What Is The Secretary of State Project?

Most voters are blissfully unaware of a long-term project that has been underway since 2005, a project meant to take control of our electoral system and bend it to one ideological agenda. It's called the Secretary of State Project and is funded by one of the most active left-wing political donors in the world, George Soros.

It may all sound like one of those conspiracy theories one sees on fevered Internet websites, but this is no black-helicopters conspiracy theory. At least it isn't one supposedly hiding in back rooms and run by unknown someones. In fact, this project is quite out in the open—it even has a Facebook Page—and it has a history of some success.

The Secretary of State Project (SoSP) is what is called a 527 organization, a group that can take unlimited political contributions from supporters like multi-billionaire and radical philanthropist George Soros. The goal is to find candidates that subscribe to a far left-wing, progressive ideology, to convince them to run for the office of secretary of state in their homestate, and then to fund their political campaign. This is fully a 50 state project.

Initially the SoSP met with success and did so in some key states that had a big impact on the country. SoSP candidates won office in both Minnesota and Ohio for instance. It is no surprise that in both states voting improprieties were ignored by those SoSP supported officials and that led to Democrats gaining some electoral wins.

In Minnesota, for instance, massive vote fraud was left unaddressed by SoSP supported Sec. of State Democrat Mark Ritchie and this led to the 2005 election of Democrat Senator Al Franken over incumbent Republican Norm Coleman. And in 2008 in Ohio, SoSP supported Sec. of State Democrat Jennifer Brunner employed shaky legal grounds to rule that some 200,000 absentee ballots cast for John McCain were invalid. These are the sort of ideologically driven actions that the SoSP is meant to propagate and in a era when elections often end up down to a razor thin margin between victor and vanquished, having a Sec. of State that doesn’t mind bending or breaking the law to favor Democrats is a plus as far these ideologues are concerned.

That is just the point of this project, in fact. Since 2000 many elections have ended up coming down to only thousands, sometimes hundreds of votes between leading candidates. The SoSP was created to take the power over election rules, process, and adjudication that the Secretary of State’s offices have and to bend those offices to the progressive cause.

Discover The Network identifies who started SoSP:

SoSP’s co-founders were Democracy Alliance member Michael Kieschnick (who also founded Working Assets and serves as a board member of the leftist evangelical group Sojourners); Becky Bond (who also has affiliations with Working Assets and the New Organizing Institute); and James Rucker (who co-founded Color of Change and formerly served as director of grassroots mobilization for MoveOn.org Political Action and Moveon.org Civic Action).

Top contributors to the project include:

Among the more notable contributors to SoSP are Democracy Alliance members George Soros, Rob Stein, Drummond Pike, Gail Furman, Michael Kieschnick, John R. Hunting, Paul Rudd, Pat Stryker, Nicholas Hanauer, Patricia Bauman, Megan Hull, Scott Wallace, Barbara Lee (not the congresswoman), Anne Bartley, Blair Hull, Rob McKay, Sanford Newman, William J. Roberts, Tim Gill, and Susie Tompkins Buell.

Simply put, this project is specifically aimed at placing in every state people with an agenda beyond that of the voters or the state itself in the office of Secretary of State. The existence of this effort shows how far progressives will go to push their agenda.