No More "Zuck Bucks" for Official Elections
Arizona Outlaws Private Subsidies for Elections. Good. Who's Next?
One of the more distasteful aspects of the 2020 election was local election boards accepting substantial private donations for "official" election operations. My now-former home of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, was one, accepting a $2.2 million private donation to fund the placement of 32 dropboxes and to promote voting by mail, on a narrow 2-1 vote by the County Election Board. The County’s 5-0 Democratic Council didn’t even try to conceal that the money was used to facilitate early and mostly voting by mail, a top Democratic party strategy.
Very little was publicized or known about the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) donation. Nearly all the money really came from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, who contributed most of an estimated $350-400 million in all for voting activity grants throughout the country.
Philadelphia city, Centre County (home to State College, where Penn State University predominates), and a dozen more jurisdictions also sought and took “Zuck Bucks” from the CTCL. Most other Pennsylvania counties didn't bother, and some Republicans, including a State Senator, sued unsuccessfully to stop it, as did the Trump campaign (among other legal challenges). Organizations in other states also filed suits to stop the grants.
Interesting that the preponderance of the Center's contributions seems to have gone to Democratic-leaning urban or close-in suburban counties, including $7.4 million for Detroit’s home of heavily Democratic Wayne County, a focus of post-election investigations and accusations of voting malfeasance.
Who is the Center for Tech and Civic Life? Let’s consult InfluenceWatch.org, a non-profit group that investigates left-leaning organizations.
“The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) is a Chicago, Illinois-based center-left election reform advocacy group formed in 2012. The organization pushes for left-of-center voting policies and election administration. It has a wide reach into local elections offices across the nation and is funded by many left-of-center funding organizations such as the Skoll Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. [1][2][3]
“Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges, and Whitney May, the founders of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, were co-workers at the New Organizing Institute (NOI) for several years before the organization dissolved in 2015. [4] NOI, described by a Washington Post reporter as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry,” was a major training center for left-of-center digital activists over the decade of its existence. [5] Additionally, a few members of CTCL’s board of directors have strong ties to Democratic political operations, notably Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor to the elections program at Pierre Omidyar’sDemocracy Fund, and Cristina Sinclaire, who was previously employed by NOI as well as by the progressive data service Catalist. [6]
“In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated a total of $350 million to CTCL. CTCL then donated the funds in the form of grants to various jurisdictions throughout the United States to help them hire more staff, buy mail-in ballot processing machinery, and other measures they deemed necessary to properly handle the election amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Then there’s this story, published in The Epoch Times and prompted by a conservative-leading non-profit, the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, which raised alarm bells about the CTLC before and after the November 2020 election.
“In March, a former Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe, published a book called “The Citizens Guide to Beating Donald Trump.” The book said the 2020 election will come down to a fight in the cities of Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit.
“During this time, Plouffe was working for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
“Six months later in September, Zuckerberg donated 400 million dollars to an organization called The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to help with local elections.”
If private donations to fund official election activities don’t at least raise an eyebrow, consider: what would you think if the National Rifle Association spent $400 million to subsidize official election activities in rural counties? Or abortion provider Planned Parenthood doing the same in urban enclaves? Does genuine voter integrity allow for private subsidies for “free and fair” elections? Would foreign donations be okay, say, from an organization connected to China’s Community Party? Bottom line: private (or, foreign) donations to fund official government ballot activity is unethical; it undermines confidence in the integrity of our elections.
No one I know is suggesting the CTLC broke laws. The CTLC has said that any election board from either “red” or “blue” jurisdictions could have applied for the funds. Some Republican-leaning areas did. But while election funding is indeed falling short across multiple jurisdictions (and many states, like Pennsylvania, have to be sued to do basic election work such as taking the names of 20,000 dead voters off its voter rolls), most Republican-leaning jurisdictions didn’t seem to be asking for the money. In contrast, heavily Democratic ones did—no harm in asking why many counties thought their funding and operations were just fine, even during a pandemic, while others sought millions of dollars.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey yesterday made his state America’s first to enact a law that effectively bans private donations to fund official election activities. Good. Legislation is pending in other states, including Pennsylvania and presumably others. Sadly, Georgia’s new election law did not outlaw private donations, so expect more “Zuck Bucks” to come flooding into heavily Democratic Fulton County (home to Atlanta) in 2022 to influence very competitive elections there for Governor and US Senate, among other contests.
If states need to invest more in their elections, then perhaps they can use some of their “America Rescue Plan Act” cash to help do that. I’m even OK with federal grant monies being available to help states clean up their voter rolls and address election integrity issues, including helping voters obtain state ID cards, as potential US Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R-GA) has suggested that corporations that wrongly criticize Georgia’s election reform law do.
And we don’t need Nancy Pelosi’s terrible, awful, and unconstitutional election bill, HR 1, to do it.