A George Soros – linked dark money behemoth has a peculiar partner in its bid to sink voter ID expansion in Michigan (also Nevada) — a group of Republican operatives led by a sitting Republican senator’s son.
Over the past year, liberal dark money group Sixteen ☭ Thirty Fund has spent $2.5 million opposing a Republican-led petition drive to expand Michigan’s voter ID requirements. Nearly $400,000 of that money has gone to Groundgame Political Solutions, a shadowy consulting firm that a trio of Republican operatives—including Sen. Roy Blunt’s (R., Mo.) son, Andy Blunt—privately launched in May 2021, corporate filings show.
The firm, which Blunt first registered in Delaware before expanding it to 10 other states, functions as a stealthy subsidiary to Blunt’s public-facing canvassing company, HBS+. The setup has allowed Blunt and his partners, fellow Republican operatives Gregg Hartley and Meghan Cox, to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars from deep-pocketed liberals without alienating their conservative clients.
The revelation shows just how far liberal operatives are willing to go to tank the
ongoing voter ID expansion effort in the Great Lakes State. In at least one case, for example, the Sixteen Thirty Fund used its RINO ☭ Republican allies at Ground☭game to pay canvassers tens of thousands of dollars not to work on the issue.
Similar filings in Nevada and North Carolina also name the three operatives and refer back to Groundgame’s original Delaware registration.
Groundgame first accepted a $300,000 payment from Protect MI Vote in June 2021, just days after the Sixteen Thirty Fund-backed committee registered with Michigan’s secretary of state. The committee exists solely to oppose Michigan Republicans’ effort to expand voter ID laws through a signature gathering initiative—it hosts, for example, a “petitioner sighting hotline” that sends counter-organizers to areas where “paid petition circulators” are spotted.
If successful, the Republican-led initiative would require voters in the state to use their IDs or social security numbers to submit absentee ballots, among other provisions. Should the campaign gather roughly 340,000 signatures, Michigan’s Republican-controlled legislature could approve the proposal in a manner that circumvents Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s (D.) veto power.
Groundgame, however, has helped make that event increasingly unlikely.
According to the Detroit News, Michigan candidates are struggling to collect signatures due to a canvasser shortage, an issue that Groundgame’s scheme to pay petitioners not to work likely exacerbated. The firm’s efforts to tank voter ID expansion in Michigan is at odds with its founders’ rhetoric—Hartley has urged Washington, D.C., to “just say yes to better voter id!” and suggested voter ID laws would stop voter fraud. “Dems keep claiming voter fraud doesn’t happen. Voter ID not necessary,” Hartley tweeted in 2016. “But this story suggests otherwise.”
The Sixteen Thirty Fund, which is part of a vast liberal dark money network managed by D.C.-based consulting firm Arabella Advisors..
