Last Updated on December 18, 2021
A left-wing election advocacy group funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent hundreds of millions of dollars to election offices nationwide, according to a Capital Research Center report Thursday.
The conservative think tank said the Center for Tech and Civic Life doled out the money in “an effort to privatize the 2020 election and put Joe Biden in the White House” in place of President Donald Trump.
The CTCL, according to its 2020 IRS Form 990 filing, distributed more than $332 million in grants. A significant portion of the money, according to the CRC, went to “elections offices across the country.”
“We’re still combing through them, but it’s already clear that our key findings from nine state reports earlier this year — Arizona and Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Virginia — will be confirmed in the coming weeks,” CRC researchers Parker Thayer and Hayden Ludwig wrote in their report.
The CTCL describes itself on its website as “a team of civic technologists, trainers, researchers, election administration and data experts working to foster a more informed and engaged democracy, and helping to modernize U.S. elections.”
The organization was founded by former Democratic campaign operatives Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges and Whitney May, according to the CRC.
The trio worked together at the New Organizing Institute for multiple years.
That organization — considered a “Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry” — trained several Democratic digital activists before shutting down, the CRC reported.
According to the CRC, Zuckerberg channeled $328 million to the CTCL through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
The foundation’s grant to the Center for Tech and Civic Life “was the second-largest it paid out in 2020,” according to the CRC.
The CTCL’s website lists tech behemoth Facebook as one of its key funders. Zuckerberg had given the organization such a significant amount of money that NPR reported last year that it “saved the election” for the Democrats.
According to the CRC, Zuckerberg’s money helped set up “private drop-boxes across key cities to hoover up mail-in ballots, bypassing the U.S. Postal Service in what was effectively the country’s first mail-in election — thanks to last-minute election law changes by Democratic secretaries of state and endless pressure from activist groups like the National Vote At Home Institute.”
Sandy Juno, retired clerk of Brown County, Wisconsin, told Just the News in June that after CTCL poured money into Green Bay, “the mayor’s office and chief of staff began to take over election functions.”
“And that is not something under state statutes they have the authority to do,” Juno said, “because under Wisconsin law, municipal clerks, the county clerk and the Wisconsin Elections Commission are the individuals charged with running elections.”
“As we got closer to the November election, we found out that this outside group had come in and was basically trying to redo our forms and documents that we use statewide,” she said.
“And these people were from out of state and had no business doing that.”
“They were working primarily with our five major Democratic base cities. So they were breaking the consistency of documents and processes and procedures used statewide,” Juno told the outlet.
