The key player in billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s scheme to fund local election operations in 2020 is part of a new effort to influence how future elections are run across the country, potentially in violation of some state laws.
A report by the Honest Elections Project (HEP) and The John Locke Foundation says that the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and allied left-wing organizations have formed the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, with $80 million in funding. A public records request exposed this new initiative as an attempt to push partisan policies on local elections offices and conceal its efforts from state oversight.
In April of 2022, the left-leaning CTCL announced the creation of its new alliance outlining a plan to connect with local election departments and claim $80 million in funding for the initiative. The alliance’s declared mission is to assist local election departments, develop “shared standards,” and obtain resources for those departments. While the organization claims to be nonpartisan, the investigative report by HEP reveals that it is anything but.
The CTCL is an election group based in Illinois that “pushes for left-of-center voting policies and election administration,” according to Influence Watch. The group is funded by a number of organizations long connected with liberal causes, including the Skoll Foundation and the Democracy Fund. As the Daily Caller reported, CTCL was founded by former employees of the one-time New Organizing Institute—“the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry,” according to the Washington Post. CTCL came to prominence in the media during the 2020 Election when Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, spent $419 million on CTCL and other non-profits leading up to the elections. This money was explicitly provided so that CTCL could influence the practices of local election offices including promoting mail-in-voting, expand opportunities for ballot curing, and expand voter outreach programs led by activist groups in Democratic-leaning areas.
After the election, the media uncovered the operations of CTCL with Zuckerberg’s money, labeling the donations “Zuck Bucks.” In response, numerous Republican-controlled states moved to adjust their election laws in order to ban private donations to their local election offices so that partisan programs could not be forced on them in exchange for funding. Meanwhile, a spokesman for Mark Zuckerberg told Daily Caller that “[during] the 2020 election, Mark and Priscilla made a one-time donation to help address the unprecedented challenge of ensuring Americans could safely vote during the height of the pandemic. They have not made, and are not planning to make, any additional donations, including any additional donations to the Center for Tech and Civic Life.”
In response to state laws prohibiting the activities of its funders, the alliance uses an “unusual and complex structure that seems designed to thwart meaningful oversight and accountability” according to HEP. As HEP further reported:
After the Alliance had recruited its first cohort of members it announced plans to begin charging offices to join. However, the Alliance also created “scholarships” to cover those membership costs, which are instantly converted into “credits” that member offices can use to buy services from CTCL and other Alliance partners. As a result, offices receive access to funds they can spend exclusively on services provided by left-wing companies and nonprofits, entirely outside normal public funding channels.
Based on the documents that HEP received through the public records process, the services described included both “legal” and “political” consulting, public relations, and recruitment and training advice. The documents also revealed that local election office partners are expected to contribute back to the alliance by providing in-kind contributions using their own taxpayer funding. The local offices are also expected to provide insight into the inner working of their offices and work with the alliance to develop improvement plans for their functions.
This latest iteration of the Zuck Bucks, now designed to evade private contribution bans, threatens to propagate the same election interference around the country under the radar. The full analysis on the documents obtained by the Honest Elections Project can be found here.
