The Center for Tech and Civic Life's (CTCL), an Illinois-based center-left election reform advocacy group, vows to "modernize the American voting experience" by setting up high-performing election offices, a more resilient and adaptive election system and better informed voters. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are known as the group's generous sponsors.
As the 2024 election nears, the CTCL has kicked off a program titled the US Alliance for Election Excellence to provide $80 million to local elections offices over five years "to envision, support, and celebrate excellence in US election administration."
Just the News, a media source founded by US investigative journalist John Solomon, has suggested that the CTCL's program resembles yet another questionable "Zuckerbucks" initiative, or, in other words, the injection of private money into public election administrations.
In the months leading to the 2020 election, Zuckerberg and his wife reportedly donated a total of $350 million to the CTCL through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF). The couple also gave $69.5 million to the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), an electoral policy advocacy group "whose core mission is to work with election officials and build confidence in elections," according to its website. In 2020 the CEIR was reportedly busy with countering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the general elections.
Zuckerberg's generosity triggered a lot of controversy among US conservatives and GOP politicians who insisted that the Facebook* founder's money went disproportionally to election offices in swing states to boost voter participation in Democratic strongholds. Remarkably, Joe Biden came out on top by winning battleground states with a slim margin. For their part, Zuckerberg's grantees insisted that they doled out the cash to nearly 2,500 counties in 49 states regardless of their political affiliations.
Former President Donald Trump subjected the Facebook founder to harsh criticism for disbursing hundreds of million of dollars to election administrations across the country.
To complicate matters further, Zuckerberg's initiative was described as part of a "well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies… to influence perceptions, change rules and laws" to defeat Donald Trump in Molly Ball‘s op-ed titled "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election."
It's unclear whether Ball – the author of the "admiring" 2020 biography of Nancy Pelosi – was bragging about what the aforementioned "cabal" had done, or whether she wanted to expose their shady deeds. Anyway, US conservative pundits and GOP voters described Ball's article as evidence of sheer election meddling by Dems and their allies in Big Tech and Big Media.
Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member, told the US conservative press in October 2021 that Zuckerberg's private donations "violated fundamental principles of equal treatment of voters since it may have led to unequal opportunities to vote in different areas of a state."
Von Spakovsky insisted that the Facebook founder's action was "a carefully orchestrated attempt to convert official government election offices into get-out-the-vote operations for one political party and to insert political operatives into election offices in order to influence and manipulate the outcome of the election."
In the wake of the controversy, 24 states have either restricted or altogether prohibited the use of private money to fund elections, according to the Capital Research Center.
"Zuckerberg, from Facebook, in 2020, he poured $420 million into these non-profit groups and these non-profits would go into communities that were in important states and they'd go to the election office and say 'here's millions of dollars for you guys, but you gotta bring in our operatives, you've gotta ballot harvest, you've gotta have mass mail balloting' and all of this stuff," Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told the US media in April 2022 while touting his state's ban on "Zuckerbucks."
Still, it seems that liberals are at it again, according to the US conservative media. In particular, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) told Just the News on Thursday that DeKalb County Board of Voter Registration & Elections accepted $2 million in private money from the CTCL in "violation" of 2021 state election reform law. The specter of alleged voter irregularities and apparent election fraud is continuing to haunt the US with over half of Republican voters still believing that the 2020 elections weren't fairly won by Joe Biden.
*Meta and Facebook are banned in Russia over extremist activities.