Meddling in Michigan elections

Thanks to a standing Freedom of Information Act request being honored by Houghton County and a little luck, I recently uncovered news of True North Law, from St. Louis, Missouri, filing an extensive FOIA request on behalf of the Chicago-based Thomas More Society.

The lawyer involved, Mark F. “Thor” Hearne II, has argued in support of voter-ID laws in the past and has been active in Michigan before. Challenging the 2020 general election, he failed to file proper documents for the case to be heard, and some of his arguments were called hearsay by Judge Cynthia Stephens. He was also the founder of the controversial, and now-defunct, American Center for Voting Rights, which pushed the ultimately unfounded narrative of widespread voter fraud from 2005-2007.

The four-page letter to Houghton County requests that they turn over any documents mentioning the Center for Tech and Civic Life from the last five years; documents concerning the Democracy Fund, New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, Arabella Advisors, Windward Fund, Omidyar Group and Center for Secure and Modern Elections for the last three years; and documents related to the receipt or expenditure of private funds related to 2020 elections; any documents related to absent voter drop boxes; three elections worth of total registered voters, absentee ballots, and votes counted for several offices; documents related to the use of public monies used to conduct the election; and whether Houghton County paid any money to Facebook in relation to the election.

For their trouble, they got very little in response. The County Administrator Ben Larson did turn over a list of election expenses and pointed them to where some generalized voter statistics are available online, but most of those records are kept at the township level, not held by the county. No outside funds were used, no emails were exchanged with or about any of the groups mentioned save one, and no money was spent on Facebook. The one email, about the Center for Tech and Civic Life, was simply a notification the county received that a grant was available. The county never responded or applied.

As of last week, True North Law had not responded to or appealed the response to their request.

Of course, on the same day, the law firm sent an identical request to at least one township in Houghton County. This was the luck part—I just happened to scoop up this other request while doing some wind turbine-related digging.

Adams Township did receive a $5,000 grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, but had no communications to report from any of the other organizations. The Center for Tech and Civic Life, funded largely by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, made $250 million in grants available to aid in elections. Opinions differ widely on whether this was good or bad. “Thor” also received some budget breakdowns and generalized voter tallies, but that was about it.

What’s the end goal of this request? Probably something like this case in Wisconsin.

A lawyer with the Thomas More Society, which “Thor” claims to represent, has sued the city of Racine, Wisconsin over a failure to fulfill FOIA requests related to the 2020 general election. The city, meanwhile, says it has provided hundreds of documents but hasn’t heard anything back “regarding insufficiencies to those responses, nor have they submitted follow-up requests.”

Of course, the case was probably never meant to stick any more than the 60+ cases that immediately followed the election were. They’re simply theater, for the benefit of fundraising from political belligerents.

Keep an ear to the ground for True North Law suing U.P. election clerks, I’ve got $5 on them following the same playbook.

But if I lose, that’s $5 total, not $5 for each of you.