and cheerfully vague website designed to tell you nothing about its origins, operations, staff, or address (a P.O. box in downtown Washington).
In 2022, the New Venture Fund received a $1 million grant “to support the Cities Forward campaign through [the] Center for Secure and Modern Elections,” yet another Arabella elections pop-up that lobbies for automatic voter registration laws and reportedly helped introduce Zuck Bucks to a number of states in 2020.
That grant came from the Crankstart Foundation, the philanthropy of Sequoia Capital venture capitalist and former Google board member Michael Moritz, a major Democratic donor.
At the Federalist, Shawn Fleetwood has also revealed that Cities Forward is apparently run by Trevor Ostbye, a former staffer for eBay founder and Democratic mega-donor Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, which spends millions of dollars on Democrat voter registration projects. Before that, Ostbye worked for various left-wing get-out-the-vote and election “reform” groups focused on netting Democrat election victories.
Stop Foreign Meddling For Good
All that’s bad enough. But the $800,000 Milwaukee grant would’ve almost certainly been impossible if Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers hadn’t vetoed not one, but two bills banning Zuck bucks.
That means there’s nothing stopping a Chinese or Russian oligarch from funneling money into the offices responsible for counting our ballots. After all, no one knows where the Cities Forward grant ultimately came from. Evers’ failure to safeguard Wisconsin elections leaves it up to voters to fix the Zuck Bucks loophole on April 2—vote yes on Question 1.
(READ MORE: The Left’s Ridiculous Disinformation on Tainted Zuck Bucks)
