Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote by John Fund & Hans von Spakovsky

Author:John Fund & Hans von Spakovsky [Fund, John & Spakovsky, Hans von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781641772082
Google: YsArEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1641772085
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

ZUGKERBUCKS AND THE CENTER FOR TECH AND CIVIC LIFE

A sleepy Chicago-based nonprofit foundation, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), had made nothing but small grants until 2019, when it grew explosively in the run-up to the 2020 election backed by a $350 million donation from Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

The money was then regranted to thousands of local government election offices across America to ostensibly “preserve the integrity of our elections.”

You would think it would make a huge news story. Instead it was largely left to think tanks to notice what Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center calls “perhaps the biggest under-reported story” of the 2020 election.1

CTCL used its newfound fortune to send grants to government officials responsible for administering the 2020 election.

The CTCL money went to 2,500 jurisdictions to pay for additional polling places, ballot drop boxes, “voter education,” and extra efforts to turn out non–English speaking voters. Strings were clearly attached to the grants, and the result was that elections in key swing states were effectively “privatized” with hardly anyone noticing.

That is not an exaggeration. When county election officials in New York begged the State Board of Elections for more money after a chaotic primary in which they were overwhelmed by absentee ballots, the New York Times reported that the board told the county officials they should “apply for grants—not from the state, but from a nonprofit foundation, the Center for Tech and Civic Life” backed by Zuckerberg.2

The Facebook angle should have seemed odd to media observers. It was Facebook’s admitted lack of oversight of supposed disinformation in the 2016 election that led to accusations of electoral meddling and strong condemnations from Democrats and Republicans. And its founder clearly dominated CTCL’s funding. It was nothing more than a subsidiary of Zuckerberg, Inc. during the 2020 campaign. In 2018, CTCL had only $1.4 million in revenue and only $560,000 of that from grants. Zuckerberg’s bucks allowed it to increase its revenue by an astounding 25,000 percent.

Details about what CTCL did with its 2020 revenue windfall aren’t easy to come by because it has refused to answer media questions. Despite CTCL declaring that its grants were meant to offset unforeseen expenses due to COVID-19, reports show that only a tiny fraction of the monies typically went to things like personal protective equipment. CTCL spent much more on financing the placement of drop boxes for mail-in votes and foreign-language get-out-the-vote ads in liberal enclaves.

In September 2020, the Philadelphia City Council held an emergency five-minute Zoom meeting in order to approve a $10 million grant from CTCL to the city’s election office. The contract specified in great detail where and how the money would be spent. The city’s entire election administration budget before the grant was $15 million.

CTCL’s $10 million grant to Philadelphia stipulated that the city use its funds to provide printing and postage for mail-in ballots and to scatter ballot drop boxes. CTCL’s intervention effectively greased the wheels for

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