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Joe Schaeffer
Remember the Zuck Bucks controversy of 2020? Here we go again. In the name of supporting the infrastructure of ‘democracy’, a Democrat-aligned Big Money partisanship is attempting to make its way into local election offices across America in 2024.
Zuck Bucks 2.0
In the last presidential race, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly bankrolled “a private army of leftists parachuting into boards of election in swing states,” to quote Liberty Nation Senior Political Analyst Tim Donner. About half the country then moved to ban such large infusions of private funding. But the Zuck Bucks are back, thanks to a new federal grant program. “On [Jan 17], in an email sent to a network of election officials and nonprofit organizations, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) announced it would begin efforts to facilitate applications to a massive federal government grant program administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA),” William Doyle at The Federalist reported Jan 19 in an eye-opening expose.
“This program could potentially funnel more than $700 million to election offices during the 2024 election under the auspices of CTCL officials and their partners in the nonprofit world of left-wing election activism,” Doyle writes. “CTCL is the organization that funneled hundreds of millions of Mark Zuckerberg’s dollars into key election offices to increase Democrat turnout in the 2020 election.”
What this amounts to is an exciting new avenue for the forces funded by Zuckerberg to influence US election machinery now that the coronavirus pandemic no longer provides a convenient excuse for his vast money drop of four years ago.
The Capital Research Center’s Influence Watch site conveys the overtly biased nature inherent to that 2020 Zuck Bucks largesse:
“In the months leading up to the November 2020 election, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan reportedly donated a total of $350 million to CTCL through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), although the actual figure reported in SVCF’s IRS disclosures was roughly $328 million.
“The couple also donated $69.5 million to a related organization, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which channeled the funds to secretaries of state as Covid-19 ‘relief grants.’ Both donations were paid out to CTCL and CEIR from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s donor-advised fund (DAF) account at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. CTCL also received $24.8 million from the New Venture Fund, a left-of-center grant making entity at the heart of the Arabella Advisors network.”
In other words, Democrat dark money groups were all over this financial outlay, yet the American people were led to believe it was being done in the altruistic pursuit of well-run elections. “The New Organizing Institute (NOI) [was] the brains behind [a] ‘progressive’ turnout machine that went defunct in 2015 – yet still haunts our elections today,” Hayden Ludwig at the Capital Research Center reported in Jan. 2023.
“NOI is the predecessor of the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the organization behind ‘Zuck bucks,’” Ludwig continued. “From 2005 to 2015, NOI had one purpose: elect Democrats, earning it praise [from a major Washington newspaper] as ‘the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry’ and ‘the Left’s think tank for campaign know-how.’ CNN even quoted a supposedly fearful Republican staffer calling NOI ‘the Left’s new Death Star.’”
That doesn’t sound like a concern for keeping the booths clean at your local voting site, does it?
“Notably, NOI was part of the Funders Committee for Civic Participation, a convening of major funders and get-out-the-vote operatives that take advantage of IRS 501(c)(3) voter registration rules to ‘organize and mobilize communities,’ ‘hold elected officials accountable,’ and ‘achieve policy impact.’ The committee boasts that this in-house model helped turn Colorado into a Democratic bastion,” Ludwig asserts.
In a series of pieces, Ludwig crucially points out how NOI naturally evolved into CTCL. The co-founders of CTCL were all actively involved in NOI. For obvious reasons, the “about” page at the CTCL website doesn’t quite inform the public of the fact. “Our founders – Tiana Epps-Johnson, a civic technologist, Whitney May, a former election official, and Donny Bridges, a civic data expert – joined forces in 2012 to get more Americans civically engaged,” the page innocently reads.
“Civically engaged” clearly meant get them registered as Democrat voters, the chief aim of the New Organizing Institute, as laid out by Hayden.
Wreaking Havoc in 2020
Doyle, writing for the New York Post in 2021, further revealed the hollowness of CTCL’s general public welfare claims.
CTCL and the Zuckerberg-backed Center for Election Innovation and Research “funded self-described ‘vote navigators’ in Wisconsin to ‘assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing… and witness absentee ballot signatures,’ and a temporary staffing agency affiliated with Stacey Abrams called Happy Faces counting the votes amid the election night chaos in Fulton County, Georgia,” Doyle explained.
That wasn’t all.
“CTCL demanded the promotion of universal mail-in voting through suspending election laws, extending deadlines that favored mail-in over in-person voting, greatly expanding opportunities for ‘ballot curing,’ expensive bulk mailings, and other lavish ‘community outreach’ programs that were directed by private activists,” Doyle added.
The activities in Wisconsin have been found to be especially outrageous.
A “136-page interim report issued by the Wisconsin Office of the Special Counsel, which was tasked with examining 2020 state election integrity issues,” detailed “a ‘bribery scheme’ implemented by the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life, a liberal voter advocacy group heavily funded by Mr Zuckerberg,” The Washington Times reported in March 2022.
“In the run-up to the 2020 election, the CTCL allocated Zuckerberg-funded grants, which became known as ‘Zuck Bucks,’ to government officials in Wisconsin to help increase absentee and in-person voting. But the money was only funneled to five heavily Democratic areas: Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay,” the paper related.
You get the idea. And now they are all set to do it again, using a FEMA loophole this time around.
“Likely a significant part of the additional funding will seek will be devoted to the shadowy (and costly) world of high-end data aggregation, statistical analysis, and the implementation of behavioral science solutions to mobilizing potential Democrat voters,” Doyle observes in his article for The Federalist.
As he correctly emphasizes, this is not the role local election offices are meant to play.
“The purpose of election offices is to maintain the polls and accurately count votes, not to ‘get out the vote’ in their jurisdictions through leveraging extremely valuable ‘inside’ information and providing system access to data analysts and partisan election activists to aid in voter canvassing or targeted ballot harvesting,” Doyle stresses.
In 2020, a partisan Democrat group clad in the thinnest wool of sheep’s clothing tapped into a Zuck Bucks mountain of cash to mar electoral integrity during the most controversial presidential election in modern American history. It is poised to do the same in 2024. Only this time, it hopes to use your taxpayer dough to pay the freight.
