Ballot bounties? Wisconsin lawmaker flags payments used to mobilize voters for liberal judge

JTN: A Wisconsin lawmaker is questioning whether it was legal for a political action committee to pay people to encourage others to vote for liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz in the state Supreme Court election in the latest mobilization tactic to raise integrity concerns in the battleground state.

Wisconsin Takes Action, a project of Organizing Empowerment PAC, held live Zoom training sessions during the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, instructing potential “community mobilizers” on how to reach out to people to encourage them to vote and get paid hundreds of dollars for their outreach efforts. 

During an hour-long training session on the day after the Wisconsin Supreme Court primary election in February, the organizers running the session explained how attendees could earn $30 by downloading an app from the Empower Project, a left-wing organization that helps “progressive organizations and nonprofits … activate, build, and expand their activist bases and organizational reach on a meaningful scale,” according to its website. 

Empower Project uses “relational organizing” for reaching out to potential voters because “talking to people who you do know,” a trainer explained, is “really effective because you talking to your father to go vote or your sister or your friend is a lot more effective than me telling them to go vote because I don’t know them. But with you, there’s a lot more connection or relationship built and more reason for them to be compelled to go vote.”  more