Reasonable Inference
[Reasonable Inference – As to partisan effect and FEC in-kind contribution theory] The EIP invited both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee to participate as “external stakeholders” in its Jira ticketing system – the mechanism through which suppression requests were submitted, routed, and tracked against platform action outcomes. The DNC accepted and submitted active censorship requests. The RNC declined. This asymmetry means that during the 2020 election cycle, the Democratic Party’s national committee had direct access to the same censorship pipeline that was also used by CISA, federal agencies, and state election officials, and that the Republican Party did not. Whether the DNC’s Jira ticket submissions produced specific suppression actions against Republican speech requires examination of the full ticket database. But the structural fact – one party inside the system, one party outside – is sufficient, without proof of specific ticket outcomes, to constitute an actionable political discrimination concern under federal campaign finance law (in-kind contribution analysis) and election interference statute analysis. If the EIP’s nominally nonpartisan character was compromised by the DNC’s active participation and asymmetrical relationship, then any CISA or federal resource contributed to its operation may represent a prohibited federal corporate or agency in-kind contribution to the DNC under 52 U.S.C. § 30118.
Citations
EIP, A Statement from the Election Integrity Partnership (Oct. 5, 2022), https://www.eipartnership.net/blog/a-statement-from-the-election-integrity-partnership (“Both the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee were invited to submit tickets. . . . The Republican National Committee was contacted on July 28, 2020. They did not respond to our inquiry and did not submit any referrals.”)
“The Democratic National Committee ended up sending four reports to the EIP.”; EIP Jira Ticket Report, at 38 (citing House Judiciary Committee, Transcribed Interview of Alex Stamos (June 23, 2023), at 8) (“While the EIP invited both the DNC and RNC, the RNC declined to respond. . . . The DNC not only accepted the invitation, but also submitted Jira tickets.”), https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/EIP_Jira-Ticket-Staff-Report-11-7-23-Clean.pdf.
EIP Statement, supra note 1 (describing the four DNC submissions: (1) a voting-by-mail claim that “received little traction and was closed without action”; (2) a Facebook political ad making “false claims about vote-by-mail fraud in an attempt to raise money,” which had already been disabled by Facebook and was referred to Facebook as such; (3) a list of “spammy content farms” most of which fell “outside the tight scope of the EIP” with no platform referrals made; and (4) a report that led EIP to discover “two linked Facebook pages attempting to mislead American voters using Facebook Ads,” one of which incorrectly claimed completed ballots had been thrown out — Facebook suspended that ad upon EIP notification).