Little Rock, Arkansas, seems an unlikely place for a soft-on-crime prosecutor to win an election. But don’t underestimate the effect of low turnout, combined with low public awareness of candidates for local office. George Soros is betting on these factors to put one over on Arkansans, and they must not let it happen.

Let me preface this with an acknowledgment that Soros has found a clever way to gain influence. He puts big money behind no-name candidates running for obscure offices against other no-name candidates. Here's how the New York Times described it in 2019, quoting and paraphrasing the director of one of Soros's dark-money organizations:

“What we’re really doing is leveling the playing field,” Ms. Tymas said, noting the inherent advantages of incumbency and often low voter engagement in district attorney races.

I must admit that when I am confronted with a choice for some down-ballot offices in primary and nonpartisan elections — say, secretary of state, treasurer, local judges, prosecutors, etc. — I will often just abstain on that line. Frequently, I have no idea who any of these people are and whether I would support them if I knew anything about them. And I don’t want my blind vote to help some idiot advance his or her political career.

At the local level, there often aren’t good resources for figuring out who is worthy of support. This is especially true for executive and judicial branch positions, such as prosecutors and judges, for which there is no voting record to consult. It’s hard to judge incumbents unless they have done something very noteworthy about them (good or bad) or they spend a lot of money promoting themselves.

That's where Soros's money comes in. I have never been one to believe that money buys power — Hillary Clinton disproved that idea in 2016, and Mike Bloomberg definitively disproved it in 2020. But one thing money can do is buy enough name recognition to win a five-way race against four other no-names in a low-turnout local primary.

Even so, we have at least learned in the last couple of years one indicator that should send you running in the opposite direction of a candidate for prosecutor — that the person is taking money from one of George Soros’s organizations. This is what voters in Little Rock should be thinking right now as their May 24 primary approaches. An organization funded entirely by Soros is supporting Alicia Walton for an open-seat prosecutorial office. That’s really all anybody needs to know. Vote for anyone who is not Alicia Walton.

When you elect a Soros prosecutor, you are getting someone who will routinely cut unnecessary deals with violent career criminals who will consequently go on to harm or even kill more people. You may think that this only happens in big cities — Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Baltimore, or Chicago. But that’s not so.

In Northern Virginia, Fairfax County State’s Attorney Steve Descano has shown what a disaster you can end up with locally if you elect someone beholden to Soros’s ideology. The Washington Free Beacon has reported that Descano has told staff in meetings, “Don’t listen to victims” of sex crimes because “they’re overly dramatic.”

Descano’s decision to reduce and drop multiple felony charges against a violent career criminal in an open-and-shut case appears to have resulted in the shootings of several homeless people on the East Coast. That’s just one example of Descano’s ideologically motivated destruction. He is undermining public faith in the criminal justice system.

Prosecutors like Descano are destroying the bipartisan consensus that recently existed for criminal justice reform. It wasn't that long ago that Republicans and Democrats were coming together to pass a law reducing long sentences for certain minor offenses for nonviolent first-time offenders. The public generally supports that idea. But no sensible person will support anything called “criminal justice reform” if it means not enforcing entire sections of the criminal code at all, or even worse, letting violent career criminals out to victimize more people.

There are lots of obscure people running for local prosecutorial positions. It’s often hard to tell them apart. But if George Soros is supporting someone on your ballot, be prepared to vote for any opponent — or for anyone in the phone book, for that matter — if it helps keep that person away from the levers of power.