CHARLESTON, S.C. (Legal Newsline) - Concerned voters in four states have filed federal lawsuits to block a mass infusion of private funds from a left-leanding nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL), into the administration of elections in battleground states, and hotly contested congressional districts.
The lawsuits, initiated by voter alliances in each state, were filed in South Carolina, Texas, Georgia and Iowa. They join earlier actions filed in other key battleground states of Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
CTCL, flush with a recent donation of $250 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, is targeting heavily Democratic areas to drive out the vote, not to help local election officials conduct safe and fair elections during the pandemic as the group claims, says Phill Kline, director of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, which is supporting the litigation by the plaintiffs.
“The mixing of private funds in the election process undermines the integrity of elections and sets a frightening precedent for the influence of private money in local governments,” Kline told Legal Newsline. “This is a well orchestrated scheme to swing the election, and it’s being done with no transparency.”
Kline noted that in Dallas, a Democratic-heavy city where Hillary Clinton won 60% of the vote in 2016, CTCL is spending $15 million. In Atlanta, where Clinton won over 68% of the vote, CTCL is spending $6 million. In Iowa, CTCL is targeting two of the six counties where Clinton won, and in Charleston, South Carolina, CTCL is targeting areas to boost only Democratic turnout in competitive U.S. House and Senate races.
In an earlier move, CTCL granted a total of $6.3 million to the Wisconsin cities of Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine.
“The grants were issued directly to the cities and not the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is responsible for managing elections throughout the state,” the Wisconsin Voters Alliance stated in a Sept. 10 press release. “A plurality of the funds — about 40% — went to support both vote-by-mail and early voting efforts. Around $1 million went to ‘voter outreach and education efforts.’"
Philadelphia, where CTCL has of late September granted $10 million, is an exemplar of how election officials in Democratically controlled jurisdictions are using the private funds to influence the outcome of elections.
Philadelphia partnered with the Committee of Seventy - which Kline characterized as an “outside, activist” group - and implemented a “mobile mail-in ballot drop-off initiative” for the Primary and General Elections.
“While it’s dressed up as a way of enhancing accessibility, there is a major problem with this initiative—by deputizing the Committee of Seventy as election officials, authorities are directly facilitating ballot harvesting, a practice expressly prohibited under state law,” Kline wrote in recently published commentary.
CTCL and another group, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which recently received $50 million from Zuckerberg and Chan, promote themselves as non-partisan, but the leaders in each group have long histories of working for progressive causes, and attacking Republicans and conservatives.