ARLINGTON, Va. (Legal Newsline) - Hundreds of millions of private dollars injected into the administration of elections, a job normally reserved for government officials, corrupted the presidential elections with disguised get out the vote drives for Joe Biden, a new investigative report shows.
The report “The Legitimacy and Effect of Private Money in Federal and State Electoral Processes” follows the trail of an estimated $500 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, spread across nonprofits. They were promoted as nonpartisan groups working for safer and more secure elections, though staffed by former Barack Obama operatives and left-wing activists, and not exactly non-partisan as advertised, Legal Newsline reported in late September.
“You effectively had an oligarch [Zuckerberg] overseeing the counting of ballots rather than the American people,” Phill Kline, drector of the Amistad Group that funded the study, said at a Wednesday press conference.
The largest chunk of the Zuckerberg money, $350 million, went to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which then granted the money to local election officials in heavily Democratic areas in battleground states. The officials were instructed how to spend the money, Kline said.
“CTCL claimed that in some states more Trump counties received money than Biden counties,” Kline said. “That was true in some cases, but the Biden counties received a lot more of the money.”
“Can you imagine if the Koch Brothers or the National Rifle Association tried this,” he added, “it would be front page news. But no one in the mainstream media is covering this story.”
The study’s finding that the grant money favored the Biden campaign was backed by an independent research group, the Capital Research Center (CRC), that investigates nonprofits.
In the battleground state of Wisconsin, the CRC filed a complaint with the state's election commission in late August arguing that CTCL was acting under a pretense of protecting the integrity of American elections when in fact it was a pro-Joe Biden outfit, Legal Newsline reported days after the complaint was filed.
The CRC's report released this week found that CTCL funded 21% of Trump counties versus 55% of Biden counties. It also found that nine out of 10 of CTCL’s largest known grants in Georgia (the group has been opaque about its grant funding) went to Biden counties.
And CTCL gave grants to nine of the 10 counties with the greatest Democratic shifts in their 2020 voting. Those nine grantees averaged a 13.7% shift blue-ward, and two of those counties (Cobb and Gwinnett) were in the four counties that delivered Biden the most votes.
CTCL is also involved in the two Georgia run-off races for the U.S. Senate; the winner of those races will determine which party controls the legislative agenda in the Senate.
Additional nonprofits funding the administration of elections include the Center for Electronic Innovation Research, the Center for Civic Design, the National Vote at Home Institute, the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and Rock the Vote.
In addition, the Amistad study shows that the infusion of private dollars was unnecessary to ensure safe and secure elections; enough election money was provided through the federal CARES Act for Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and other battleground states.