(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) The emails obtained by Protect the Public’s Trust and shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation showed that the Biden administration sought taxpayer funding for a program that would use school children to provide voter registration materials to American Indians who tend to vote for Democrats.
Internal emails showed that in 2022, Department of the Interior (DOI) officials developed a plan that would have given American Indian children attending Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools voter registration materials so that they would bring them home to their parents.
According to DOI attorney-advisor Joshua Berg, BIE’s proposed native voter registration plan was formulated to comply with Executive Order 14019. The order was issued by Joe Biden in March 2021.
In March 2022, Berg wrote that he and his colleagues had “developed a plan to distribute voter registration applications at BIE schools so that school children [could] bring home voter registration applications to their parents and/or guardians.”
“[The federal government would also have provided] return envelopes with pre-paid postage so that parents and/or guardians [could] mail in their completed voter registration applications directly to the corresponding elections office in their state,” Berg wrote.
The BIE’s website stated that the agency, which is a division of the DOI, funds a network of 183 elementary and secondary schools all across 64 Indian reservations in 23 states. The news source added that these schools, 53 of which are directly administered by the agency and 130 of which are tribally operated, serve roughly 46,000 American Indian students.
The emails also showed that on March 2, 2024, Berg contacted DOI Deputy Assistant Secretary Eric Werwa to schedule a call so that they could discuss funding for the BEI school voter registration initiative.
On March 22, 2024, BIE team lead Jennifer Wiginton and Brian Quint, a DOI attorney-advisor, were sent a link to a meeting with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) where taxpayer funding for the BIE’s “voting rights” initiatives was supposed to be discussed.
DOI employees also maintained a list of states paired with information related to voting in those states. New Mexico, Arizona, South Dakota, Montana and Kansas were among the states included on the list.
“What a coincidence that there is such strong overlap between the states BIE apparently chose to target and those Democrats see Native American turnout as important to their chances of electoral success. These records show that the worst fears of those who believed this order would be used to help the President and his party were justified,” Protect the Public’s Trust director Michael Chamberlain said.
