My article from the May 1 edition of the American Spectator:

Whatever happened to the left-wing Secretary of State Project liberals promised would save our elections from the dirty tricks of those dang lowdown, yellow-bellied, lily-livered Republicans?

The evidence now suggests that the election-stealing, George Soros-funded so-called “527” political committee is dead, or perhaps just deeply sedated. This group that section 527 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code allows to accept unlimited financial contributions was created solely to rig elections for Democrats.

It accomplishes this by electing permissive liberal Democrats as secretaries of state. In most states the secretary of state is the chief elections officer, so putting left-wingers in the often-overlooked but critically important office allows these political radicals to manipulate the electoral process. This is what liberals call “election protection.”

Billionaire donor Soros, whom Saturday Night Live has mocked as the “owner” of the Democratic Party, underwrote the Secretary of State Project in order to help Democrats gain an unfair advantage on Election Day. Soros and progressives all across the fruited plain believe with a religious fervor that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell).

For years Soros’s ultra-wealthy colleagues in the Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that funds left-wing political infrastructure, opened their wallets to help secretary of state candidates endorsed by the SoS Project. They helped to elect Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizer Mark Ritchie, the ACORN-loving Minnesota secretary of state who presided over Al Franken’s theft of incumbent Republican Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2008 election cycle.

Until a year and a half ago the Secretary of State Project was doing well. Before the 2010 cycle it took credit for electing 11 of the 18 left-wingers it endorsed since it began funding candidates in 2006.

Then in 2010 disaster struck for Democrats at both the national and state levels. Five out of the SoS Project’s seven official candidates went down to defeat. Only Ritchie and another progressive incumbent, California’s Debra Bowen, stayed afloat in the Republican electoral tsunami. As the Secretary of State Project lost its luster and its funding dried up, the writing was on the wall.

Despite the SoS Project’s ultimately limited shelf life, the idea behind the group was clever in a Robert Mugabe kind of way. A relative pittance can help swing these little-watched state contests, allowing even small donors to play a big role in making all of America Vermont.

Once a secretary of state who doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss about electoral integrity is in power, the undemocratic installation of Democrats in public office may follow. (See Franken, Al.)

The secretary of state candidates the SoS Project endorses sing the same familiar song about election-related issues that we now hear from Eric Holder’s lawless Justice Department.

The left-of-center candidates bearing the Secretary of State Project’s seal of approval typically say that: a) voter fraud is as real as the Loch Ness monster; b) Republicans routinely practice vote suppression; c) voter rolls should never be cleansed of the dead and fictional characters; and d) anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist.

With that said, how do we actually know that the fetid Secretary of State Project is likely a-mouldering in the ground?

Rumors of the organization’s death have been circulating for months.

The Secretary of State Project’s website, secstateproject.org, is currently offline after vanishing from the Internet in July of last year. At press time its Facebook page, YouTube channel, and Twitter account hadn’t been updated since 2010. The group hasn’t endorsed any candidates for the 2012 election cycle and its most recent IRS filings show almost no financial activity since the 2010 election cycle.

Progressive activists involved with the group refused to comment. Contacted by telephone, co-founder Rebecca Bond, who goes by “Becky,” politely refused to comment for this would-be obituary after this writer pointed out that the political committee’s once-impressive website had gone dark.

Bond wasn’t the only one with zipped lips. Wayne State law professor and community organizer Jocelyn Benson, who was beaten decisively in blue state Michigan by Republican Ruth Johnson in 2010, failed to return telephone calls. Benson, who lost by five percentage points despite running in a blue state, being endorsed by the Secretary of State Project, and outspending her opponent by a quarter of a million dollars, failed to return telephone calls.

Longtime Democratic operative Alexandra Visher, who is vice president in charge of partner engagement and communications at the Soros-backed Democracy Alliance, and who has generally been willing to comment on other matters, also honored the Left’s code of silence, failing to respond to emails seeking comment. The Democracy Alliance has steered its members’ sizeable donations to the Secretary of State Project and dozens of other progressive pressure groups with close ties to the Obama White House such as Media Matters for America and John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.

Incidentally, the SoS Project’s friends in leftist groups such as the ACORN-affiliated Project Vote have launched a massive assault on electoral integrity through the courts. Project Vote, which used to employ Barack Obama, and other radical organizations are pressuring state officials across America to drop voter fraud investigations.

Meanwhile, it is telling that at the time the Secretary of State Project was created Bond paraphrased an aphorism attributed to Joseph Stalin. The brutal Communist dictator reportedly said, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

Bond told the San Francisco Chronicle bluntly that, “Any serious commitment to wrestling control of the country from the Republican Party must include removing their political operatives from deciding who can vote and whose votes will count.”

Bond and co-founder James Rucker, formerly director of grassroots mobilization for MoveOn, used the Secretary of State Project to perpetuate perennially popular progressive platitudes about the Grand Old Party’s supposed track record for electoral malfeasance.

Rucker is better known for co-founding Color of Change, an Afro-centrist attack group, with former Obama green jobs czar and self-described “communist” Van Jones. Color of Change takes credit for getting Glenn Beck off the Fox News Channel. The group also takes credit for getting major corporations to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and getting the highly effective conservative public policy group to abandon its common-sense push for voter ID laws.

Now that the Secretary of State Project is either pushing up the daisies or writhing in the agony of death throes how will its originators pass the days?

While Rucker spends his time organizing boycotts and smearing conservatives as racist, San Francisco-based Bond’s day job consists of targeting Tea Party-friendly lawmakers such as Reps. Allen West (R-Fla.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) for defeat.

Bond is political director for CREDO Mobile, the wireless reseller that donates part of its profits to leftist groups such as Media Matters for America, Project Vote, Color of Change, Food Democracy Now!, and the Sierra Club Foundation. CREDO Mobile president Michael Kieschnick boasts that CREDO Action, a network he claims has 2.5 million activists, has given upwards of $70 million to left-wing groups since 1985.

Bond has another role within the for-profit company. Although CREDO opposes the Supreme Court decision that allowed independent political action committees, known as super PACs, to accept unlimited corporate funding, the cognitively dissonant company went ahead and created the CREDO Super PAC anyway.

CREDO felt it shouldn’t “unilaterally disarm,” Bond, who is the new committee’s president, reportedly said. “If we decided to sit this out and be purists on this thing, it wouldn’t change a thing other than help the other side.”

“This allows us to directly advocate for defeat of these [Tea Party] candidates, instead of talking about defeat of issues. This is something we could not have done before” the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, she said. Bond claims that only MoveOn has a larger list of left-wing voters’ email addresses than CREDO.

CREDO Super PAC has taken in almost $1.2 million so far, according to the Federal Election Commission database.

Real estate investor Patricia Bauman, a Democracy Alliance member, has given $13,000 to CREDO Super PAC so far this year. Kieschnick, another Democracy Alliance member, has given $30,000 to the political committee since last year. Hollywood actresses and longtime Democratic donors Stockard Channing and Patricia Richardson (from TV’s “Home Improvement”) have each given $500 to the committee so far this year.

The super PAC has also retained a sleazy Marxist in Chicago as a consultant. The committee paid $50,417 to Strategic Consulting Group, the firm of convicted swindler and tax cheat Robert Creamer. An admitted fan of Saul Alinsky, Creamer has reportedly visited the Obama White House close to 60 times since he got out of the hoosegow. In prison he wrote a book widely hailed by leftists that later served as a blueprint for Obamacare. Creamer, who is married to socialist congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), also used to be a lobbyist for Soros’s Open Society Institute.

The busy Ms. Bond is also on the board of the Alinsky-inspired New Organizing Institute (NOI), a Soros-funded school for community organizers. The nonprofit created something called the Candidate Project to recruit candidates for city councils, school boards, state legislatures, and local commissions.

These are “the battlefields where life-changing issues are constantly being tested and decided under our noses,” according to NOI. “There are more than half a million local elected offices outside of the Washington gridlock — that’s more than 500,000 ways to influence whether government serves the 99% or just the 1%.”

Maybe Bond has embraced new political vehicles because those who tilt to port no longer need the Secretary of State Project. After all, the dirty work of the Left is already being done on the taxpayer dime.

Attorney General Holder’s minions are doing everything in their power to ignore wrongdoing on the Left. Their failure to pursue truncheon-wielding New Black Panther Party members who tried to intimidate Philadelphia voters in 2008 is just one example. They are also opening elections to massive voter fraud. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law the Department of Justice has blocked eminently reasonable voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina.

Those statutes are racist and discriminatory, according to the Obama administration.

But in reality they are something quite different. Such laws might be the only things that prevent Democrats from stealing the election this November.