Researchers: Zuckerberg Spent $419.5M to Push Democrat Votes in 2020
Thursday, 14 October 2021 08:11 AM
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent $419.5 million during the 2020 election to support Democrat candidates through legal loopholes.
Those loopholes allowed him to pass money through two organizations that put the money into local government elections offices with stipulations about how the funding could be spent, according to researchers.
The New York Post featured the shocking political influence story on its cover Thursday.
Headlined "ZUCK'S BUCK How Facebook boss gave $419 million to get Biden elected," the report stated that "the 2020 election wasn't stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes."
The report said Zuckerberg had orchestrated and funded a "targeted, private takeover of government election operations" for highly partisan purposes despite being run through nonprofit organizations.
The article concluded that Zuckerberg’s "money significantly increased Joe Biden's vote margin in key swing states. In places like Georgia, where Biden won by 12,000 votes, and Arizona, where he won by 10,000, the spending likely put him over the top."
"This unprecedented merger of public election offices with private resources and personnel is an acute threat to our republic and should be the focus of electoral reform efforts moving forward," the report added.
The two research organizations, the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), distributed the money to cities and counties in ways that would bring out Democrat voters and increase the count for then-candidate Joe Biden in key swing states, William Doyle, Ph.D., the principal researcher at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, wrote for The Federalist in the article featured by the Post.
Doyle, whose team's analysts conducted the research, called the merger of public election offices and private resources an "acute threat to our republic, and should be the focus of electoral reform efforts moving forward" and accused Zuckerberg of likely buying the election.
The CTCL and CEIR money did not work through financing campaign expenses in traditional manners, Doyle continued, but funded activities such as "vote navigators" to launch outreach campaigns in areas where there were high numbers of Democrat voters.
For example, navigators in Wisconsin were used to assist voters, answer questions, and witness absentee ballot signatures. Additionally, in Georgia, "Happy Faces," a temporary staffing agency affiliated with one-time gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, helped to count the votes in Fulton County, Georgia, the researchers learned.
CTCL also pushed for universal mail-in voting, extended deadlines that would favor mailed votes over in-person ballots, and expensive bulk mailings, among other actions that would promote the Democrats' vote, the researchers found. Additionally, CTCL helped push for unmonitored private drop boxes and actions that allowed several post-election ballots to be submitted.
It also increased funding for poll workers and temporary staffing which allowed for the "infiltration of election offices" by paid Democrat activists that had been coordinated through social media and left-leaning nonprofit organizations, Doyle writes.
He also pointed out that federal and state matching funds in place for COVID-19 related election expenses came to $479.5 million, but the CTCL and CEIR funds, through Zuckerberg, came close at $419.5 million.
The bulk of the money donated by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, went to CTCL, for a total of $350 million, according to Influence Watch. That money then went out in grants to jurisdictions to help them hire staff, buy mail-in ballot processing equipment, and for other measures to handle the election during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Meanwhile, out of the 26 grants of $1 million or more each for cities and counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin, 25 went to the areas where Biden won.
However, Brown County, Wisconsin, the only county on the list where then-President Donald Trump won, got just $1.1 million, or less than 1.3% of the $85.5 million CTCL had provided to the other 26 top recipients.
Most of the CTCL money going to Wisconsin went to Green Bay, which is heavily Democrat, rather than to rural counties, the researchers determined. Wisconsin's legislature had already provided about $7 per voter to Green Bay to manage its 2020 elections and $4 per voter to rural counties.
The CTCL funding brought Green Bay's resources to $47 a voter while leaving the rural counties at $4 a voter. Doyle notes that similar funding disparities were seen in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Flint, Dallas, and Houston, which all got tens of millions of dollars from the organization's grants.
"We call this the injection of structural bias into the 2020 election, and our analysis shows it likely generated enough additional votes for Biden to secure an Electoral College victory in 2020," Doyle writes.
However, he stressed that "more proof is needed" to determine if the organizations' efforts had harvested large numbers of extra Democrat votes, and explained that research used showed how the vote was affected even in places like Texas where Trump won and said it would not be "inconceivable" that such methods could come into play in future elections.
"We have good reason to anticipate that the results of our work will show that CTCL and CEIR involvement in the 2020 election gave rise to an election that, while free, was not fair," he concluded. "The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought with money poured through legal loopholes."
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