zuck chan fdn
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BIG LIE
MERRI OK
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Hayden Ludwig -Capital Research Center
LAB-GROWN LIBTARD
Hayden Ludwig is the Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America. He was formerly Senior Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. Ludwig is a native of Orange County, California, and holds a Master’s of Public Policy from George Mason University.
AUTHORED CONTENT
States Banning or Restricting “Zuck Bucks”—UPDATED 12/30/2023
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Hayden Ludwig -Capital Research Center
LAB-GROWN LIBTARD
Hayden Ludwig is the Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America. He was formerly Senior Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. Ludwig is a native of Orange County, California, and holds a Master’s of Public Policy from George Mason University.
AUTHORED CONTENT
States Banning or Restricting “Zuck Bucks”—UPDATED 12/30/2023
Article on December 30, 2023 by Sarah Lee, Jon Rodeback, Hayden Ludwig
*Editor’s note: Updated December 30, 2023, with two new bans in Louisiana (constitutional amendment) and North Caroline (veto override).
State Bans and restrictions passed: 27 states
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia
County Bans and restrictions passed: 12 counties
Wisconsin*: Walworth, Ozaukee, Kenosha, Winnebago, Iowa, Lafayette, Washington, Kewaunee, Oneida, Barron
Michigan: Livingston, Langlade
**Roughly two dozen more Wisconsin counties are considering bans (September 16, 2022)
Vetoes: 4 states
Kansas (veto overridden), Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin (vetoed twice)
Private financing of government election offices under the guise of COVID-19 relief skewed voter turnout in the 2020 election and may have tipped the presidential election to Joe Biden.
The chief culprit was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who poured $350 million into one sleepy nonprofit, the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL). CTCL then distributed grants to hundreds of county and city elections officials in 47 states and the District of Columbia.
Despite its claims that the grants were strictly for COVID-19 relief, not partisan advantage, the data show otherwise. CRC research into grants distributed in key states—Arizona and Nevada, Texas, Michigan and Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—has documented their partisan effects. We have also catalogued our major findings at InfluenceWatch.
Summer 2021:The flood of “Zuck bucks” caught the attention of House Republicans, who sent CTCL a letter on June 21, 2021, demanding the group explain where its $350 million in COVID-19 “relief” funds went—since less than one percent of those funds were spent on personal protective equipment. They have also called on CTCL to publish its Form 990 for public review.
January 28, 2022:We’ve updated our original 2021 findings in the 9 states CRC analyzed using CTCL’s latest disclosures here. A list of allCTCL grants nationwide is available here with limited analysis. For a list of common questions and answers about CTCL’s 2020 grants, go here.
As detailed below, at least a dozen state legislatures have responded to these revelations with bills to protect free and fair elections by prohibiting or restricting private funding of government election offices. Note that not all of the states listed below bannedZuck bucks; some only regulated or restricted private funding for elections offices. Vetoes and failed bills are also noted.
July 2022:24 states have banned or restricted the use of private funds for election offices and 6 governors—all Democrats—have vetoed potential bans. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) has vetoed 2 Zuck buck bans; Kansas’s legislature overrode its Democratic governor’s veto. In addition, 4 counties (Walworth, Wisconsin; Ozaukee, Wisconsin; Kenosha, Wisconsin; Livingston, Michigan) have banned Zuck bucks.
December 30, 2023: On November 18, Louisiana voters passed an amendment to the state constitution banning foreign government and nongovernmental donations to conduct elections, effectively bypassing the governor’s veto. The North Carolina legislature overrode the governor’s veto.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/another-far-right-group-was-posting-conspiracy-theories-about-voter-roll-program-as-red-states-cut-ties}:
tpm 4 23
as Republican-led states pull out of a multistate voter roll program in response to Gateway Pundit-pushed conspiracy theories about the organization, a conservative nonprofit was apparently also part of fanning the flames.
Judicial Watch, a far-right legal advocacy group, published a white paper in early March boosting erroneous claims about the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan program designed to maintain voter rolls across state lines.
The paper, which the non-profit reupped on their website Friday, sought to legitimize debunked claims made by the far-right website Gateway Pundit last year, which falsely argued that ERIC was founded by “left-leaning attorney David Becker” and funded by GeorgeSoros.
Judicial Watch claims that Becker had a “history of left-wing activism and unethical conduct,” and that ERIC “shares the vast amount of sensitive personal data it receives from member states with another liberal non-profit, the Center for Election Innovation and Research,” which they linked to the “Zuckerbucks” controversy, another election-related conspiracy theory.
Becker did help a handful of states launch the non-partisan program with a group called the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2012, but Soros never directly contributed to ERIC.Becker has sat on ERIC’s board as a non-voting ex-officio member since its founding, but on March 14 he announced that he would be vacating the position due to the conspiracy theories about his role that were being pushed by the right-wing media.
The Judicial Watch report was originally published on March 9, three days after Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd (R) announced that his state would be withdrawing from the program alongside Missouri and West Virginia. That afternoon, former president Donald Trump attacked ERIC on Truth Social as well:
“All Republican Governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” he wrote. “It’s a fools game for Republicans…”
On March 10, Texas officials also signaled their interest in leaving the program, and they’ve since drawn up legislation to do so. Ohio and Iowa announced their departures on March 17.
ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin posted an open letter on March 2 trying to bat down misinformation about the program, but it didn’t stop what would become a wave of red state officials cutting ties with the program.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-didnt-mention-his-guest-trying-decertify-2020-election-wisconsin}:
on March 7, Tucker Carlson hosted Michael Gableman, a special counsel hired by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature, to highlight an interim report by Gableman about the 2020 election. The segment was touted by a spokesperson for Donald Trump. But it left out some crucial details. [vid]
CARLSON (HOST): So you learn a lot about what the people in charge care about by what they won't allow you to say. And at the very top of the list of things you're not allowed to say, can literally get you silenced and censored for saying, is that there was voter fraud in the last election. But the fact is there was and the deeper you dig, the more of it you find.
The Wisconsin Office of Special Counsel has just released its second report on the subject, and it's pretty unbelievable. The report found, among other things, quote 100 percent voting rates in many nursing homes in Brown, Dane, Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Racine counties. Several of these nursing home residents that had voted had been previously declared incompetent. Michael Gabelman is the special counsel to the Wisconsin Assembly, he is also a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. By the way, we will be speaking to Mr. Gableman at much greater length at Tucker Carlson Today. But we wanted to preview the conversation right now. Mr. Gableman, thanks so much for coming on. Now, I – the report is, in my opinion, pretty shocking. But just give us give us the overview of what you found.
MICHAEL GABLEMAN (SPECIAL COUNSEL TO THE WISCONSIN ASSEMBLY): Tucker, the overview relates right back to what you said in your opening segment, the relatively unremarkable observation that all lives are equal. Well, it should be relatively – It should be also unremarkable to say that all votes in a democracy are equal. But that wasn't the case in Wisconsin in November 2020. We had a wave of massive election bribery in which government officials in the five Zuckerberg-sponsored cities participated, as well as what you related when you introduced your audience to me, which is the government-sponsored elder abuse, all to wring out votes from people who frankly were victimized by the very people at the Wisconsin Elections Commission who are supposed to keep our voters safe.
CARLSON: I'm a little confused. So, Mark Zuckerberg is a tech billionaire. He's not a government official. He has no legal or constitutional right to control our elections. But it sounds like he had a great deal of control over the elections in Wisconsin.
GABLEMAN: He had a great deal. He adopted a plan by a guy who became his employee named David Plouffe, who wrote the unsubtlely-titled book A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump. And in Nevada, on November 11, 2016, David Plouffe did a postmortem on the Hillary Clinton campaign failure to win. And he said the two big mistakes that the Hillary Clinton campaign made were failing to target cities like Milwaukee and failing to drive out the numbers of the African-American vote. And so Mark Zuckerberg has $330 million dollars that he's going to spend to defeat Donald Trump, and he puts David Plouffe's lessons in the of the 2016 campaign into operation in Wisconsin. And now we are seeing a complete cover-up and obstruction by the very so-called public servants who ran this election, who should have been in charge, but who delegated it out to Mark Zuckerberg's agents and virtually employees. We had one guy, Michael Spitzer Rubenstein, a lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, who was running the election site on Election Day in the city of Green Bay. One of our five largest cities, also one of the five cities to receive the Zuckerberg money – $8.8 million dollars between the five.
CARLSON: That's just it's all beyond belief, and you'd think that people who wanted to defend democracy would be outraged, but of course, they're in favor of it. Michael, this report, and again, we haven't always highlighted voter fraud on this show, but this report proves it. It's horrifying and really look forward to speaking to you at much greater length on Tucker Carlson Today.
Here’s some of what Carlson left out.
To start with, neither Carlson nor Gableman mentioned that Gableman has called for decertifying Wisconsin’s 2020 election, even though that’s not legally possible, according to lawyers for the legislature. That’s a fairly large omission right from the jump, and it gets worse.
Neither Carlson nor Gableman disclosed that Gableman had previously appeared at a Trump rally.
Gableman’s report, his presentation to the Wisconsin assembly, and much of his segment with Carlson were based on a conspiracy theory about Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s private donations to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which helped over 2,500 jurisdictions across the country hold an election during the pandemic.
As NPR reported back in 2020, “The money arrived as historically underfunded election department budgets were sapped from unforeseen purchases during the primaries and were forced to spend money on election workers, postage and printing for the increasing number of voters who wanted to vote by mail.” The NPR report even broke down how some Wisconsin jurisdictions used the money.
Conspiracy theories have swirled in right-wing circles about the grants since the election, but as NPR noted, “An APM Reports analysis of voter registration and voter turnout in three of the five key swing states shows the grant funding had no clear impact on who turned out to vote.” The Associated Press also reported that three lawsuits arguing that the funding was illegal under state law were all rejected.
Sarah Mimms at BuzzFeed News dove into Gableman’s criticism of how the state handled senior citizen voting; he claimed a decision not to send voting assistants into nursing homes meant mentally unfit residents cast ballots. She noted that Gableman's team interviewed nursing home residents about how elections work “apparently as a test of their capacity to have voted,” but that a Democratic legislator at the presentation noted that only a judge can take away a person's right to vote.
Mimms also noted that Gableman’s report asked nursing home residents “whether they would support a hypothetical candidate for office who wanted to raise taxes to create government health insurance, apparently as a test of their capacity to have voted.” And she wrote that a Democrat pointed out to Gableman at the hearing that only a judge can prevent a person from voting.
The AP also noted in a fact check that the history behind the nursing home decision was far more complicated than Gableman let on:
State law does require local election clerks to send so-called special voting deputies to nursing homes to give residents an opportunity to vote. After trying to make two visits, the deputies can mail absentee ballots to the residents instead.
But early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Wisconsin Elections Commission made its decision, the state was under a safer-at-home order and nursing homes were severely limiting who could come into their facilities, often not even allowing immediate family members inside.
The elections commission, split evenly among Republicans and Democrats, in March 2020 voted unanimously that poll workers could not be sent into nursing homes. The commission voted 5-1 in two follow-up votes extending the order through the November 2020 election before rescinding it in March 2021. Instead of sending in voting deputies, the commission directed clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing home residents who had requested them.
State election commissioners have defended their move, saying they were trying to ensure nursing home residents could vote by sending absentee ballots instead of voting assistants who may not have been allowed to enter.
Mimms also noted that Gableman struggled to explain why, if there was as much fraud as he suggests, Trump did so much worse than other Republicans on the ballot.
And she highlighted one detail that might explain why Gableman is interested in a media tour right now: His contract may be up.
Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, a Republican who is retiring at the end of the year, tweeted Tuesday that he will “do everything possible to stop any effort, to put politicians in charge of deciding who wins or loses elections.” Speaker Robin Vos, who hired Gableman, did not respond to a request for comment.
When Vos first started the 2020 election investigation, under intense pressure from Trump and his supporters, he insisted that its focus wasn’t on trying to undo the 2020 election, but on providing a rationale for passing election reforms through the legislature this year. Gableman’s report, however, came too late for that. As Democratic Rep. Mark Spreitzer noted during the hearing, Vos passed a few election-related bills last week — which would not survive a veto from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — and the Assembly is unlikely to meet again this session.
Gableman told legislators Tuesday that he is planning to continue his investigation, but that the status of his contract with Vos is “complicated” and they are “going back and forth on the terms and the scope of the continued contract.” Vos did not respond to a request for comment on the contract.
“I believe that I do have a continuing contract through the rendering of services,” Gableman said. “Others take the position that my authority ran out at the end of December of ‘21."
This segment is indistinguishable from the right-wing media segments that served as a pretext for the January 6 insurrection. We’re more than a year past that awful day, and Fox News is still throwing gasoline on American democracy. It’s only going to get worse.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/conservatives-want-to-block-300m-in-election-funds-from-states-but-theyll-fail/
no lnx
after local election officials from more than 1,100 jurisdictions in 40-plus states applied for private grants to better run the presidential elections, a conservative public interest law firm has sued three swing states to block officials from using those funds, stating in their briefs that "they do not want progressive candidates to win."
In addition to alleging that county and local governments in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota lacked the authority to take the money from the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL),the lawsuits from the Thomas More Society, the socially conservative firm, are claiming that the grants have a partisan benefit of favoring "progressive" candidates because some recipients included metro counties—which tend to be blue epicenters
"To be sure, CTCL is free to directly spend its $250 million private federal election grant fund to get out the vote in Pennsylvania; but, federal election law leaves discretion to the 'states,' not the counties and cities, on how to implement federal elections," the group's Pennsylvania lawsuit said. "The plaintiffs are injured by CTCL's private federal election grants because they are targeted to counties and cities with progressive voting patterns."
Election experts said that the lawsuits seeking to block governments from using funds donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his physician wife Priscilla Chan stood little chance of success. But the suits typified the outbreak of partisan litigation in 2020 where Democrats have sought to make voting in the pandemic easier, while Republicans have opposed those efforts—most notably, blocking federal funding, which led to the Zuckerberg-Chan grants.
"The [lawsuits'] arguments are patent nonsense," said Justin Levitt, who was deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration and now teaches constitutional law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
"It's possible that there are limitations in state law that I don't know about. But the arguments based on federal law are simply embarrassing," Levitt said. "They're [suing] based on the presumption that Congress, in granting states money for election administration, meant to preclude any other entities from getting any other money from any other place."
"The biggest problem with that argument is Congress neither said nor implied that anywhere," he continued. "Nor would there have been any reason for Congress to say that they, and they alone, were the only possible sources of money for local governments to run elections."
Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona elections official, a CTCL board member and now an adviser at the Democracy Fund, a bipartisan foundation, rejected the lawsuits' charge that the grants had a partisan agenda. Rather, the communities that were initially awarded funding were the cities and counties that had the hardest time this spring with holding an election in the pandemic. The metro areas saw the biggest disruptions, from exoduses of poll workers to last-minute polling place closures and relocations, to technical issues with new voting systems—all as record volumes of voters cast mail-in ballots for the first time...
Those are locations that in this global pandemic are seeing some of the largest shifts in the way in which they are conducting their elections. And they were struggling the most in the primaries," Patrick said. "We all heard about Wisconsin. We all saw the things happening in those early primaries… That's really where the focus was for the first [grantmaking] phase. And the second stage is wide open to any jurisdiction and they now have heard from, and have [acted on] grant applications, in 40-some states."
Patrick was not surprised by the litigation, as the 2020 election has seen more aspects of the fine print of election administration become focal points of lawsuits than ever. The litigation has made the job of running an election amid a health crisis more difficult, she said.
"There is litigation being proposed in this country on absolutely any facet of the election administration process and voter access that people can write down on a piece of paper as a lawsuit," Patrick said. "We're seeing litigation around this situation [CTCL grants], where our [state and federal] governments have failed to fully and adequately resource local election officials to be able to service their voters in a pandemic. We see litigation around how many drop boxes can be allowed [in Pennsylvania and Ohio]. We see litigation around being able to have poll workers in a park in Wisconsin on a Saturday to allow voters to drop off ballots."
"One might expect [lawsuits] in a presidential election," she continued. "But when you layer in the additional complexity that we are in a global pandemic, and Republican and Democrat and independent secretaries of state [and] local election officials are literally pleading with their state legislatures, with their governors, and legislative branches, and others, to allow them to service their voters well; to resource [assist] them properly; to allow them the policies they need in this moment; and [that the result] in too many places [is] they [local election officials] are being denied on all three of those fronts."
Jordan Shuber, the lead lawyer on the Pennsylvania lawsuit, directed all questions on the suits to Erick G. Kaardal, a Minnesota lawyer, who also signed the three states' complaints.
Kaardal did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment. (The Minnesota group he represents has also sued to block a face mask requirement for the state's polling place voters. His firm was also involved in the failed effort to put rap star Kanye West as a 2020 presidential candidate on the Wisconsin ballot.)
Fortifying Election Preparations
The Zuckerberg-Chan donation of $250 million to CTCL for grants to local jurisdictions and an additional $50 million to the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) for grants to state election agencies was the highest-profile private effort to make up for a lack of federal funding to cover the unexpected costs of running an election amid a national health crisis.
An unprecedented number of local and state officials have embraced the funding. The CTCL grants, to 1,100 local government agencies that run America's elections, represent more than one-tenth of the country's election offices. CEIR's grants, primarily for public education purposes, have gone to about half of the states.
Experienced administrators know what they want to do. As before the pandemic, they must offer a variety of voting options: voting with mailed-out ballots, and in-person voting, either early or on Election Day. In early September, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued its presidential election readiness assessment that contained reports in its appendix from metro-area officials on their plans. Those summaries listed needing more supplies, staffing, voting equipment, public education materials and postage to make voting efficient and safe. After Congress did not appropriate more funds for these purposes, the grants filled that void.
"The pressure these funds take off the shoulders of the front-line people trying to implement the law during this pandemic cannot be overemphasized," said one unidentified grantee in a September 25 program update on CTCL's website.
"Thank you so much. We are a small rural township, and this will be a huge help," said another grantee in that same September 25 update.
"Our job is to get funding into the hands of local election officials, then get out of their way," the update said. "We leave spending decisions to the discretion of each grantee jurisdiction, as long as the election activity falls under these four broad categories: Ensure Safe, Efficient Election Day Administration; Expand Voter Education and Outreach Efforts; Launch Poll Worker Recruitment, Training and Safety Efforts; [and] Support Early In-Person Voting and Vote by Mail."
Patrick offered more detail on how the funds would be spent. The grants were "not so much for large technology" acquisitions, she said, such as high-speed scanners for counting ballots or sorting returned absentee ballot envelopes—although some cities were using funds for that. Instead, most funds were "for the general support of hiring more poll workers than normal, hiring and having to pay for polling place facilities to be cleaned, and/or [renting] the facilities themselves because they have had so many denials [due to COVID-19 concerns]."
Still, Patrick said that some hardware to be acquired, such as a desk-size machine that opens envelopes and removes absentee ballots, would speed up the pre-ballot counting work.
"When you think of the alternative to a ballot extraction machine, it's two people, a Democrat and a Republican, sitting on either side of a table with letter openers opening up tens, if not hundreds or thousands of envelopes," she said.
The grants would hire more election workers to help with the routine tasks tied to sending out absentee ballots and processing them upon their return, Patrick said. Many of those tasks, unlike being a poll worker, did not require that much training because they were repetitive.
"Part of what some jurisdictions are using the additional funding for is to bring in more assistance, more physical human help, at every stage," she said. "It does allow them to move staff around so that they can have their permanent staff shift to the more complicated or complex jobs [such as authenticating voters or verifying signatures], and then have other individuals who don't have the same level of experience doing the more mundane tasks that our elections tend to rely upon, like taking a ballot out of an envelope and unfolding it."
Patrick said that it was not too late for local election officials to bolster their staffs and streamline their ballot-handling and vote-counting processes. The exception, she said, would be states that have already begun to process returned absentee ballots, as the equipment and the steps involved could not be altered once that process has begun.
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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