Originally Posted by
Legion
Have you heard about this?
While other election law changes have prompted thunderous press releases and high-profile hand-wringing, these laws have received much less attention.
In 2020, a tax-exempt charitable foundation operated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan provided hundreds of millions of dollars for local election administration.
As a nonprofit, a 501(c)(3) under the IRS code, the foundation cannot spend money on partisan political activities.
But in 2017, Chan and Zuckerberg hired David Plouffe, who was Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, to lead what Zuckerberg described in a news release as the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s “policy and advocacy effort.”
In October 2019, as the presidential campaigns were heating up, Plouffe scaled back to a part-time role to make more time for other endeavors, including a book he was writing, later published in March 2020.
The title of the book? “A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump.”
While it’s completely legal for foundation money to be spent on non-partisan voter education and get-out-the-vote efforts, in this case, the foundation’s money appears to have been targeted to one team’s voters.
Campaign spending in federal elections is limited by federal law and regulated by the Federal Election Commission.
States have similar laws that limit and regulate campaign spending.
This includes the money that campaigns spend on costly get-out-the-vote efforts aimed at turning out the voters who are likely to be on the campaign’s team, and not on the other campaign’s team.
In 2020, the Chan-Zuckerberg foundation gave $350 million to a nonprofit organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which distributed it to about 2,500 jurisdictions in nearly every state.
There were tight conditions on the use of the cash. For example, in Arizona’s Coconino County, the Board of Supervisors was told in a memo that the grant from CTCL would provide “additional capacity to increase voter education efforts.”
But not everywhere.
The Associated Press reported that nine of Arizona’s fifteen counties – Apache, Coconino, Graham, La Paz, Maricopa, Navajo, Pima, Pinal and Yuma – received grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
Of the six counties that received no foundation money – Cochise, Gila, Greenlee, Mohave, Santa Cruz and Yavapai – only one, lightly populated Santa Cruz, was carried by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
The others went overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. He carried Mohave (the state’s 6th largest county) by a margin of 73.7% to 22.2% and Yavapai (4th largest) 63.4% to 32%. No Chan-Zuckerberg money was spent by CTCL to get-out-the-vote in those jurisdictions.
A study by the Foundation for Government Accountability reported that in Pennsylvania, CTCL distributed $22 million of private money for the 2020 election, and “counties won by Biden in 2020 received an average of $4.99 Zuckerbucks per registered voter".
https://www.bollyinside.com/news/keep-private-money-out-of-election-administration-daily-bulletin
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