This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 1

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 2

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 3

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 4

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 5

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 6

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Mountaineer Conservative Action: 8

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 9

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 10

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 11

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition: 1

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition: 2

The texts messages (verbatim)

Reproduced exactly as received, including punctuation, emoji, formatting, and one typo. Each message is preceded by the sender name and phone number as it appeared in the recipient’s inbox.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Defending girls’ sports should be simple common sense.

But Sen. Tom Takubo voted against HB 3293 (4/18/21) that would protect female athletes, putting their opportunities at risk.

Call Sen. Takubo TODAY at 304-357-7990 and tell him to “Stop Endangering Our Girls!”

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

We must protect our children from the radical woke left agenda.

Chris Pritt has proven he’ll do that by:

✅ Voting for record tax cuts to create jobs and put money back in working families’ pockets ✅ Passing a ban on gender surgeries for minors ✅ Voting to ban men from playing women’s sports ✅ Voting to prevent illegal aliens from stealing our jobs

Call Chris Pratt TODAY at 304-573-9980 and thank him for protecting our children!

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Tom Takubo is too liberal for West Virginia!

Takubo called banning puberty blockers “dramatic overreach” and voted to give puberty blockers to children.

These are not West Virginian values.

Call Tom Takubo TODAY at 304-357-7990 and tell him to “Stop Endangering Our Children!”

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Associated Press, 3/2/23; The Register-Herald, 3/29/23; SB 471, 2018; HB 3293, 2021

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Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Tom Takubo said it was TOO EXPENSIVE to protect your children.

Takubo voted to allow men to play in women’s sports (HB 3293, 4/8/21), putting young female athletes at risk.

West Virginia families deserve better. Call Tom Takubo and let him know he doesn’t share our values.

☎️ 304-357-7990

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: Metro News. “Push from Senate President’s political action committee targets a GOP colleague” 3/24/26; HB 3293, 2021

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Tom Takubo isn’t being honest.

Takubo claimed to support girls’ sports, but voted AGAINST protecting them (HB 3293, 2021).

Tell him West Virginia families expect better.

📞 Call now: 304-357-7990

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Watch our new video 📺

Tom Takubo is misleading West Virginians.

What’s real is that Tom Takubo voted AGAINST protecting girls’ sports (HB 3293, 2021).

Call Tom Takubo and tell him to “Stop endangering West Virginia’s girls!”

📞 304-357-7990

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Tom Takubo voted to put men in women’s sports and give puberty blockers to children.

These are not close calls. These are basic commonsense values that every West Virginia parent understands.

Takubo failed that test. Badly.

Call Tom Takubo TODAY at 304-357-7990 and tell him to stop endangering our kids!

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Associated Press, 3/2/23; The Register-Herald, 3/29/23.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Don’t be misled by Tom Takubo.

Takubo voted to give puberty blockers to kids, and the record proves it.

West Virginia families deserve the truth.

On May 12th, 𝗿𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Tom Takubo fought tooth and nail to pump puberty blockers into West Virginia children.

When conservatives stopped it, Takubo called it the most anti-Republican bill he had ever seen.

He is endangering our kids and lying about it. 𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼 on May 12.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; Register-Herald, 3/29/23

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Tom Takubo supports an extreme agenda:

❌ Voted to allow men to play in girls’ sports (HB 3293, 2021)

❌ Called banning puberty blockers “Dramatic Overreach” (Health and Human Resources Committee)

Woke liberal Tom Takubo has a reckless record that endangers West Virginia children.

𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼 on May 12.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

May 12 is coming. Senate District 17 cannot afford to get this wrong.

✅ 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁: Pro-Trump conservative. Banned puberty blockers. Banned gender surgeries on minors. Protected girls sports. Protecting our kids, our families, and our values.

❌ 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰: Woke Liberal. Voted for puberty blockers for kids. Called banning them “Dramatic Overreach.” Voted to allow men in girls sports. Pushing woke liberal policies that endanger our children.

𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲. 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘬𝘪𝘥𝘴.

Vote Chris Pritt on May 12.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: HB 3293, 2021; AP, 3/2/23; HB 2998, 2021

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Election Day is May 12. Vote early if you can!

As a Delegate, Chris Pritt has a record of putting West Virginia families first, voting to ban puberty blockers and to ban gender surgeries for minors.

As your State Senator, Chris Pritt will fight for our children, our values, and our families every single day.

𝗩𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Did you know? Steven Eshenaur backed DEI policies, partnered with radical left activist groups, and supported needle exchange programs.

West Virginia values are on the ballot. Steven Eshenaur’s record is clear-too liberal, too woke.

𝗢𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮, 𝗿𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗘𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗮𝘂𝗿.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: Kanawha-Charleston Health Department Website, “About” Page, Accessed 3/10/26; 2. Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, Press Release, 8/26/22. 3. The Daily Yonder, 12/19/22

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

📽️Watch our new video about Radical Liberal Michael Antolini.

Michael Antolini is the head of an organization backing abortion on demand (1) and is bankrolled by radical liberal donors (2).

We don’t need this woke agenda in West Virginia.

𝗢𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮𝘁𝗵 - 𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗲𝗹 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗶.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Source: 1. WBOY, 6/28/22; 2. West Virginia Secretary of State

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

May 12 is election day. Vote early if you can.

West Virginia families deserve a State Senator who stands firm for conservative values, protects our kids, and never backs down.

That is Chris Pritt. 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰.

𝗩𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮. 𝘙𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Radical Steve Eshenaur leads the 𝘄𝗼𝗸𝗲 Kanawha-Charleston Health Department that is committed to pushing an extreme diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) agenda.

Steven Eshenaur is too liberal for West Virginia. Let your voice be heard!

𝗩𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗘𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗮𝘂𝗿.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Source: Kanawha-Charleston Health Department Website, “About” Page, Accessed 3/10/26.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵: Tom Takubo voted to give puberty blockers to kids.

These policies hurt West Virginia families.

Don’t let 𝘓𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰 get away with misinformation. Let your voice be heard!

Vote Early Now: 𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗟𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Tom Takubo voted for radical policies that put woke politics ahead of West Virginia values.

❌ Voted for puberty blockers for kids (1)

❌ Voted to allow men in girls’ sports (2)

West Virginia families deserve better. On May 12, reject Tom Takubo.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: 1. The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23; 2. HB 3293, 2021

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Don’t let 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗘𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗮𝘂𝗿 fool you.

Steven Eshenaur supports a radical left agenda pushing DEI politics, needle exchanges, and using tax dollars to promote a LGBT group’s “Big Gay Cookout”

Let’s face it, Steven Eshenaur is too liberal and woke for West Virginia.

Make your voice heard on May 12th - 𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗘𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗮𝘂𝗿!

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: Kanawha-Charleston Health Department Website, “About” Page, Accessed 3/10/26; The Daily Yonder, 12/19/22

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Tom Takubo is lying again, and voters deserve to know the truth.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵: Tom Takubo has NOT been endorsed by President Trump. That claim is false - don’t be misled by lying Tom Takubo.

𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰 is a woke liberal who voted for puberty blockers for kids, called banning them “Dramatic Overreach”, and voted to allow men in girls’ sports.

Don’t let 𝘓𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰 get away with misinformation. Let your voice be heard!

𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23; Health and Human Resources Committee; HB 3293, 2021

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Sorry to interrupt Mother’s Day.

We have 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 to share.

Tom Takubo was caught LYING about having an endorsement from President Trump.

🔗Read more about Lying Tom Takubo here: https://www.nationalfile.com/article/busted-wv-sen-tom-takubo-caught-lying-about-trump-endorsement-in-desperate-primary-push

𝘖𝘯 𝘔𝘢𝘺 12𝘵𝘩, 𝘳𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Source: 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘍𝘪𝘭𝘦, 5/9/26.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

📽️ICYMI: Watch to learn about the real Tom Takubo.

Tom Takubo is wrong for West Virginia. Takubo voted to give puberty blockers to kids and allow men to compete in girls’ sports.

𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮𝘁𝗵 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝟲:𝟯𝟬𝗔𝗠 𝘁𝗼 𝟳:𝟯𝟬𝗣𝗠.

Make your plan to vote tomorrow and 𝗥𝗘𝗝𝗘𝗖𝗧 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23; HB 3293, 2021.

Reply STOP to stop.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

West Virginia turned 163 this week. I’m a couple days late to the party, so let me make it up to the old place with a present worth giving.

Here’s some history worth sitting with on a birthday. On June 20, 1863, the western counties did something almost nobody in American history has done: they looked at a government run by people who didn’t represent them — power and policy tilted toward interests on the other side of the mountains, written for somebody else’s benefit, paid for with somebody else’s money — and they said no thanks, and they walked. They built their own state. For themselves. For their neighbors.

That’s not a fun fact. That’s the whole reason this place exists. And it’s exactly why I’m launching what I’m launching today.

For a while now, this newsletter has done one job: show you the machinery. How the money moves, how it hardens into policy, the pattern you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. And a lot of you keep writing back with the same question — okay, so what do we actually do about it?

This is the answer. Welcome to the West Virginia Model Legislation Library.

If you already subscribe, you’re in — added automatically, nothing to click. The main feed stays what it’s always been: the investigation. This new one is the workshop. The main feed is where we expose what they’re doing. This is where we beat them at it.

The American Legislative Exchange Council runs a model legislation library. I’m not telling you a secret — it’s their whole business model, and they’ll brag about it themselves. Corporations and politicians get in a room, often behind closed doors, and crank out template bills. Then those templates get carried home to states like ours and dropped in barely changed. Same words, state after state, written for the people who paid to be in the room.

And it works — for one reason. Our Legislature is part-time. Sixty days. Almost no staff. A lawmaker who wants to do something needs bill text, a fiscal note, and talking points, fast, and usually can’t pull that together alone. So ALEC walks right into that empty space and hands them a finished bill. Tidy. Convenient. Written for somebody who doesn’t live here.

So here’s the question I couldn’t let go of. If the whole con runs on the fact that they have a library and we don’t —then why don’t we just build our own? So we are going to.

Not for billionaires. For our neighbors.

Here’s the thing their money can’t buy: people who actually live here and know how this state works. Retired attorneys. Former county clerks. Folks who’ve spent careers reading the Code. We don’t need to fly in national staff or rent a think tank. We need to organize the people already sitting in our own communities — and aim that talent at laws written for us instead of at us.

That’s what this library is. And the first entries start dropping here this week — all public, all free, all yours:

* A blueprint for how an in-state policy shop really works — who you need, how a bill goes from idea to introduced, how you pay for it. The instruction manual for doing in the open what they do in the dark.

* A straight-shooting brief on Amendment 1, the “Citizenship Requirement to Vote” measure on your November ballot. It won’t tell you how to vote. It’ll show you what that amendment actually changes — which is close to nothing — and what got shoved aside while it ate up floor time and ballot space.

* Two real, drafted bills. Not ideas. Not wish lists. Actual legislation. One keeps West Virginia’s photo-ID requirement and fixes the gaps that quietly cost eligible people their vote. The other keeps the state’s voter-roll cleanup intact while making sure that being an occasional voter doesn’t become step one toward losing your registration. Both of them amend real sections of our Code, line by line.

Read that list again, because this is the part that matters: neither bill weakens election security. Neither one keeps a single ineligible voter on the rolls. They keep the goal the Legislature said it wanted — and they stop eligible West Virginians from getting run over in the process. That’s what legislation built for your neighbors looks like. You’ll see every line of it this week.

One straight word, because straight is the whole point. These are working drafts. Before anything like this gets introduced, it needs checking against the current Code and review by legislative counsel — and I say so right inside the documents. We don’t dress things up as more than they are. That right there is the difference between us and them.

Here’s where you come in.

ALEC works in the dark because the dark is the only place their game survives. Drag it into the daylight and it falls apart. We’ve got the opposite situation — which is to say, no problem at all. We’ve got nothing to hide, so we’re done acting like we do.

* If you’re a lawyer, a retired clerk, a policy nerd, or just someone who knows how this state actually runs — this is your invitation. We’re building a real library and we need real hands. Hit reply and tell me you’re in.

* If you know somebody in the Legislature who’s sick of waiting around for a national outfit to hand them a bill written for someone else — forward this to them.

* If you just want to follow along — stay subscribed. The pieces start landing this week, one at a time, so each one gets room to breathe. Read them. Argue with them. Send me what you’re seeing in your own county. That’s how the next bills get written.

So let them keep their quiet little meetings and their corporate sponsors and their pre-written bills. Let them. We don’t need any of it. We’re not the ones who have to hide — they are. We care about our people, we’re doing this honest, and we’re doing it where every single person can watch.

A hundred and sixty-three years ago, the people of this state decided they’d rather build their own government than live under one written for somebody else. That’s not a metaphor. That’s literally how West Virginia got here. We’re just keeping the family tradition.

Happy birthday, West Virginia. Sorry I’m late. Here’s your present.

Welcome to the library. Let’s get to work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

My daughter just turned 18. She’s smart, opinionated, and absolutely ready to vote. And I did something that feels almost sacrilegious for a parent who cares deeply about democracy: I told her to wait. Not forever. Not to disengage. Just to hold off on registering until we’re closer to the deadline this fall.

Why? Because right now, our voter registration systems are a mess — a political battlefield where our personal data is being treated like a weapon, passed around between governments and third‑party vendors, and routinely left hanging out on the open internet like a forgotten file on someone’s desktop.

I don’t want my kid’s full name, address, date of birth, and partial Social Security number sitting in some unsecured cloud bucket or in the hands of a contractor who treats “security” as an afterthought. And that is not a hypothetical fear. It’s exactly what has already happened, over and over again.

This is not about discouraging her — or anyone — from voting. It’s about the adults in charge of this system behaving so irresponsibly with voter data that I don’t trust them with my freshly 18‑year‑old’s information right now.

When Your Voter File Becomes a Political Weapon

Over the last couple of years, the federal government has been on a crusade to get its hands on complete, unredacted statewide voter registration lists from almost every state and Washington, D.C. These aren’t just the public records versions that include name and address. They want the whole thing: full legal names, residential addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and pieces of Social Security numbers.

The Department of Justice has sent demands to at least 48 states and D.C., and has sued Washington, D.C. and 30 states that refused to turn over their full statewide voter registration lists with driver’s license and Social Security information. Some of these lawsuits target states the administration lost in 2020, and the stated justification is “we just want to check whether your rolls are accurate.”

Let’s be clear: there is a world of difference between auditing election systems and hoovering up the most sensitive information on tens of millions of voters into federal hands, to be processed by contractors we know almost nothing about. Election officials from both parties have raised alarms because the federal government has never had full, unredacted voter lists at this scale before.

Some states have said no. Illinois, for example, refused to hand over dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and Social Security information, citing state law and privacy protections, and instead sent a more limited file like the one it shares with political committees. The DOJ wrote back and said, essentially, “Not good enough. We want the entire database, all fields, including full name, date of birth, residence, driver’s license, and last four of the Social Security number.”

Other states have been sued and then vindicated in court. A federal judge in California dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit that sought to force the state to turn over its full, unredacted voter registration list, including addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. In total, at least eight of these cases — including ones against California, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oregon, Maine, and Wisconsin — have already been dismissed, and the DOJ is appealing several of them.

So from my vantage point as a parent, here’s how this looks: the federal government is in a legal knife fight with dozens of states trying to pry loose as much sensitive voter data as possible, while courts are saying, “Hold on, you may not be allowed to do that.” That is not a stable, trustworthy environment for me to casually toss my daughter’s data into.

The Grown‑Ups Left the Door Wide Open

If this were just a theoretical debate about who could access what, I’d still be uneasy. But this isn’t theoretical. We have a long, ugly history of voter data being leaked, misconfigured, and left exposed — not by some movie‑villain hacker, but by the very entities that collect and monetize this information.

A few greatest hits:

* A tech contractor in Illinois left at least 13 databases with about 4.6 million records on the open internet — no password protection — containing names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, voter registration history, absentee and early voting records, even death certificates from multiple counties.

* Security researchers found a misconfigured database sitting online that contained information on about 191 million U.S. voters — including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails — accessible to anyone who knew where to look.

* A huge dataset compiled by Deep Root Analytics, a political data firm that worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign, exposed personal information on roughly 198 million Americans due to a misconfigured Amazon S3 server. Again: names, demographics, political data, all sitting out there.

* In Alaska, a cyberattack on the state’s online voter registration system exposed personal information — names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses, party affiliation — for about 113,000 people.

* Another leak involved about 593,000 Alaska voter records associated with a national voter file compiled by TargetSmart; the data was exposed because a third‑party AI software company that licensed the data failed to secure its database.

These are not minor slip‑ups. These are systemic failures: misconfigured servers, unsecured cloud storage, and contractors who don’t lock the damn door.

And every time this happens, we get the same bland apology: “We take security very seriously.” No, they don’t. If they did, the personal information of millions of voters wouldn’t keep ending up on the internet like someone’s forgotten public Dropbox folder.

The Third‑Party Vendor Problem Nobody Wants to Own

Here’s the part that really sets me off: when states and the federal government collect this data, they don’t just keep it in some mythical, perfectly secured government vault. They share it. They license it. They hand it to third‑party contractors — data analytics firms, consultants, vendors — who then store, copy, and manipulate it on their own systems.

That’s how you end up with situations like:

* Deep Root Analytics compiling a massive trove of voter data for campaign work and leaving it exposed because of a misconfigured S3 bucket.

* TargetSmart’s licensed data being left unsecured by Equals3, an AI software company, leading to the leak of hundreds of thousands of Alaska voter records.

* Illinois counties’ data sitting in unsecured cloud storage run by a technology contractor, with Social Security numbers and full personal details just hanging out for anyone who finds the server.

It doesn’t matter which party these vendors are aligned with. I don’t trust any of them if their idea of security is “remember to maybe set a password later.” Yet these are exactly the kinds of entities the federal government and the political parties rely on to store and process the giant voter files they’re currently fighting over.

So when I picture my daughter registering to vote, I’m not just picturing our local elections office. I’m picturing a diffuse, poorly governed ecosystem of contractors and data firms that have already demonstrated, time and again, that they are fully capable of screwing this up on a massive scale.

“Mom, Are You Saying I Shouldn’t Vote?”

No. I’m saying I don’t trust the people holding the keys to the system right now.

When I tell my daughter, “Let’s wait until October before you register,” I’m not telling her to sit out democracy. I’m telling her that her information has value, and that the adults who designed and run these systems have not earned our blind trust.

I’m also acknowledging something we usually gloss over: once your data gets sucked into one of these giant voter databases, you don’t really get it back. You can’t un‑expose a Social Security number. You can’t un‑leak a birth date and home address that have already been scraped, copied, and sold fifty times.

So yes, I am asking my daughter to delay — strategically. I want to see:

* Whether more courts push back against these sweeping federal data demands.

* Whether our state clarifies what exactly it is sharing, with whom, and under what security controls.

* Whether there are any new breaches, “misconfigurations,” or “contractor errors” in the months ahead that change the risk picture.

Do I think the system will magically become safe by October? No. But I’d rather not reward ongoing, active recklessness with my kid’s data while the lawsuits are still flying and the breaches are still being disclosed.

What I Want Before I Hand Over My Kid’s Data

If I’m going to feel even moderately comfortable telling my daughter to go ahead and register online, I want to see three basic things.

* Data minimization and clear limits I want my state to say, in plain language: “Here’s what we collect when you register. Here’s what we do not collect. Here’s what we share, and with whom, and here’s what we will never share.” If you don’t need driver’s license numbers or pieces of Social Security numbers to run a secure, accurate election, stop hoarding them.

* Vendor accountability with teeth If a contractor exposes voter data — like the firms involved in the 191 million‑voter exposure, the 198 million‑record Deep Root leak, the Alaska voter file mess, or the Illinois county databases — there should be real, painful consequences. Not “we’re sorry and we updated our settings,” but termination of contracts, fines, mandatory independent security audits, and public disclosure of what happened.

* Independent security oversight I want more than “trust us, we’re professionals.” I want independent security researchers, auditors, and watchdog organizations to be part of the process, not treated as the enemy when they discover yet another unsecured database. When Chris Vickery or another researcher finds millions of voter records lying around in the wild, that shouldn’t be a PR crisis to spin; it should be a fire alarm to fix underlying practices.

Until that culture shifts — until the people who hold our voter data act like they’re handling live explosives, not email marketing lists — I’m going to be very selective about when and how my daughter’s information enters that system.

What You Can Do If You Feel the Same

If any of this resonates with you, here are a few practical steps you can take without walking away from democracy:

* Ask questions of your state elections office. What fields are collected? Who gets access? Is anything shared with the federal government or third‑party vendors, and under what agreements?

* Watch the lawsuits. Pay attention to which states are resisting federal overreach and which courts are pushing back on massive, unredacted data demands.

* Support organizations that fight for data privacy in elections. Groups tracking DOJ data requests and voter file security are doing unglamorous but essential work pressing for limits and safeguards.

* Make your own call about timing. Maybe you’re comfortable registering now. Maybe, like me, you want your freshly 18‑year‑old to register closer to the deadline. That’s your call as a parent and as a voter.

What I refuse to do is pretend this is normal. It is not normal to have nearly 200 million voter records exposed because of a misconfigured server. It is not normal for millions of records from multiple Illinois counties to be dumped onto the open internet by a sloppy contractor. It is not normal for the federal government to be locked in litigation with dozens of states, trying to force them to hand over the most sensitive details of their voters’ lives.

My daughter will vote. She will participate. She will use her voice.

But until the people demanding her data stop treating our voter files like a political chew toy and start treating them like the dangerous, sensitive assets they are, I’m going to protect her information as fiercely as I can — even if that means telling her to wait.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

Hunger in West Virginia is not an accident. It is what happens when the same small circle of men controls the budgets, the lawsuits, and the money machine behind our elections—Governor Patrick Morrisey, Attorney General JB McCuskey, and consultant Scott Will.

Have you ever been hungry?

Not the kind of hungry that nudges you toward the fridge between meals. Not the kind of hungry that has you scrolling through a takeout app on a Tuesday night. I mean truly, stomach-aching, nothing in the cabinet, kids going to bed without dinner hungry.

In 2026, the wealthiest country on earth is quietly letting millions of families go without food. At what point did hunger stop being a moral crisis and become just another policy argument? The distance between a full refrigerator and an empty one is the same distance between our leaders and the people they’re supposed to serve.

I’ve been thinking about that question a lot lately. Because while lawmakers in Washington and right here in Charleston debate budgets, score political points, and protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, real people—your neighbors, your coworkers, the family down the street—are going without food. This isn’t a hypothetical. This isn’t a distant problem. This is happening right now, in 2026, in the wealthiest country on earth.

And when you follow the decisions and then follow the money, you keep landing on the same three names.

If you’ve been reading my work on this Substack, you know this isn’t a standalone story. In “Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore,” I laid out how RAGA and DAGA turned the AG’s office into a national partisan litigation machine. In “Your Help Really Makes a Difference,” I showed how Patrick Morrisey’s donor world operated at the Greenbrier. And in “Sugar Maple PAC may be buying the ads, but the real story is the small circle of operatives routing, reporting, and managing the machine behind West Virginia’s 2026 Republican primaries,” I traced the same pattern through Scott Will, SW2 Political, Matchstick, Bulldog, Red Curve, and the PAC infrastructure behind West Virginia’s Republican primaries. This piece sits on top of that groundwork. It is about what happens when that same machine meets something as basic as whether kids in West Virginia eat dinner.

The Numbers Are Staggering — And They Should Shame Us

A new Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis found that food insecurity in America has reached levels higher than during the COVID-19 pandemic. One in ten American households reported not having enough food to eat, or that their children missed meals—more than double the share who said the same in June 2020, at the height of the crisis. More than a third of households are now dipping into their savings just to buy groceries.

Meanwhile, food prices in April 2026 were about 3.2 percent higher than a year ago, the fastest monthly spike in nearly four years. Overall inflation has climbed to roughly 3.8 percent, the highest in almost three years. People are not imagining this. It is real, and it is relentless.

And yet, Congress passed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” slashing around 186–187 billion dollars from SNAP—food stamps—over ten years. That’s about a 20 percent cut to the one program millions of families depend on to keep food on the table. Before the cuts, children made up roughly 39 percent of SNAP recipients, and older Americans around 20 percent. These are the people lawmakers decided could afford to go without.

The Trump administration actually celebrated removing people from SNAP—as if hunger is a victory condition.

Right Here in West Virginia: Patrick Morrisey’s Hunger Budget

West Virginia already knows what hunger looks like. We live it. According to Feeding America, 1 in 5 children in our state faces hunger. In fiscal year 2025, about 272,800 West Virginians—15.4 percent of our entire population—relied on SNAP benefits just to eat. Our state consistently ranks among the most food-insecure in the nation.

And now, on top of federal cuts to SNAP, WIC, and school nutrition programs, our state is facing its own budget crisis—one that threatens the programs quietly holding West Virginia families together.

Governor Patrick Morrisey recently revealed a 40 million dollar structural gap in West Virginia’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding. His early suggestions for closing that gap? Cutting childcare assistance. Cutting the clothing allowance that helps low-income families buy school clothes for their kids. Putting the futures of 58 Family Support Centers across our state in jeopardy.

These aren’t just buildings. Family Support Centers are places where families get parent education, child-development support, after-school programs, GED classes, food and hygiene pantries, and a hand when they need it most. In a single recent year, just four of these centers served nearly 5,000 individuals statewide. They are lifelines—and they are now staring down an uncertain July with no guarantee of continued funding.

The Department of Human Services scrambled to send a letter on June 11, 2026, extending Family Support Center grants for a “fifth quarter” to buy time. A fifth quarter. That’s the language of crisis management, not a government that has its priorities straight.

No one forced Patrick Morrisey to start balancing his TANF books on the backs of childcare, school clothes, and community supports. In a state where 1 in 5 kids is already hungry, choosing children’s clothing vouchers and Family Support Centers as the first place to cut is not prudence. It’s a statement of values.

JB McCuskey: The Fights He Chooses and the Hunger He Ignores

If Patrick Morrisey’s budget tells you who he is willing to sacrifice, Attorney General JB McCuskey’s docket tells you what he thinks is worth fighting for.

On May 20, 2026, McCuskey filed a sweeping consumer-protection lawsuit against Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), a proxy-advisory firm based in Rockville, Maryland, accusing it of deceptive trade practices and claiming its climate and diversity policies harm West Virginia investors.

This lawsuit didn’t materialize out of thin air. It closely tracks the playbook pioneered by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office has been at the center of the national anti-ESG crusade and who has repeatedly targeted proxy advisers and climate-related investing. McCuskey’s wife, Wendy, is from Texas, and instead of writing his own script for West Virginia, he is following Paxton’s lead—importing that culture-war agenda into a state where families are more worried about their grocery bill than about whether a proxy-advisory firm graded Exxon’s climate plan too harshly.

He can marshal outside lawyers and national Republican AG figures to go after a company in Maryland, but when it comes to standing up for the most basic interest his constituents have—being able to feed their families—his pen goes dry. On twenty-three attorneys general from across the country signed a letter to the U.S. Senate urging it to restore SNAP protections in the Farm Bill. They called the cuts economically shortsighted and morally wrong. They warned that some states may have to consider withdrawing from SNAP altogether because the cost-shifting is so severe. They asked Congress to reverse the damage before millions more Americans lose the ability to feed their families.

West Virginia’s Attorney General, JB McCuskey, was not among them.

That omission is extraordinary in a state like ours. In one of the hungriest states in the country, with one in five children facing hunger, our attorney general stayed silent on the program that keeps many of them fed. Analysts estimate that the Farm Bill changes will shift more than 80 million dollars in new costs onto West Virginia by the end of 2026, straining a state budget that already struggles to meet basic needs. Twenty-three of his peers looked at that reality and said, “not on our watch.” Our attorney general looked at the same crisis and stayed quiet.

I know JB McCuskey. He comes from a family with means. His wife is from Texas. I would be willing to bet he has never once opened a refrigerator and felt that particular kind of dread—the kind where you already know it’s empty before you look. That’s not an insult. It’s an observation about how distance from struggle shapes the decisions people make.

When you’ve never been hungry, hunger is a statistic. When you have, it’s a memory that never fully leaves. McCuskey’s record makes that distance visible: he will pick up the pen to protect corporations from environmental advocates and climate-conscious shareholders, and to echo Ken Paxton’s anti-ESG crusade, but he put it down when it was time to protect hungry families in one of the most food-insecure states in America.

Twenty-three attorneys general from across the country looked at what is happening to hungry families and said “not on our watch.” West Virginia’s top law-enforcement officer looked at the same crisis and said nothing. That silence has a cost. And families across this state are the ones paying it.

Scott Will and the Machine Behind Them

If Patrick Morrisey and JB McCuskey are the faces, Scott Will is part of the wiring behind them.

Scott Will isn’t some random D.C. consultant. He managed Patrick Morrisey’s first successful campaign for attorney general in 2012, then followed him into the world of Republican attorneys general politics as Morrisey rose to chair the national Republican Attorneys General Association. That same world raises and spends millions of dollars to elect and protect Republican AGs—including here in West Virginia.

Now, Will’s name shows up on the boards of American Prosperity Group and West Virginia Prosperity Group and at SW2 Political—the small circle of consultants, media buyers, and compliance firms that keep popping up around West Virginia-branded PACs and 2026 Republican primaries. Different committee names, same people behind the curtain.

The money trail isn’t abstract. In one of the Republican Attorneys General Association’s 8872 IRS reports, there’s a line item for an expenditure to “Geraniums” at 1011 “Birdge” Road in Charleston—JB and Wendy McCuskey’s business address—with the purpose listed as “sunglasses” and a total of $4,287. Maybe they were branded merch for an event, maybe they were something else. What matters is the picture: a national Republican AG group can drop four grand on “sunglasses” at the attorney general’s side business while West Virginia is told there isn’t enough in the budget for children’s clothing vouchers or the Family Support Centers that keep people afloat.

Search for Forms 8871, 8872 and 990 filed with the IRS. Search by EIN: 46-4501717

You don’t have to memorize all the entities. What matters is the pattern: PACs with homey West Virginia names, money routed through out-of-state compliance shops, and the same handful of political pros—Scott Will among them—sitting on the boards, placing the ads, filing the reports, and benefiting from the spillover.

So while Morrisey is floating cuts to childcare and Family Support Centers to plug a TANF hole, and McCuskey can’t be bothered to sign a letter defending SNAP, there is a professional operation making sure the money keeps flowing for their races and their allies. Scott Will, who helped put Morrisey in office in the first place, is part of that operation—the connective tissue between national Republican AG politics and the local campaigns that keep this hunger-inducing status quo in place.

If this feels familiar, it should. “Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore” explained the RAGA model at the highest level. “Your Help Really Makes a Difference” showed the donor culture around Patrick Morrisey. And the Sugar Maple PAC piece mapped the political-services plumbing—Scott Will, SW2, Matchstick, Bulldog, Red Curve, the boards, the filings, the Massachusetts addresses—that keeps the whole thing operational in West Virginia races. The names and entities shift, but the pattern does not: lawsuits, donor money, compliance infrastructure, and electoral strategy all braided together while ordinary people live with the consequences.

This Is a Choice

Here is what I want you to understand: this didn’t just happen. It was engineered.

Every budget is a moral document. When Congress decides to cut 186 billion dollars from food assistance while protecting tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, it is making a deliberate choice about whose lives matter. When West Virginia faces a 40 million dollar hole in TANF and the first items floated for cuts are children’s clothing allowances and community support centers—not executive salaries, not corporate subsidies—that is a choice.

Economists describe a growing K-shaped economy: higher earners are doing fine, productivity is up, wages are growing at the top—while lower-income Americans are quietly drowning in food costs, housing costs, healthcare costs, and a vanishing safety net. Research calls this “growing hardship across the board,” but it isn’t really across the board. It is concentrated, predictable, and falling hardest on the people who can least afford it—children, the elderly, low-income families, and working people who are already barely getting by.

Morrisey’s budget choices, McCuskey’s silence on SNAP, and the operation Scott Will helps keep humming around them are part of that larger story. The suffering is local. The wiring is national.

Back to the Question

Have you ever been hungry?

I don’t ask to make you feel guilty. I ask because I think it matters whether we’ve felt that particular kind of fear—the one where you don’t know when your next meal is coming, where you’re watching your kids and calculating what you have left, where dignity gets stripped away in the checkout line.

Some of us have felt it. Some of us are feeling it right now. And some of us are making the decisions that determine whether our neighbors feel it tomorrow.

The people writing these budgets and casting these votes will never miss a meal. For them, hunger lives in spreadsheets and talking points. For the rest of us, it lives in our bodies and our memories. That distance—that insulation from consequence—is exactly what makes it possible to vote yes on a 20 percent cut to food stamps, or shrug at a 40 million dollar gap in family assistance funding, or call removing people from SNAP a success.

It is not a success. It is a failure. A moral failure. A national disgrace. And the fact that it’s barely making front pages—that hunger has become background noise in American politics—might be the most disturbing part of all.

West Virginia’s families deserve better. American families deserve better. And we deserve lawmakers—and the people behind them—who act like they know what it feels like to be hungry.

If you’re new here and want the fuller pattern, read these three pieces together: “Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore,” “Your Help Really Makes a Difference,” and the Sugar Maple PAC piece. They tell the same story from three angles—the lawsuit machine, the donor culture, and the political-services apparatus—and this article is where those threads meet the question of hunger.

Thanks for reading West Virginia Policy, Elections, & Campaign Finance Research! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

In my last piece, we met the Election Integrity Network — Cleta Mitchell’s meticulously branded operation for turning election anxiety into model legislation, one state capitol at a time. We walked through the handbook, the ten principles, the suspiciously timed poll, and the whole apparatus designed to make you feel like democracy is held together with duct tape and good vibes.

Today, we need to talk about one of the humans inside that machine.

Reader, meet Heather Honey — private investigator, voter‑roll auditor, Cyber Ninjas alumna, Pennsylvania election‑world celebrity, and, as of August 2025, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.

Yes, that’s a real title. No, it did not previously exist. No, you may not take the rest of the day off to process this.

Part One: A Star Is Born (In a Voting Line in Lebanon County)

Heather Honey’s personal mythology begins exactly where you’d expect it to: Election Day 2020, a polling place in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.

By her own account, she was standing in line when she watched an older woman get handed a provisional ballot. This, for Heather, was a Damascus moment. A call. A sign. Where most of us would think “huh, that’s a thing that happens sometimes,” Heather thought: I should spend the next several years of my life pursuing this.

And she did.

Before we go any further, understand that Honey is not a rogue Facebook warrior. She is a trained private investigator and supply‑chain auditor who ran a firm called Haystack Investigations. She knew how to find things. She knew how to build a case. The problem, as we will discuss at length and with increasing concern, is what she found — and what she did with it once she found it.

Part Two: The Claim That Launched a Thousand Headaches

Within weeks of her polling‑line awakening, Honey was knee‑deep in Pennsylvania voter data. She ran the numbers. She ran them again. And then she produced a figure: Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters.

This claim made its way up the food chain with the speed you’d expect from a claim that tells powerful people exactly what they want to hear. It was briefed to Republican state Rep. Frank Ryan. It was cited in legislative hearings. And then, on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump stood on the Ellipse and screamed it into a microphone aimed at a crowd that was about to do something memorable.

The Department of Justice later called the figure false. The Pennsylvania Department of State explained the methodology with the patient, tired energy of a teacher on the last day before summer break: voter rolls are updated continuously after elections. You cannot take a snapshot of the rolls weeks later and compare it to election‑night results and call the difference fraud. You will always get a discrepancy. That is how voter rolls work. That is, in fact, the whole point of voter rolls.

But by then, the claim had done its job.

Part Three: Honey Goes to Arizona

Here is something that is real and actually happened: Heather Honey was a paid subcontractor for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to conduct a partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 presidential ballots.

For the uninitiated: Cyber Ninjas was a cybersecurity firm with no election experience, run by a man who had shared election conspiracy theories online, hired to audit an election they already believed was stolen. They searched ballots for traces of bamboo fiber, which they believed would prove ballots had been smuggled in from Asia. This is a true fact about the world we live in.

Honey served as a “manager” on the project and billed tens of thousands of dollars for her work.

The audit concluded in September 2021. It confirmed Biden’s win. In fact, it found Biden had won by slightly more than originally reported.

Honey did not slow down.

Part Four: Follow the Honey (CPI → FAIRE → Verity)

The money trail starts with the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the D.C. nonprofit that funds the Foundation for Accountability Integrity & Research in Elections Fund (FAIRE), Mitchell’s shiny new election “research” vehicle. FAIRE pulled in roughly 3.9 million dollars in contributions in its first reported year and spent about 2.0 million on grants and other expenses. That’s a lot of concern about voter rolls.

Buried in FAIRE’s Form 990 is where it gets fun. FAIRE had to file Schedule L — the “Transactions with Interested Persons” schedule — because it paid Verity Vote LLC 121,284 dollars for “consulting,” and disclosed Verity as “an entity owned more than 35% by an officer.” Translation: one of FAIRE’s own officers owned the company FAIRE was paying.

Verity Vote LLC is not some mysterious, free‑floating election‑integrity start‑up. It’s owned by Heather Honey, who lists her address as 1451 Quentin Road, Lebanon, PA, the same address that appears for FAIRE‑related entities and in Pennsylvania open‑records documents. From that one mailbox, she also runs Haystack Investigations and the Election Research Institute, making 1451 Quentin Road the Mar‑a‑Lago of “just asking questions about elections.”

FAIRE’s 990 lists Honey as Vice President and Director, with zero dollars in compensation. On paper, she’s a selfless volunteer. In reality, she is simultaneously:

* A FAIRE officer (Vice President, officially paid nothing)

* Owner of Verity Vote LLC, which received 121,284 dollarsfrom FAIRE for “consulting”

* The Trump administration’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at DHS

The IRS forced FAIRE to disclose this on Schedule L because this is, in fact, self‑dealing: an officer steering nonprofit money to her own company while reporting zero personal compensation from the nonprofit itself. It’s like saying you’re volunteering at the bake sale while quietly sending all the receipts to your cousin’s cupcake LLC.

Part Five: Honey and L2 – When the Marketing File Becomes the Gospel

Honey’s research career is essentially one long exercise in asking, “What if the commercial marketing file is the truth and the official state rolls are the problem?”

Her method relied heavily on L2, a commercial voter‑data vendor that stitches together public records, credit bureau data, and telecom information into a master file. In Pennsylvania, Honey’s Verity Vote reports compared raw voter registration files — which election officials know can have missing or outdated ID fields — against L2’s file, then treated every discrepancy as evidence of fraud.

Common Cause flagged this in litigation as relying on “faulty sources of voter data” to justify removing voters from the rolls, rather than acknowledging that the commercial file is itself a stitched‑together best guess. Honey’s approach wasn’t “find the truth”; it was “trust the data broker.”

Those flawed comparisons were not just blog‑fodder. Trump’s team cited Honey’s work directly in their attempts to overturn the 2020 election, including the now‑famous “more votes than voters” claim in Pennsylvania that DOJ later said was false. When Trump told the country the rolls were riddled with illegal votes, he was, in part, reading from Heather Honey’s L2‑powered homework.

Part Six: Verity Vote, FAIRE, and the Professional Ecosystem of Concern

After Arizona, Honey kept moving. Under the Verity Votebrand, she cranked out reports on unverified overseas ballots, mail voting, and ERIC, while also working under FAIRE’s umbrella. She filed Right‑to‑Know requests for voter data across Pennsylvania, challenged thousands of mail‑ballot applications, and circulated draft election‑law language to state legislators.

At the same time, she became a fixture at the Election Integrity Network, rising to lead Pennsylvania’s state chapter, PA Fair Elections, the grassroots arm of the EIN apparatus. Recall from the EIN handbook how much ink they spill praising “citizen volunteers” as the backbone of election integrity. Heather Honey is one of those citizen volunteers. She is also, inconveniently for that narrative, a paid professional whose LLC is under contract with the very foundation singing her praises.

This is the dual‑role magic trick at the core of the operation: package yourself as grassroots, bill yourself as a consultant.

Part Seven: Honey, I Broke ERIC

ERIC — the Electronic Registration Information Center — is a bipartisan interstate compact that helps states keep their voter rolls accurate by comparing data across state lines. Election administrators, Republican and Democrat, tend to describe it as the best tool they have for maintaining clean rolls.

Honey wrote a 29‑page report claiming ERIC was broken, biased, and essentially a liberal plot.

Investigations by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found that Honey had:

* Used a single year’s data out of twelve available

* Selected the one metric that supported her conclusion

* Ignored other findings that contradicted her thesis

In data analysis circles, this is called “cherry‑picking.” In private‑investigation circles, it’s called “building the case you want rather than the case the evidence supports.” In the EIN’s newsletter, it was called “groundbreaking research.”

The report ricocheted through Cleta Mitchell’s network and landed on the desks of Republican secretaries of state. Multiple states — including Texas, Virginia, Missouri, and Louisiana — subsequently withdrew from ERIC. Election experts say this made voter rolls less accurate, not more. The bamboo‑ballot energy had fully matured into a methodology.

Part Eight: From FOIA Fights to First‑Party Data

Back when she was just a very motivated private investigator, Honey had to FOIA and litigate her way into election records. In April 2026, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave her a major win in Honey v. Lycoming County Offices of Voter Services, ruling that cast vote records (CVRs) — granular digital records of how ballots were tabulated — are public records under the state Right‑to‑Know Law.

Democracy Docket described the decision as “a key win for election deniers and anti‑voting activists, who frequently seek access to raw election files in order to push conspiracy theories.” Election officials worry that releasing CVRs without context creates an open buffet for people eager to turn statistical noise into fraud claims. Honey’s supporters call it “transparency.” Everyone else calls it “please don’t do that.”

Seven weeks later, the same Heather Honey is sitting at DHS as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, with access not just to county CVRs she can sue for, but to federal‑level election data and DOJ‑collected voter files most researchers can only dream about. The woman who used to compare state rolls to L2 from her Lebanon office now has the real thing.

Part Nine: The DHS Contradiction (a.k.a. Honey vs. Her Own Department)

In March 2026, on a call with election officials from nearly every state, Honey reportedly told them that DHS was not using voter registration data collected by DOJ to remove noncitizens from the rolls.

A DHS spokesperson had previously told Democracy Docket the opposite — that voter data from DOJ was being shared with the department and used as part of a broader effort. An election official on the call, confronted with this mismatch, summed it up neatly: “I don’t know if she’s stupid or lying.”

Either way, it is less than ideal when the person in charge of “integrity” appears to contradict her own department’s public statements about how they are handling voter data.

Part Ten: The National Emergency Meeting

In early 2026, ProPublica reported that Honey had been present at a closed‑door meeting where senior Trump officials and election activists discussed a strategy to declare a “national emergency” — one that would expand presidential powers over elections and potentially allow a federal takeover of the 2026 midterms.

To be clear about what we are describing: the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security allegedly attended a meeting where participants strategized about using emergency powers to control the next election.

This is what separates Heather Honey from a random Telegram influencer with a spreadsheet. She is, at this writing, a federal official with a security clearance and a budget. The pipeline from “Lebanon County polling line” to “DHS conference room where people discuss emergency presidential powers over elections” is a short one, and Heather Honey is standing at both ends of it.

Part Eleven: The Full Thread (a.k.a. The Rube Goldberg Machine)

For readers who like their corruption with bullet points, here is the full chain:

* Cleta Mitchell founds FAIRE, funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, funded by donors who prefer the “dark” setting on their money.

* FAIRE pays Verity Vote LLC 121,284 dollars for “consulting” and has to disclose it on Schedule L because it’s a self‑dealing transaction with an officer‑owned company.

* Verity Vote LLC is owned by Heather Honey, who is also FAIRE’s Vice President, listed with zero salary on the 990.

* Honey’s voter‑data “research,” built on comparing state voter rolls to L2’s commercial file, is cited by Trump in his 2020 election challenges.

* Trump appoints Honey as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at DHS in August 2025.

* American Oversight sues DHS in October 2025 for records on her hiring and activities, pointing to her history of coordinating with Trump‑world to push unproven fraud claims.

* In April 2026, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court grants her a unanimous win giving her access to 2020 election records in Honey v. Lycoming County.

* Shortly afterward, she tells state election officials something about DOJ‑to‑DHS data sharing that contradicts what DHS itself has already told the public.

If you diagram that as a flow chart, it looks like this:

anonymous donors → CPI → FAIRE → Verity Vote → Trump’s talking points → DHS job → court‑ordered data access → DHS “clarifications”

The only people not in the loop are voters.

As a final twist, West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner is now refusing to provide voter data to DOJ on “federalism” grounds while continuing to share it with DHS. If you’re wondering which federal agency he trusts more with your voter file, the answer appears to be the one that employs Heather Honey.

The Honey in the Machine

Here’s the through‑line that connects my last article to this one.

The EIN’s Model Election Laws Handbook is a blueprint. It outlines ten principles, drafts model legislation for each one, and is designed to be exported to state legislatures across the country. The handbook is the factory. Heather Honey is what the factory produces — and then sends back into the government to run the factory from the inside.

She went from:

* Citizen volunteer (Lebanon County polling line, 2020)

* to grassroots organizer (PA Fair Elections, EIN state chapter leader)

* to paid researcher (Verity Vote, Cyber Ninjas, FAIRE)

* to federal official (DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, 2025)

The name “Honey” does a lot of work in this story. It’s warm. It’s domestic. It’s disarming. It conjures someone’s grandmother, not someone who has been a subcontractor on a bamboo‑ballot audit, owned the LLC paid by Cleta Mitchell’s foundation, attended meetings about presidential emergency powers over elections, and now sits inside DHS with access to the data she used to misread from Lebanon.

That, more than anything else, is worth understanding about how this network operates: it looks sweet. It sounds like concerned citizens at a school board meeting. It presents itself as a mom in line at a polling place who just had some questions.

And then one day, the mom is running “election integrity” for the Department of Homeland Security.

Oh, honey.

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They Played Themselves: A Note Before We Begin

Let’s be honest about what we’re doing here. Someone handed a bunch of out-of-state dark-money lawyers a whiteboard and a dream, and asked them to write a Model Election Laws Handbook that would turn West Virginia — and every other state willing to listen — into a laboratory for voting restrictions. The result is a 116-page document that dresses up activist wishcasting in the language of legislative drafting and calls it policy research.

After wading through their methodology and digging deep into the junk data — and I use the word “data” charitably, the way you’d call a gas station hot dog “cuisine”—here’s the thing that’s going to make you laugh: they played themselves.

The crown jewel of the entire handbook, the empirical foundation on which the whole thing rests, is a single poll. One poll, commissioned by their own allied fund, conducted by a pollster who has been rated as favoring Republican-aligned results fielded in a very specific window: January 17–21, 2025.

Let that sink in. They surveyed voters three days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration — at the precise peak of Republican voter enthusiasm, when Trump’s approval rating had climbed to 47%, its highest point of his second term before beginning a steady decline to 36% by late 2025. They captured Republicans at maximum victory-lap energy and Democrats at maximum “what just happened” shock, then used those results to claim that the American people overwhelmingly support citizenship purges of voter rolls.

It’s like polling fans leaving a stadium after their team won the Super Bowl and concluding that the country loves football and nothing else matters.

The poll they’re so proud of is a time-stamped artifact of a single partisan moment — and that moment has already passed. Trump’s approval among independents alone dropped 21 percentage points over the course of 2025. The handbook, meanwhile, is designed to be permanent law.

So buckle up. What follows? The short version: there’s less real data here than in a fortune cookie, and the fortune cookie at least tells you something true about your future.

But First: Who’s Holding the Whiteboard?

The Election Integrity Network isn’t a group of concerned West Virginians who got angry about election security and decided to write a handbook. It’s one of eight organizations launched in 2021 by the Conservative Partnership Institute — a Washington D.C. nonprofit at 300 Independence Ave SE.

In 2024, CPI paid Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, $871,853 in base compensation — plus $37,831 in additional benefits. Call it $909,000.

Not millions. Just under a million. From a charity. That collects tax-deductible donations from donors whose names appear nowhere on the public filing.

EIN is chaired by Cleta Mitchell, whose résumé includes a starring role on the January 2, 2021 phone call in which Donald Trump urged Georgia officials to “find 11,780 votes.” She resigned from her law firm when the call became public, testified before the January 6 Select Committee, and then did what any reasonable person would do next: built a 50-state election legislation network. The Model Election Laws Handbook is her flagship product.

Her law firm, Compass Legal Group, billed CPI $608,984 for “legal services” in 2024, also from 300 Independence Ave SE. Compass Professional Inc. billed $986,048 for “administrative services.” Conservative Partnership Campus Inc. billed $1,202,229 for “facility services.” All from the same address.

Four entities. One building. Nearly $3.2 million in related payments, routed through a 501(c)(3) charity that raised $32.3 million in anonymous contributions last year.

Meanwhile, in Mannington, West Virginia, a man named Ed Fisher runs Citizens for West Virginia Election Integrity. He volunteers his time. He submits public comments to the West Virginia Legislature on Sunday nights at 9:58 PM.

He is not paid. He is thanked in the dedication.

The dedication calls volunteers like Ed Fisher “tireless warriors” who are “the backbone of saving America.” It says EIN owes them “an enormous debt of gratitude.”

That is a beautiful thing to say to someone you’re not paying.

Mark Meadows gets $909,000. Ed Fisher gets called a warrior. Keep that in mind as you read everything that follows.

The Poll: Reading the Numbers They Don’t Want You to Read

Here is what EIN claims: that “Americans strongly support” the policies in the handbook, and that a poll confirms their reforms are “commonsense” and “desired by the voters.”

Here is what the poll actually shows — if you read past the summary slide.

The survey was commissioned by the FAIR Elections Fund, an organization in the same ideological orbit as CPI, and conducted by RMG Research Inc. — the firm founded by Scott Rasmussen, whose work has been repeatedly flagged for a pro‑Republican house effect.

The fieldwork dates: January 17–21, 2025. Inauguration week.

Just to be clear: the evidence that the American people demand these laws is a survey taken when Republican enthusiasm was at its cyclical peak and has been falling ever since. The same firm, polling Wisconsin just three months later in April 2025, found Trump’s approval had already flipped to 47% approve, 53% disapprove. The handbook was published in May 2026, citing the January 2025 numbers as though the intervening year hadn’t happened.

The questions themselves are engineered to produce high agreement. Consider the top result: “Requiring states to regularly clean voter rolls by removing people who have died, moved, or are not citizens” — 91% in favor.

Of course 91% of people favor that. Who would say they want dead people on the voter rolls?

But the question that produced that number reads: “Requiring states to regularly clean voter rolls by removing people who have died, moved, or are not citizens.” They bundled “or are not citizens” in with removing dead voters and people who moved away. Almost no one objects to removing deceased voters. The question conflates an uncontroversial housekeeping task with a highly contested policy — citizenship-based purges — then claims the combined support number as a mandate for both.

Another example: “Requiring voters to show photo ID that confirms citizenship before casting a ballot” — 87% in favor. Most Americans tell pollsters they support some form of voter ID. The citizenship‑confirmation requirement is smuggled into the middle of the phrase as if it were ordinary, then used to justify far more aggressive documentary proof-of-citizenship laws.

The poll is not neutral research. It is a guided tour of the conclusions EIN had already reached.

The poll they’re so proud of is a time-stamped snapshot of a single partisan moment — taken at maximum victory-lap energy — and the handbook is a blueprint for permanent law.

The mandate has already expired. The laws are designed to be permanent.

The Handbook: A Form Letter From Washington D.C.

This is the part where I show you the actual document.

Page 7 of the handbook explains how to use it: “Customize bracketed terms for your jurisdiction and coordinate with legislative counsel for proper integration.”

There are literal bracket symbols throughout the model legislation. [Chief Election Official]. [Title __, Chapter__ of the State Election Code]. [X]months. [Y]years.

West Virginia’s 2025 election laws are a fill-in-the-blank form. Here is where each blank came from:

* Principle I: Citizens-Only Voter Registration SB 486

* Principle II: Photo ID Confirming Citizenship HB 3016

* Principle IX: Stop "Billionaire-Concocted" Schemes SB 490 — Ban on Ranked Choice Voting

* Principle IV: Voter Roll Maintenance SB 487 — Inactive Voter Threshold Change from four to two years

* Election Consolidation SB 50 — Municipal Election Consolidation

Perhaps the most entertaining section of the handbook is Principle IX: “Stop Billionaire-Concocted Election Schemes.” It criticizes ranked-choice voting, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and private election funding, portraying them as tools of secretive wealthy individuals.

The irony is dense enough to cut with a knife.

They are warning West Virginia about billionaire election schemes. They are the billionaire election scheme.

EIN’s handbook was written by a network of organizations that collectively constitute one of the most sophisticated billionaire-funded model-legislation operations in American political history.

Assistant Majority Leader Senator Patricia Rucker sponsored three of those five bills. She is also the 2025 ALEC National Chair — the American Legislative Exchange Council, the organization where corporate lobbyists and state legislators meet to pass identical model legislation in fifty states at once. She is not a grassroots citizen. She is the national chair of the organization running this same playbook everywhere.

And the bills didn’t just come with a template. They came with professional lobbying.

On the night before the House Judiciary Committee heard HJR13, registered lobbyist Joe Reidy sent delegates a one-pager on behalf of Americans for Citizen Voting — a national organization — making the exact same arguments as Ed Fisher’s public comment, submitted that same Sunday evening. One was a grassroots citizen. One was a paid professional. Their documents were functionally identical.

That is not a coincidence. That is a coordinated operation with a volunteer face on it.

West Virginia’s Citizen Action Group (West Virginia advocacy group staffed by locals) Comments on HJR13

Now It’s Going on Your November 2026 Ballot

Five laws weren’t enough. This November, West Virginians will vote on Amendment 1 — the Citizenship Requirement to Vote in West Virginia Elections Amendment, born from Senate Joint Resolution 9.

SJR9 passed the West Virginia Senate 33-0 on March 3, 2026. It passed the House of Delegates 97-0 on March 13. The final amended version cleared the Senate 34-0 on the last day of session.

Not a single dissenting vote in either chamber.

The amendment would change the West Virginia Constitution from “Citizens of the state shall be entitled to vote” to “only citizens of the state who are citizens of the United States are entitled to vote.” Noncitizen voting in West Virginia state elections is already illegal. It has been illegal. There is no documented problem it solves.

What it does do is put EIN’s Principle I — the first item in the fill-in-the-blank handbook — directly into the West Virginia Constitution.

Charlie Kolean, state director of Americans for Citizen Voting — the same national organization whose lobbyist Joe Reidy emailed delegates the night before the HJR13 committee hearing — celebrated the Senate’s unanimous passage: “The West Virginia Senate’s unanimous 33-0 passage of SJR9 makes one thing unmistakably clear: there is broad agreement that only U.S. citizens should vote in West Virginia elections.”

West Virginia is the fourth state to put this amendment on the 2026 ballot. Arkansas, Kansas, and South Dakota are the others. It is also listed as part of ALEC’s 2026 Essential Policy Solutions — the same organization whose National Chair sponsored the original five bills.

The template is working exactly as designed. West Virginia didn’t write this amendment. West Virginia filled in the blank.

What These Laws Actually Do to West Virginians

Here’s where we stop talking about Washington D.C. and start talking about Marion County.

EIN’s handbook claims these laws are urgent because noncitizen voting is a serious threat. Even Governor Morrisey — who signed all five bills — acknowledged at the signing ceremony that voter fraud is not widespread in West Virginia. The bills’ own champion said there was no widespread problem to solve.

The handbook leans hard on the idea of a noncitizen voting crisis. Its own favorite sources don’t back that up. Heritage’s fraud database has turned up a few dozen noncitizen cases in more than forty years of elections, out of billions of ballots cast. Independent research consistently finds noncitizen voting to be statistically near zero. West Virginia’s laws — and now Amendment 1 — are solving a problem that doesn’t measurably exist here.

But the laws create real problems for real people:

SB 487 lowered the threshold for flagging voters as “inactive” from four years to two years. West Virginia has some of the highest poverty rates and most housing instability in the country. Two years is a short window. Seasonal workers, people dealing with housing crises, rural residents who move within the state — these are the voters most likely to be swept into “inactive” status and quietly removed from the rolls before they know it happened.

HB 3016 mandates government-issued photo ID at the polls. West Virginia’s most rural counties have limited DMV access. Elderly residents without cars, people who have never needed a passport, low-income voters who don’t drive — these are the people who face the highest barriers to getting the ID the law now requires.

SB 486 adds citizenship verification requirements that were already required by federal and state law. It’s redundant — except that it creates an additional bureaucratic layer, another checkpoint where a voter can be flagged, challenged, or simply delayed long enough to give up.

Amendment 1 (SJR9) cements all of it into the Constitution, making it harder to undo, and signaling to the next legislature that the template is still open for business.

None of these laws were demanded by West Virginians. C4WVEI’s Facebook page had 19 likes when it was lobbying the legislature. The model laws were written in a building on Independence Avenue. The lobbyists were registered agents of national organizations. The volunteers who provided the grassroots cover believed what they were told.

Just to be clear: the people who wrote these laws will never live under them. The people who will are the ones who got called “tireless warriors” and weren’t paid a dime.

The Full Pipeline

Here it is, from top to bottom.

$32.3 million in anonymous donations flow into the Conservative Partnership Institute, a 501(c)(3) charity in Washington D.C. Every dollar is tax-deductible. Not one donor is publicly named.

CPI pays its leadership generously. Mark Meadows: $909,000. Jim DeMint, founder: $608,034 in base pay. Edward Corrigan, CEO: $437,566. Wesley Denton, COO: $400,824. It also pays related firms at the same address nearly $3.2 million in service contracts.

CPI funds the Election Integrity Network, which produces the handbook, runs training summits, builds state coalitions, and tells volunteers like Ed Fisher what to believe and what to say.

Registered lobbyists from Heritage Action, Honest Elections Project Action, Americans for Prosperity, and the State Freedom Caucus Network are all listed in West Virginia’s lobbyist directory, all pushing the same bills. Paid professionals. National organizations. Already in the building.

Ed Fisher submits a public comment from a Gmail account on a Sunday night. His organization is not registered as a charity with the West Virginia Secretary of State.

Five bills pass. Governor Morrisey signs them. Amendment 1 goes on the November 2026 ballot. ALEC calls West Virginia a model state.

Every dollar that flowed through this pipeline from anonymous billionaires to the West Virginia legislature was tax-deductible. American taxpayers — including West Virginians — subsidized the operation that made it harder for West Virginians to vote. That is not an exaggeration. That is the tax code.

The Dedication, One More Time

Let’s end where the handbook begins.

“These tireless warriors for honest, transparent and accurate elections are the backbone of saving America’s broken election systems. Their collective efforts and expertise form the basis of everything contained in this Handbook. Without their hard work over the past five years, none of this would have been possible.”

Without Ed Fisher, none of this would have been possible.

Without the volunteers in every state who showed up, filed the comments, appeared on the podcasts, and genuinely believed they were protecting their neighbors — none of this would have been possible.

The poll was cherry-picked. The model laws were pre-written. The lobbyists were already in the building when Ed Fisher sent his email. And now the whole thing is going on your ballot in November.

He is the face of a $32 million operation that pays its leadership nearly a million dollars a year. He did it for free. And the laws passed in his name make it harder for the people he grew up with to vote.

That is the handbook. That is the con. And now you’ve read the fine print.

Methodology: How to Map a System

I’ve been reviewing these type of filings every month for over three years. When you do that consistently, you watch the pattern build in real time —the technical term is Longitudinal Document Review.

Here is the method:

Phase 1: Map the network, not the incident. Do not start with the scandal. Start with the power node. Who decides who holds this power? Trace the commission, the appointments, the affiliations, the funders. Find the connective tissue—shared addresses, shared board members, shared funding sources.

Phase 2: Follow the money backward. Standard reporting: Donor → Candidate → Favor. Systems reporting: Outcome → Who benefited? → Who funded the actors? → Where did the money originate?

Phase 3: Identify the feedback loop. Stop looking for a beginning and end. Look for the circle. The output of the system becomes the input for its next iteration.

Phase 4: Name the architecture. Do not describe corruption as moral failing. Describe it as legal framework. “These politicians are corrupt” invites outrage. “The combination of Citizens United, McCutcheon v. FEC, and AFP v. Bonita allows unlimited anonymous spending” identifies the levers that must be pulled.

Sources

If you want to check my work — and you should — all of it is publicly available. Here’s where to look:

Conservative Partnership Institute, Form 990 (2024)Filed with the IRS. Available via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. Salary figures, contractor payments, and revenue numbers all come directly from this filing.→ Search: “Conservative Partnership Institute 990 ProPublica”

EIN Model Election Laws Handbook, May 2026 EditionPublished by the Election Integrity Network. The bracketed template language is on page 7. The dedication is pages 3–4. The poll summary is page 8.→ Publicly available at electionintegritynetwork.org

FAIR Elections Fund / RMG Research Poll (Jan. 17–21, 2025)Conducted January 17–21, 2025. 1,000 registered voters. Commissioned by the FAIR Elections Fund, fieldwork by RMG Research Inc.→ Obtained through public records research.

RMG Research Wisconsin Poll (April 8–14, 2025)Conducted April 8–14, 2025. 800 registered voters. Same pollster, three months later, showing Trump at 53% disapproval among Wisconsin voters.→ Obtained through public records research.

West Virginia House Judiciary Committee Public Comments (Feb. 17, 2025)Ed Fisher’s public comment on HJR13, submitted February 16, 2025 at 9:58 PM on behalf of Citizens for West Virginia Election Integrity.→ Public legislative record, West Virginia Legislature.

West Virginia Lobbyist Directory (June 2026)Filed with the West Virginia Ethics Commission. Lists all registered lobbyists active during the 2025–2026 legislative sessions, including Americans for Citizen Voting, Heritage Action, Honest Elections Project Action, Americans for Prosperity, and the State Freedom Caucus Network. https://ethics.wv.gov/lobbyist-directories→ Public record, West Virginia Ethics Commission.

On Scott Rasmussen / RMG Research house effectFiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings and coverage in outlets like The Hillhave repeatedly noted a Republican-leaning house effect in Rasmussen‑branded polling.→ FiveThirtyEight Pollster Ratings; The Hill, September 2018.

On Cleta Mitchell and the January 2, 2021 phone callPrimary source is the recording and transcript of Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, first published by The Washington Post and used by the January 6 Select Committee.

Related links

https://www.prlog.org/13151906-west-virginia-leaders-announce-support-for-election-integrity-networks-model-election-laws-handbook.html

https://irp.cdn-website.com/bd6706c7/files/uploaded/EIN-Handbook2026-v3.pdf

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Thanks for reading West Virginia Policy, Elections, & Campaign Finance Research! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

Quick Note: *I left you a metric ton of breadcrumbs at the bottom of this article…*

Let’s stop pretending this is normal.

For nearly a decade, West Virginia’s top election official, Mac Warner, used his office not to invite more of us into democracy, but to lock us out of it. He did it while parroting Donald Trump’s Big Lie. He did it while carrying water for one of the most notorious voter‑suppression strategists in America, Cleta Mitchell. And when he was done here, he carried that playbook straight to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This is not “election integrity.” It is a coordinated attack on West Virginia voters — and it’s time we name it for what it is.

“Cleaning” the rolls by erasing West Virginians

When Warner took office in 2017, he bragged that he was going to “clean up” our voter rolls. What he actually did was launch one of the most aggressive purge campaigns in our state’s history.

Tens of thousands of registrations disappeared in a matter of months. Within a few years, well over a hundred thousand names were gone — roughly one in every twelve registered voters in this state. That is not housekeeping. That is a political scrub.

And who gets wiped out when you swing a sledgehammer at the voter rolls?

* Older voters who don’t move much but don’t vote in every single election.

* Poor and working‑class people whose lives are chaotic enough without navigating red tape.

* Students, renters, and folks who move for work and get lost in the paperwork.

These are our people. Our neighbors. Warner turned them into rounding errors.

Independent experts warned that his purge machine was moving faster and hitting harder than the data justified. County clerks quietly removed jaw‑dropping percentages of their voters, and instead of hitting the brakes, Warner’s office trotted out press releases crowing about “the cleanest voter rolls in state history.”

Let’s be clear: in a state that already has no same‑day registration, no no‑excuse absentee voting, no drop boxes, and some of the lowest turnout in America, mass purges are not neutral. They are a deliberate choice to make voting a minefield.

Enter Cleta Mitchell, Patron Saint of Voter Suppression

While Warner was busy deleting voters at home, the national voter‑suppression machine was taking notes.

Cleta Mitchell’s name should be burned into our political memory. She was on the infamous call where Donald Trump begged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes. When that blew up, she didn’t slink away in shame. She built an empire.

Her Election Integrity Network is a slick, well‑funded operation designed to do one thing: shrink the electorate. They train activists to mass‑challenge registrations, cook up bogus “fraud” stories, and pressure Republican officials to follow their script. They wrap it all in patriotic language, but the goal is simple — fewer voters, especially the ones they think will vote against them.

And guess who she saw as a model state official? Mac Warner.

Public records show Warner and his lieutenants speaking at Mitchell’s voter‑rolls working groups and webinars, sharing how they were “cleaning up” West Virginia’s rolls. Mitchell personally emailed Warner’s office asking for the very databases and tools they were using so she could feed them into her national machine.

That’s not a casual connection. That is strategic coordination. West Virginia wasn’t just on her radar. We were a lab.

ERIC: From Boring Success to Convenient Scapegoat

Here’s the part that makes me angriest: we actually had a good system.

ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, was a bipartisan workhorse. It helped states flag people who moved, died, or were registered in multiple places, and it also helped identify eligible but unregistered citizens. In other words, it caught the rare cases of real fraud and helped more people vote.

So why blow it up?

Because the Big Lie machine needed a new villain. Mitchell and her allies started spreading lies about ERIC — calling it partisan, dangerous, corrupt. None of that held up to scrutiny. But it didn’t have to. It just had to scare enough Republican officials into pulling the plug.

Mac Warner did not stand up for West Virginians. He saluted and fell in line.

In March 2023, he yanked West Virginia out of ERIC, synchronizing the move with Florida and Missouri like they were coordinating a press conference, not gambling with our elections. Former Secretary of State Natalie Tennant called him out, warning that leaving ERIC would hurt election security and open the door to more sloppiness and more wrongful purges.

Warner didn’t care. What mattered was not whether ERIC worked — it did — but whether staying in it annoyed the national election‑denial crowd. He chose them over us.

EagleAI: Junk Science Aimed at Your Registration

ERIC was real infrastructure. Its replacements are junk.

One of the crown jewels of Mitchell’s network is EagleAI — a “voter fraud hunting” tool dreamed up by a retired doctor with no elections background. It hoovers up public data, spits out lists of “suspicious” voters, and hands them to right‑wing activists eager to challenge anyone who looks like the wrong kind of voter.

Election officials who’ve actually looked under the hood say EagleAI routinely misfires. It mis‑matches people, misreads records, and “finds” fraud where there is none. In other words, it’s a perfect weapon if your goal is not accuracy but intimidation.

And where was Mac Warner? His office was on the inside of those conversations.

Emails show his top lawyer requesting materials shared inside Cleta Mitchell’s voter‑rolls working group — including handouts from the founder of EagleAI. West Virginia’s election officials were not just watching from afar. They were plugged into a private pipeline built to spread this software and the mass‑challenge tactics that come with it.

Imagine being a student in Morgantown, a black voter in Martinsburg, or an elderly voter in Clay County, and knowing that some out‑of‑state “patriot” armed with a glitchy database can try to erase you from the rolls with a click.

That isn’t “integrity.” It’s high‑tech harassment aimed at the most vulnerable voters.

The Legislature Does the Dirty Work

While Warner was doing the quiet administrative damage, the Legislature was busy pouring concrete around our ballot box.

They turned more voting‑related mistakes into felonies, cranking up fear and confusion. They created vague new crimes about “interfering” with voters that could just as easily be used to target volunteers giving people rides as actual bad actors. They shortened the time it takes to brand you “inactive,” bringing us closer to a “use it or lose it” democracy where skipping a couple elections can cost you your registration.

Then came the strict photo ID regime — a barrier that falls heaviest on rural, older, poorer, and disabled voters, the very people least able to take off work, find transportation, and navigate paperwork to chase down documents.

Add it up: mass purges, no same‑day registration, no no‑excuse absentee, no drop boxes, harsher criminal penalties, and tighter ID rules. That is not a coincidence. That is an architecture.

From Stop the Steal to the DOJ

If this story ended with Warner slinking off into retirement, it would be bad enough. But in today’s upside‑down Republican Party, sabotaging democracy is a résumé booster.

Warner publicly insisted that the 2020 election was “stolen,” and even claimed the CIA was in on it. He showed up at “Stop the Steal” events. He backed legal efforts to throw out results in states that dared to vote for Joe Biden.

And what was his reward? A promotion.

After losing his run for governor, Warner was handed a powerful job at the U.S. Department of Justice, overseeing the very civil rights division that is supposed to protect your right to vote. From that perch, he helped push a sweeping demand that nearly every state hand over unredacted voter data — including sensitive personal information — all in the name of chasing phantom fraud.

Watchdogs now suspect that some of the same right‑wing operatives who shaped his work in West Virginia, including Cleta Mitchell, have the ear of senior DOJ officials too. The West Virginia model didn’t stay in West Virginia. It got exported.

Our state was the proving ground. The rest of the country is the next target.

What this really is: A Message

Strip away the legalese, the press releases, and the “integrity” branding, and the message to ordinary West Virginians is brutal and simple:

* If you don’t vote in every election, we might wipe you off the rolls.

* If you make a mistake, we might charge you with a felony.

* If you’re poor, disabled, a student, or working three jobs, we will make it as hard as possible to get your ballot counted.

* And if you dare to complain, we’ll tell you we’re just “protecting” your vote.

That’s not protection. That’s punishment.

The people who built this system are counting on us to be too tired, too broke, and too beaten down to fight back. They think West Virginia is the perfect place to experiment, because we’re rural, we’re small, and we’ve been written off as a red state that doesn’t matter.

They’re wrong — if we choose to prove them wrong.

What We Do Now

We can’t undo the damage overnight. But we can draw a line.

We can demand:

* No more backroom deals with Cleta Mitchell’s network. Any contact between state election officials and outside “integrity” groups should be disclosed and subject to public scrutiny — and frankly, cut off.

* Real, transparent tools instead of junk. Rejoin ERIC or build something just as strong out in the open, not in the shadows of far‑right Telegram channels.

* Automatic and same‑day registration, no‑excuse absentee voting, and drop boxes so that voting is a right, not an obstacle course.

* Strict rules on purges. Clear notice, simple ways to fix errors, and independent oversight so nobody gets quietly erased.

* A new culture of democracy in West Virginia where “election integrity” means helping every eligible voter cast a ballot, not hunting for excuses to keep them out.

Most of all, we can remember that this is our state. Not Mac Warner’s. Not Cleta Mitchell’s. Not Donald Trump’s.

They picked West Virginia because they thought we’d be easy to roll. They thought they could turn our home into a cautionary tale for the rest of the country.

I’m not willing to let them write that story. And if you’ve read this far, I don’t think you are either.

The question is not whether they’re coming for our votes. They already have.The question is whether we meet them at the door.

What I’m Reading

Elephant Wars: Why fight the Democrats when we have each other? By: Gary Abernathy (From the era of when current WV Secretary of State Kris Warner was WV GOP Chair)

What I’m Watching

The Dark Money Game

(After you watch Episode 1, read this: https://wvpublic.org/story/wvpb-news/power-failure-a-massive-bribery-scheme-could-change-the-ohio-valleys-energy-system/ Episode 2 will tell you more than enough about Leonard Leo. Check out this: https://fedsoc.org/chapters/WV/west-virginia-lawyer-chapter)

Unprecedented

(Explains how the Trump family was smart about building their base. It is quite genius.)

What I’m Listening To

Voter Roll Purges

* Brennan Center for Justice — West Virginia’s Large-Scale Purge Raises Concerns Among Voters (Oct. 2018) — brennancenter.org

* WV MetroNews — SOS Mac Warner, clerks purge voters rolls in WV (April 2017) — wvmetronews.com

* U.S. Senate Rules Committee — Written Bio: West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner(June 2024) — rules.senate.gov

West Virginia Structural Voting Barriers

* Center for Public Integrity — New West Virginia restrictions follow Republican playbook in other states (Oct. 2022) — publicintegrity.org

* American Progress — How West Virginia Elections Would Look Different if the Freedom to Vote Act Had Been Enacted (Oct. 2024) — americanprogress.org

* Bolts Magazine — West Virginia Adds to Election Deniers’ Ongoing Takeover of State Politics(March 2023) — boltsmag.org

Mac Warner’s Political Posture & Election Denial

* WV MetroNews — Gubernatorial candidate Mac Warner: “The election was stolen, and it was stolen by the CIA” (Dec. 2023) — wvmetronews.com

* News & Sentinel — Doubling Down: West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner accuses CIA of stealing election (Dec. 2023) — newsandsentinel.com

* CBS News Pittsburgh — West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner running for governor(Jan. 2023) — cbsnews.com

* WCHS TV — State settles lawsuits alleging illegal firing over politics (Nov. 2018) — wchstv.com

* WV Public Broadcasting — Ex-Secretary of State employees settle lawsuits over firings (Sept. 2018) — wvpublic.org

ERIC Withdrawal

* Democracy Docket — Three GOP States Withdraw from Voter Data Organization ERIC (Feb. 2024) — democracydocket.com

* Issue One — Withdrawals from ERIC are the result of politics that hurt the integrity of elections (Jan. 2024) — issueone.org

* Institute for Responsive Government — West Virginia should embrace ERIC, not refute it(May 2023) — responsivegov.org

* WV Public Broadcasting — Preventing Election Fraud In W.Va. (Oct. 2023) — wvpublic.org

* VoteBeat — States that left ERIC are struggling to maintain voter rolls (Dec. 2023) — votebeat.org

Cleta Mitchell & the Election Integrity Network

* Democracy Docket — Cleta Mitchell Couldn’t Overturn the 2020 Election, So Now She’s Suppressing Voters (July 2023) — democracydocket.com

* NPR — Election partnership ERIC: 5 takeaways from NPR’s investigation (June 2023) — npr.org

* NPR — The Sunday Story: How the far right is making voter fraud easier (June 2023) — npr.org

* New Republic — The Shadowy Right-Wing Group That’s Suppressing the 2024 Vote (Oct. 2024) — newrepublic.com

* Wikipedia — Cleta Mitchell — en.wikipedia.org

Mac Warner & Mitchell Direct Coordination / EagleAI

* American Oversight — Prominent Election Deniers’ Ties to ERIC Alternatives and Threats to Voting Rights in 2024 (Sept. 2024) — americanoversight.org

* American Oversight — West Virginia Secretary of State Records Regarding EagleAI (Oct. 2024) — americanoversight.org

* American Oversight — Inside Election Integrity Network Meetings (Oct. 2024) — americanoversight.org

* NBC News — Inside the right’s effort to build a voter fraud hunting tool (Aug. 2023) — nbcnews.com

* Truthout — Right-Wing Activists Are Pushing States to Use Their Voter Roll Purging Software (Nov. 2024) — truthout.org

West Virginia Legislation

* ACLU of West Virginia — Lawmakers hard at work restricting our voting rights: Five bills to watch closely (March 2025) — acluwv.org

* Governor of West Virginia — Governor Patrick Morrisey Signs Voter ID Bill Into Law (April 2025) — governor.wv.gov

* ALEC — West Virginia Leads the Charge in Securing Elections (Nov. 2025) — alec.org

* WV Public Broadcasting — Warner Testifies Before Congress, Opposes Election Reform Legislation (March 2021) — wvpublic.org

Warner at DOJ

* Bloomberg Law — Warner, Who Said CIA Stole Election, Now Leads DOJ Civil Rights (Feb. 2025) — bloomberglaw.com

* Democracy Docket — The DOJ Lawyer and Hardcore Election Denier Probing 2020 (Oct. 2025) — democracydocket.com

* Democracy Docket — West Virginia DOJ Voter Data Access Challenge (May 2026) — democracydocket.com

* Legal News Line — Bondi sues Warner over refusal to release W.Va. voter info (June 2026) — legalnewsline.com

* ACLU — United States v. Warner (April 2026) — aclu.org

* Democracy Forward — FOIA Complaint vs. DOJ (April 2026) — democracyforward.org

Thanks for reading West Virginia Policy, Elections, & Campaign Finance Research! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

This week, I was reading about Governor Patrick Morrisey’s record as Attorney General and got stuck on a question that wouldn’t leave me alone:

When did I ever ask my Attorney General to file a multistate lawsuit?

I couldn’t remember a single time. Not once. Not in conversation with neighbors, not on a ballot question, not in any candidate forum I’d ever watched. I’ve thought plenty about consumer scams, about the opioid crisis, about whether my AG was protecting West Virginians from price-gouging or fraud. I have never once thought, “What I really need is for my Attorney General to be the lead plaintiff in a 23-state coalition lawsuit against an EPA rule.”

And yet that — the multistate lawsuit — has become the single most resource-intensive, nationally consequential, and politically rewarded activity of the modern Attorney General’s office. In West Virginia and across the country.

This is an article about how that happened, why it should bother you regardless of which party you vote for, and a concrete reform you can ask your delegate and senator to support. A form letter is at the bottom — copy, paste, fill in your district, send.

The Transformation Nobody Voted For

Until about 1999, state Attorneys General were mostly what you’d expect them to be: the state’s lawyers. They handled criminal appeals, defended state agencies, prosecuted consumer fraud, and occasionally joined a multistate effort when something genuinely national — tobacco litigation, antitrust cases — required it. The job was unglamorous and largely local.

Then Republicans founded the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) in 1999. Democrats responded with the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA)in 2002. Both are organized as 527 political committees. Both raise tens of millions of dollars per cycle from donor industries with direct financial stakes in litigation outcomes. Both function as case-selection committees, briefing-paper factories, and donor-access machines for their member AGs (Lipton, 2014).

The Marquette political scientist Paul Nolette documents the transformation in his 2015 book Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policymaking in Contemporary America* (Nolette, 2015). His finding, in short: the rise of RAGA and DAGA turned state AGs from low-profile law-enforcement officials into partisan policy entrepreneurs whose case selection is now driven by national party donors and ideological coalitions rather than by anything resembling state-specific harm.

In his follow-up work, Nolette (2017) calls them “agents of polarization.” The phrase is precise. The AG office became one of the most efficient mechanisms in American politics for converting donor priorities into nationally consequential litigation — all conducted under the seal of a state government and at substantial public expense.

How this Works in Practice

The pattern is the same regardless of which party is in power in Washington (Nolette, 2014, 2017).

When a Democrat is in the White House, Republican AGs file dozens of multistate lawsuits per year against federal rules on emissions, immigration, healthcare, education, finance, and ESG investing. The cases align — to a degree that is statistically very difficult to call coincidental — with the donor industries that fund RAGA: coal, oil, gas, pharmaceuticals, finance, for-profit education (Nolette, 2015).

When a Republican is in the White House, Democratic AGs file the mirror-image waves of multistate lawsuits against federal rules on environmental rollbacks, immigration enforcement, ACA sabotage, abortion access, and federal preemption of state climate laws. Those cases align with DAGA’s donor base: trial lawyers, technology firms, and organized labor (Konisky & Nolette, 2021).

A 2014 New York Times investigation by Eric Lipton — which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting — actually obtained the underlying communications: industry lobbyists drafting comment letters and lawsuit language that AGs filed under their own names with minimal modification (Lipton, 2014). The West Virginia AG’s office was named in connection with energy-industry communications in that investigation.

This isn’t a fringe critique. It’s the documented operating reality of the modern AG office, in both parties (Lemos & Quinn, 2015; Smith, 2023).

West Virginia’s Case Study: the Morrisey Era

Patrick Morrisey is one of the cleanest examples of the archetype Nolette describes. From his 2012 election as Attorney General through his 2024 election as Governor, he:

* Joined or led roughly 97 multistate lawsuits — the overwhelming majority against the Obama and Biden administrations

* Won West Virginia v. EPA at the Supreme Court in 2022, restructuring federal administrative law and gutting EPA authority to regulate power-plant emissions — entirely through litigation, with no corresponding legislative action in West Virginia or Congress

* Served as RAGA chairman in 2017–2018, the year RAGA pivoted from defense to offense and coordinated the Texas v. United States lawsuit seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act

* Was a first mover on the state anti-ESG strategy, building a “Restricted Financial Institutions List” targeting banks that limit financing to coal — coordinated with finance and energy donor priorities simultaneously

To be clear: some of this work produced real public benefits. The $1 billion-plus in opioid settlements his office secured for West Virginia is a genuine accomplishment. The Frontier broadband settlement helped real West Virginians. Consumer protection work continued throughout his tenure.

But the resource allocation of the office tilted dramatically toward national federalism litigation. A dedicated Solicitor General’s office was created — uncommon for a small state — and staffed from the Federalist Society network. The multistate coordination unit punched far above West Virginia’s weight class. The cases that defined Morrisey’s national profile were the cases his donor coalition wanted filed.

His successor, Attorney General JB McCuskey, has continued the pattern. The Vanguard ESG-antitrust settlement announced this past March was a Morrisey-era multistate case McCuskey closed out.

This isn’t a Morrisey problem specifically. It’s the structural problem the office now has (Smith, 2023).

Why this Should Bother You

Here is the part that I think gets lost in partisan framing:

You did not elect your Attorney General to do this work.When West Virginians vote for an AG, they vote on consumer protection, drug enforcement, fraud, and crime. Polling consistently shows those are the functions voters associate with the office. Multistate federalism litigation against Washington ranks near the bottom of public salience — when voters can identify it as their AG’s work at all.

You did not vote on the case selection. RAGA and DAGA decide, in private donor-aligned strategy meetings, which lawsuits get filed (Lipton, 2014). Your AG joins them. There is no statutory requirement that West Virginia’s participation in a multistate case correspond to any West Virginia-specific harm. There is no disclosure requirement identifying RAGA or DAGA as the coordinating entity.

You are paying for it. RAGA and DAGA dues are paid by the associations themselves, through private donations. But West Virginia taxpayers fund the staff time, senior attorney positions, communications infrastructure, and travel that make a small-state AG office a productive node in the national partisan litigation machine. Senior staff routinely travel to RAGA and DAGA donor retreats on state time (Lipton, 2014).

Neither party will reform this from the inside. Both parties’ AGs benefit from the current system. National profile, donor networks, future office. The reform has to come from the people who elect them — and from the state legislatures that appropriate their budgets (Lemos & Quinn, 2015).

What’s Already Accepted, and What Should Be Added

West Virginia already draws this line cleanly in other contexts. The state funds the National Governors Association — nonpartisan, all-50-state, focused on policy and training. The state does not fund the Republican Governors Association or the Democratic Governors Association, both of which are nakedly electoral organizations. The state funds the National Conference of State Legislatures. The state does not fund the Republican State Leadership Committee or the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

The Attorney General’s office is the gap. The state funds (and should continue funding) the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG, n.d.), founded in 1907, genuinely nonpartisan, responsible for the kind of bipartisan multistate work that has produced the tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, the opioid settlements, and similar outcomes. NAAG does the work voters actually elected their AGs to do.

But the state currently allows the AG’s office to function as an extension of RAGA — or under a future Democratic AG, of DAGA — using public staff, public time, and public infrastructure for partisan electoral and policy operations. That is the gap a modest reform can close.

The Reform: Resource Separation And Disclosure

The cleanest proposal is two parts:

Part 1 — Resource separation. Prohibit use of state office resources — staff time, state-issued devices, state-funded travel, state communications infrastructure — for RAGA, DAGA, or any successor partisan AG association. AG participation in such organizations would have to be on personal time using personal or campaign funds. This is exactly the rule that already applies to most other elected officials’ partisan party activity. Continue full state funding for NAAG and for nonpartisan regional AG bodies.

Part 2 — Disclosure. Require the AG to publicly disclose every multistate case the office joins, identifying the coordinating entity, the lead state, the stated West Virginia interest, and the resources committed. Put it on a publicly searchable docket. Update quarterly.

This is on solid constitutional ground. The U.S. Supreme Court would likely strike down an outright ban on AG participation in RAGA or DAGA — First Amendment associational rights protect that. But the state has clear authority to decline to subsidize partisan activity, exactly as it already declines to subsidize candidates’ campaign work with state resources.

The reform is enactable, durable, and bipartisan in its logic. The next Democratic AG of West Virginia — whenever that happens — should be bound by the same rule as the current Republican one. That’s the point.

What You Can Do

If you’ve read this far and agree that this is a problem worth raising, the most concrete thing you can do is send a letter to your state delegate and senator. A form letter is below — copy it, fill in the bracketed fields, send it. You can find your delegate and senator at the here (https://wvlegislature.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=57f9e9f83109403887e15da991ff9234)

The 2027 legislative session begins in January. The interim committee period between now and then is when policy ideas get shaped. This is the window.

Form Letter to Your Delegate and Senator

Copy the text below into a new email, fill in the bracketed fields, and send it to both your delegate and your senator. Their contact information is at https://www.wvlegislature.gov/House/roster.cfm and https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Senate1/roster.cfm

Subject: Request to introduce legislation separating state Attorney General office resources from partisan AG association activity

Dear [Delegate / Senator Last Name],

I am a constituent in [your county] and a registered voter in your district. I am writing to ask you to introduce, or co-sponsor, legislation in the 2027 session that would prohibit the use of West Virginia state office resources for activities of partisan Attorneys General associations — specifically the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) and the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA) — while preserving full state support for genuinely nonpartisan bodies such as the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG).

My concern is structural, not partisan. The same reform should apply regardless of which party holds the Attorney General’s office. The next Democratic Attorney General of West Virginia should be bound by the same rule as the current Republican one. That is the point of the proposal.

The problem: Over the past two decades, the Attorney General’s office in West Virginia and across the country has shifted significant public resources — staff time, senior attorney positions, travel, and communications infrastructure — toward multistate lawsuits coordinated through RAGA and DAGA. These partisan 527 organizations function as case-selection committees and donor-access vehicles funded by industries with direct financial stakes in litigation outcomes. Peer-reviewed academic research, including Marquette University political scientist Paul Nolette’s 2015 book Federalism on Trial (University Press of Kansas) and his 2017 article in Publius: The Journal of Federalism, documents that the substantive overlap between RAGA-coordinated lawsuits and RAGA donor-industry priorities is statistically significant and structural. The same pattern exists in mirror form for DAGA. The Pulitzer-winning 2014 New York Timesinvestigation by Eric Lipton (”Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General”) provided the underlying documentary evidence of industry lobbyists drafting AG comment letters and lawsuit language.

The taxpayer concern: While RAGA and DAGA dues are not paid from state funds directly, West Virginia taxpayers do fund the state staff time, infrastructure, and travel that make our AG office a productive node in these national partisan operations. There is currently no statutory requirement that our state’s participation in a multistate case correspond to a demonstrable West Virginia-specific interest, and no disclosure requirement identifying RAGA or DAGA as the coordinating entity behind cases West Virginia joins.

The existing precedent: West Virginia already draws this line cleanly elsewhere. State funds support the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures (both nonpartisan) but not the Republican or Democratic Governors Associations or the Republican State Leadership Committee or Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (all partisan). The Attorney General’s office is the gap. Closing that gap simply applies the same principle the Legislature already applies to other constitutional offices.

The specific proposal I am asking you to consider:

* Resource separation. Prohibit use of state office resources — including paid staff time during business hours, state-issued devices, state-funded travel, and state communications infrastructure — for any partisan Attorneys General association (defined as any 527 or comparable entity organized around party-aligned AG electoral or policy activity).

* Continued nonpartisan support. Explicitly authorize state funds to cover NAAG dues and support participation in nonpartisan AG bodies and regional groupings.

* Disclosure. Require quarterly public disclosure of every multistate case the AG office joins, identifying the coordinating entity, the lead state, the stated West Virginia interest, and the state resources committed.

* Enforcement. Designate the State Auditor as the enforcement body, with authority to recover state funds expended in violation.

This is on solid constitutional ground. The First Amendment likely prevents outright bans on AG participation in RAGA or DAGA, but the state has clear authority to decline to subsidize partisan activity with public resources — the same posture under which the state already prohibits use of state resources for campaign work.

I am asking you to do three things:

* Review the proposal and the underlying research (full reference list below).

* Discuss the proposal with the Legislature’s nonpartisan legal staff to refine drafting.

* Introduce or co-sponsor a bill in the 2027 regular session.

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further, in person or by phone, at your convenience.

Thank you for your time and for your service to our district.

Sincerely,

[Your full name][Your street address][City, WV, ZIP][Phone number][Email address]

References

Konisky, D. M., & Nolette, P. (2021). The state of American federalism, 2020–2021: Deepening partisanship amid tumultuous times. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 51(3), 327–364. https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjab015

Lemos, M. H., & Quinn, K. M. (2015). Litigating state interests: Attorneys general as amici. New York University Law Review, 90(4), 1229–1271. https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-90-number-4/litigating-state-interests/

Lipton, E. (2014, October 28). Lobbyists, bearing gifts, pursue attorneys general. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/us/lobbyists-bearing-gifts-pursue-attorneys-general.html

National Association of Attorneys General. (n.d.). About NAAG. Retrieved June 5, 2026, from https://www.naag.org/

Nolette, P. (2014). State litigation during the Obama administration: Diverging agendas in an era of polarized politics. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 44(3), 451–474. https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pju011

Nolette, P. (2015). Federalism on trial: State attorneys general and national policymaking in contemporary America. University Press of Kansas.

Nolette, P. (2017). The dual role of state attorneys general in American federalism: Conflict and cooperation in an era of partisan polarization. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 47(3), 342–377. https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjx036

Smith, M. (2023). Politicization of state attorneys general: How partisanship is changing the role for the worse [Note]. Cornell Law Review, 108(4). https://publications.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawreview/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/Smith-note-final-version.pdf

If you found this article useful, please share it with neighbors and consider subscribing. Future installments will cover the WV legislative calendar for 2026 interims, which legislators have shown openness to good-government reforms, and how to track multistate cases your AG office joins in real time.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

In the August of 2015, Patrick Morrisey — then West Virginia’s Attorney General, today the state’s 37th Governor— stood in a room at the Greenbrier resort and made a frank request of the energy, financial-services, and healthcare executives in front of him: keep writing the checks.

UtilitySecrets.org obtained audio of that fundraiser, hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). Morrisey was joined by his counterparts from Utah and Montana, Sean Reyes and Tim Fox. In remarks that run only a few minutes apiece, the three Republican AGs explained — in unusually plain language — what donors get in return for their generosity, and how they coordinate with one another and with the national organization that helps re-elect them.

The audio recording would be striking on its own. What gives it weight is that it lands inside a structural story that political scientists have been documenting in the peer-reviewed literature for years. In a 2017 study published through Marquette University, political scientist Paul Nolette argued that state attorneys general have become “a more entrenched part of the national policy landscape,” with “coalitions of mostly Republican AGs aggressively challeng[ing] Obama Administration initiatives such as the Clean Power Plan” and successfully “limited, delayed, or curtailed Obama’s regulatory agenda, particularly during his second term” (Nolette 2017).

The Greenbrier audio is, in effect, the campaign-finance correlate of the legal strategy Nolette describes. This post walks through both.

What Morrisey Told the Room

Speaking to a crowd that, by his own description, included representatives “in the financial services industries, healthcare, energy, across the board,” Morrisey framed his office as a turnaround story for industry:

“I think people used to look at West Virginia and maybe want to run in the opposite direction in terms of the business climate there, but through our office and some of the changes in the legislature, we’ve really been able to … start turn things around.”

He then ticked through his EPA-litigation résumé, anchored on the Clean Power Plan stay his coalition had won at the Supreme Court earlier that year:

“We helped lead the charge against the president’s Power Plan, obtaining the stay. In West Virginia, that’s as good as you can do. When you’re fighting for coal miners and their families … if you can get a stay of the President’s top initiative that matters. If you can get a stay of the Waters of the United States rule, that matters.”

And then came the ask. Not the kind of generic ask that surfaces in stump speeches, but a specific, transactional appeal aimed at the executives in the room:

“The only way I get to stay is through your incredible generosity, so thank you all for coming today. Thanks for your support and if you haven’t written a check, I’d be grateful if you could; if you have already maxed out, if you would consider talking to some of the executives and people that you know, I would be appreciative of it. … I do have a very rich opponent and while we match up very well on the issues, you know it helps to have a little bit more in the way of resources in order to counteract some of those TV buys. So your help really makes a difference.”

He closed by name-checking the rest of the RAGA roster on hand — “General Fox, General Reyes, and obviously you know about the great leadership of Chairman Schuette” — and thanked the room “for coming to the Greenbrier.”

The Pitch from Reyes and Fox: “You Won’t Go Broke”

Tim Fox, Montana’s then-AG, made the coordination explicit. The product on offer was not a single state’s legal docket. It was a 27-, 28-, 29-state coalition acting as one:

“When we collaborate and get together … with Patrick Morrisey and push back against the federal government, or get together and write a letter to the federal government or whatever it is, we make a difference when there is 27, 28, 29, 30 or more attorneys general; people listen, people watch, and it makes a difference. So thank you for supporting each of our attorneys general in RAGA, and thank you for supporting me. You won’t go broke, and it’ll be one of the best investments you’ll ever make.”

Sean Reyes, who later went on to become the subject of the CMD records lawsuit over his RAGA and Rule of Law Defense Fund correspondence, was more colorful — and more direct about who was holding the checks:

“If you have checks for us, I’m taking Missy to the Supreme Court but Alan will be here and Erica can help us out as well. … Just remember that when you are writing those big corporate checks, you’re standing there with me in the ring of a bunch of gangbangers from fifth grade, that’s how I feel with you.”

Three AGs. One coalition. One ask.

The Scholarly Backbone: Why “27, 28, 29” Wasn’t Bluster

Tim Fox’s coalition arithmetic is exactly the dynamic Nolette documents in his Marquette study. He calls it a shift from AGs as “state-focused actors largely disconnected from one another” to a polarized national operation in which “the shape of these partisan coalitions has become quite predictable and stable” (Nolette 2017).

Three findings from the paper directly underwrite the Greenbrier audio recording:

1. RAGA’s reason for being is fundraising and strategy — not litigation in the abstract. Nolette traces RAGA back to its 1999 founding, noting that the organization “focused initially on fundraising goals rather than litigation strategy.” When a Democrat reentered the White House in 2009, Republican AGs “essentially flipped the script” and went on offense; RAGA-coordinated multistate litigation against the Obama administration “entrenched Republican AGs as a strong force against federal regulatory expansion” (Nolette 2017).

2. The Clean Power Plan case was a coordinated, anticipatory partisan effort — and West Virginia led it.Nolette describes the litigation Morrisey was fundraising on as “emblematic of the partisan trends and coalitions among AGs.” Within days of the EPA’s June 2014 CPP rollout, Murray Energy filed in the D.C. Circuit. “A week later, West Virginia AG Patrick Morrissey and eleven other AGs filed an amicus curiae brief supporting Murray Energy’s positon.” The challenge was filed before the regulations were even finalized in the Federal Register, which Nolette flags as “particularly unusual” (Nolette 2017). The coordination wasn’t reactive. It was rehearsed.

3. The donor link to the litigation was a live issue at the time — and the numbers match. Nolette writes flatly: “Democratic AGs demanded that Republican AGs reveal their connections with industry groups during the West Virginia v. EPA litigation, and pointed out that Murray Energy had donated $250,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association shortly before the litigation began” (Nolette 2017). That figure is the same $250,000 the Center for Media and Democracy independently tallied in its 2015-onward review of fossil-fuel money flowing to RAGA. Two different sources, same number, same timing — and the recipient is the coalition Morrisey was thanking the Greenbrier audience for keeping in business.

Nolette also notes a detail that is easy to miss when you only watch the courtroom: “Republican AGs were already in conversations about how to challenge the CPP before even the proposed rules were announced.” That is the operational meaning of Fox’s line on the audio recording — “you won’t go broke, and it’ll be one of the best investments you’ll ever make.” Donors weren’t underwriting a particular case. They were underwriting an anticipatory, multi-year coalition that was already in motion before the rules existed.

What the Money Was Buying

RAGA’s own 2016 year-in-review reads less like a legal-office annual report and more like a customer success deck for the fossil-fuel and utility sectors. Per the association:

“Republican attorneys general led the fight against President Obama’s overreaching, illegal EPA regulations, resulting in the Supreme Court to halt implementation of Obama’s signature climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan.”

The same document lists wins on the EPA’s WOTUS rule, the mercury rule (Michigan v. EPA), BLM fracking rules, the prairie-chicken designation, Keystone XL, and the EPA’s “Sue and Settle” practice. Nearly every item maps onto a specific industry priority — and each of those wins is one Nolette documents inside the broader pattern of “kitchen sink” multistate strategy (Nolette 2017).

Documents previously obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy show how that alignment was produced. At an August 2015 RAGA summit in West Virginia — less than two weeks before GOP AGs petitioned federal courts to block the Clean Power Plan — Murray Energy and Southern Company paid for private meetings with the same attorneys general. The agenda included a panel called “The Dangerous Consequences of the Clean Power Plan & Other EPA Rules,” staffed by Mike Duncan of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, Geoffrey Barnes of Murray Energy, and three AGs: Scott Pruitt, Ken Paxton, and Patrick Morrisey.

The attendee list from that summit, per CMD, included Koch Industries, AFPM, ACCCE, the American Chemistry Council, ANGA, Devon Energy, Edison Electric Institute, Georgia Power, the National Mining Association, NextEra Energy, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Peabody Energy, and the State Policy Network, among others.

CMD’s tally of what those interests were paying RAGA since 2015:

* ExxonMobil: at least $100,000

* Koch Industries: $350,000

* Southern Company: $85,000

* American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity:$378,250

* Murray Energy: $250,000

* Total from fossil fuel interests, utilities, and their trade groups: more than $2.25 million

Corporations can pay up to $125,000 in RAGA “premium” membership dues for the privilege of private briefings with AGs and their staff — alongside “a five-hour golf game, and a National Rifle Association-sponsored shooting tournament,” as CMD described the recreational programming.

The Utility Pattern: Heavy on the Right, Selective on the Left

The donor pattern is not random. Across governor-level association giving:

* American Electric Power, Duke Energy, and NextEra Resources contributed a combined $574,413 to the Republican Governors Association and $0 to the Democratic Governors Association.

* Eleven additional utilities donated to RGA and not DGA. So did Dominion CEO Thomas Farrell and AEP CEO Nick Akins, personally.

* Southern Company and the Edison Electric Institute gave to both committees — but at significantly different levels.

* Only PSEG gave more to DGA than RGA. Only Xcel split evenly. Only Puget Sound Energy gave to DGA alone.

At the AG level in the first six months of 2017, the top utility funders of RAGA — Southern Company, EEI, and NextEra — were each in at $50,000. EEI and NextEra gave the Democratic counterpart, DAGA, half that. Of eight additional utilities donating to RAGA, only Dominion also gave to DAGA.

That asymmetry has a logic. In most states, the governor appoints the public service commissioners who regulate utility rates and capital plans, and the AG litigates the federal rules that determine what those utilities have to spend on emissions controls. As Nolette puts it, AGs operate “largely independently from other state officials” and have used their offices “creative[ly]” to achieve “national public policy goals” — meaning a single elected AG can swing federal regulatory outcomes that no single state legislator or PSC commissioner can (Nolette 2017). Buying influence at both nodes — cheaply, by the standards of utility-scale capex — is a defensible line item for any company whose business model depends on coal, gas, or the pace of the energy transition.

Why This Still Matters in 2026

Three reasons the Greenbrier audio recording is not just a historical artifact.

1. The pitchman now runs the state. Morrisey was sworn in as West Virginia’s 37th governor on January 13, 2025, after defeating Huntington mayor Steve Williams in November 2024 (WV Encyclopedia). The official biography on governor.wv.gov leads with West Virginia v. EPA, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that grew out of exactly the EPA-litigation track he was fundraising on at the Greenbrier — the same case Nolette identified in 2017 as “emblematic of the partisan trends and coalitions among AGs” (Nolette 2017). The donors who helped keep him in the AG’s office in 2016 now have a direct line to the executive branch — and to the appointees who sit on the West Virginia Public Service Commission.

2. The coordination model is still operating, and still partly hidden. The Center for Media and Democracy sued Utah AG Sean Reyes over his refusal to turn over emails and other records detailing his dealings with RAGA and the Rule of Law Defense Fund — the same 501(c)(4) the CMD documents tied to Clean Power Plan strategy meetings in April 2016. Reyes is the same AG who, on audio recording at the Greenbrier, told corporate donors “if you have checks for us, I’m taking Missy to the Supreme Court.”

3. The governor’s chair is the next prize. A Center for American Progress Action Fund analysis at the time argued that meaningful U.S. climate action would require expanding the map of states actively curbing carbon pollution, naming New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan as critical 2018 contests. Several of those governorships have since flipped repeatedly. Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signed anti-rooftop-solar legislation; Maine Gov. Paul LePage vetoed pro-solar legislation; both moves were utility priorities. The Greenbrier audio recording is, in effect, a template — and the template scales beyond the AG office.

The Quote That Should Outlive the News Cycle

Strip away the legal posture, the panel agendas, and the donor totals, and what remains is one sentence from a Republican attorney general — now a sitting governor — to a room full of corporate executives:

“The only way I get to stay is through your incredible generosity.”

Nolette’s broader claim, drawn from years of multistate-AG data, is that the Obama-era legal battles “simply cannot be characterized as involving ‘the states versus the national government.’ Instead, these battles involve sharp conflicts among the states themselves, with some challenging and others defending the exercise of federal power” (Nolette 2017).

Translated out of academic language: the side a state ends up on is not a function of its geography, its economy, or even its voters. It is a function of who its attorney general is, which national coalition that AG belongs to, and who is funding the coalition. The Greenbrier audio is what that funding sounds like when it is happening in the room.

The customers, on that day at the Greenbrier in 2015, were the country’s largest utilities, fossil-fuel producers, and their trade associations. The product was the legal and political firepower of state attorneys general, coordinated through RAGA and the Rule of Law Defense Fund.

Ten years later, in West Virginia, the vendor is the governor.

Audio: UtilitySecrets.org. Underlying RAGA documents and corporate-donor totals: Center for Media and Democracy. Scholarly grounding on AG coalition behavior, RAGA’s origin, the West Virginia v. EPA litigation timeline, and the Murray Energy $250,000 RAGA donation: Paul Nolette, “The Dual Role of State Attorneys General in American Federalism: Conflict and Cooperation in an Era of Partisan Polarization,”Marquette University Political Science Faculty Research and Publications, July 2017.

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