How Joe Biden Used Taxpayer Money To Buy Young Voters In The 2022 Midterms

In the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, President Joe Biden had American universities use taxpayer-funded Federal Work Study programs to pay college students to engage in voter registration campaigns for the benefit of Democrats.

“[O]n its face, you have to question whether this is legal or not,” Thomas Jones, president of the American Accountability Foundation, told The Federalist. “Their target audience here, college students, is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, so you have to question whether ‘non-partisan’ is really non-partisan.”

Last April, the Biden administration told universities they are required under the Higher Education Act of 1965 to “make a good faith effort” to make mail voter registration forms “widely available” to their students. But the president’s acting assistant secretary for the Office of Postsecondary Education, Michelle Asha Cooper, went much further, claiming that as part of such efforts to increase voter registration among their students, universities may use work-study funds — which are used to provide part-time campus jobs to help students with tuition costs — to pay students to “support voter registration activities.”

Having taxpayers fund get-out-the-vote activities that support Democrats in this way had previously not been allowed.

“If a student is employed directly by a postsecondary institution, the institution may compensate a student for [Federal Work Study] employment involving voter registration activities that take place on or off-campus,” Cooper’s letter reads.

Cooper directed colleges to expand their roles in the electoral process, such as by becoming voting sites and supplying locations for ballot drop boxes. She told colleges and universities to coordinate their activities with local election officials.

Jones said such instructions were “problematic,” adding that the use of work-study funds to facilitate college voter registration campaigns is clearly a way for the left to “harvest young liberal votes.”

The work-study scheme was just one of many ways the Biden administration had agencies get involved in voting activities that benefit the Democrat Party.

In fact, in March 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to interfere in state election processes. Despite legal efforts by government watchdog groups to uncover how federal departments intended to implement the order in the lead-up to the 2022 elections, the Biden administration has continued to conceal nearly all related documents.

A Concerted Effort to Boost Democrat Turnout

The taxpayer-funded work-study scheme complemented the activities of an array of left-wing nonprofit groups to boost Democrat Party votes on college campuses.

Among the most notable of these groups is an organization known as Civic Nation, a nonprofit headed by Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. According to its website, Civic Nation’s stated mission is to “empower” individuals and entities “to create a more inclusive, equitable America” through the use of multiple “national initiatives” that seek to “activate and train people to organize within their communities.” One of these active enterprises is an initiative known as the “ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge,” which was established in 2016 to encourage colleges to increase voter participation among students.