College Fix reports how universities stacked the deck for Democrats this election season

ANALYSIS

Universities across the country have found logistical ways to help Democratic candidates advance this election season. investigation report by The College Fix found

University administrations have a number of ways to help stack the deck, but one primary method is to hand over huge reams of private student contact data to a third-party voter data processing company under the guise of studying student voting trends.

More than 1,200 campuses are participating in the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, launched during the Obama administration. In order to participate in the study, administrators actually sign off on students’ FERPA personal data.

Although the third-party voter data company is required to de-identify the data before submitting it for review and then delete the data, there is no evidence that they are deleting it, and the company refuses to respond The College Fix’s data management issues.

Fun fact: The third-party vendor originally used for the study was Catalist, the Democratic Party’s exclusive provider of voter data. Six years ago, it was transferred to L2, another massive voter data company with less obvious ties to Democrats.

“The Left has created a very sophisticated system to obtain valuable, non-public data about every student … without the student’s knowledge or consent,” one observer said. Correction.

Universities are generally quite protective of students’ personal information and often like to hide behind FERPA when it’s convenient for them.

But somehow, the Harris-Walz application recently obtained tens of thousands of student emails and phone numbers and used that data to lobby for votes in Arizona, Wisconsin and, reportedly, Georgia.

Representatives from state university campuses in Arizona and Wisconsin have told The College Fix that apparently all one has to do to get massive amounts of student email is just ask, it’s obviously public information.

Careful Republicans could either try to mass text and email students themselves during the next election cycle — or work to stop this potentially illegal leak of student data.

Whether the Harris-Walz campaign acquired contacts at a voter data company or simply asked universities to do so, calls for institutions to better protect student email addresses and phone numbers from partisan use have increased this election season.

Even with these violations, another more obvious tactic deployed by the Biden administration has been alarming.

The U.S. Department of Education, under Biden, has told administrators — at the risk of losing federal funding — that they must hire college students to register their peers and work at the polls for the federal study-work program.

Essentially, this equates to partisan vote-getting for Democrats, since college students lean heavily Democratic. The College Fix recently reported at several such voter registration drives that were overtly partisan in nature, with themes promoting DEI, justice, and anti-racism.

The scheme drew sharp criticism from Republicans in Congress and a memo from 16 Republican attorneys general to the Department of Education, which argued the guidelines violated the law.

They say that today’s election was won in the fields. It remains to be seen whether those efforts will give the Harris-Waltz campaign the edge it needs to claim victory on Tuesday.

MORE: Read The College Fix’s election integrity articles here.

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