How Zuckerbucks Funded Biden
A flood of money from the Facebook founder gave Dems an unfair and illegal advantage.
Tue Dec 22, 2020
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife helped buy the presidency for the increasingly frail and feeble former Vice President Joe Biden by improperly influencing election officials as they strategically flooded left-wing activist groups with more than $400 million during the 2020 election cycle.
Those groups, in turn, gave huge grants to election administrators in order to create “a two-tiered election system that treated voters differently depending on whether they lived in Democrat or Republican strongholds,” Phill Kline, director of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, a public interest law firm focused on religious freedom, wrote in a new report.
Part of the lesson here is that not all privatization is good. Some things need to be done by government alone.
“This privatization of elections undermines the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which requires state election plans to be submitted to federal officials and approved and requires respect for equal protection by making all resources available equally to all voters,” according to Kline.
And this illicit collusion between pro-Biden funders like Zuckerberg and government officials that outsourced election administration to the activist Left helped Democrats prevail in battleground states. It may end up installing a puppet of the Communist Chinese in the White House in the terminal stage of the rolling coup attempt against President Donald Trump that began before he was inaugurated.
This year there was “an unprecedented and coordinated public-private partnership to improperly influence” the election in swing states, which “effectively placed government’s thumb on the scale to help these private interests achieve their objectives and to benefit” Barack Obama’s former vice president, according to Kline, a former attorney general of Kansas.
Biden, an underachieving, sleazy career politician from Delaware with no notable achievements despite a half century in office, has claimed victory and the transition process is underway even though President Trump continues to contest the election. Trump’s lawyers filed a new appeal with the Supreme Court Dec. 20 in hopes of reversing the Democrat-dominated Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings that they say unconstitutionally modified the state’s voting-by-mail laws, opening the door to massive election fraud.
Election experts have long said that mail-in voting is fraught with problems because it gives wrongdoers greater opportunities for fraud compared to in-person balloting.
The bipartisan U.S. Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, determined in 2005 that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and that “vote-buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”
“The consensus among people who study fraud carefully is that voting by mail is a much more fertile area for fraud than voting in person,” Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in 2018.
Pennsylvania’s official 20 presidential electors voted for the Biden-Harris ticket Dec. 14 while a completing slate of Republican electors voted for the Trump-Pence ticket. The Democrat electors in Pennsylvania and other contested states may be challenged in Congress on Jan. 6 when the electoral votes are officially tabulated.
Kline’s report comes as presidential advisor Peter Navarro released his own 36-page report detailing voting irregularities.
“The observed patterns of election irregularities are so consistent across the six battleground states [i.e. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin] that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election outright, strategically game the election process in such a way as to ‘stuff the ballot box’ and unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket,” Navarro said during a Dec. 18 conference call with reporters.
According to the Amistad Project’s report, Zuckerberg and his wife made $419.5 million in donations to nonprofits this election cycle –“Zuckerbucks,” as some have called the money— $350 million of which went to the “Safe Elections” Project of the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL). The other $69.5 million went to the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Contrary both to federal law and state legislature-endorsed election plans, Zuckerberg’s money “dictated city and county election management,” Kline wrote in the report’s executive summary.
In addition, “executive officials in swing states facilitated, through unique and novel contracts, the sharing of private and sensitive information about citizens within those states with private interests, some [of] whom actively promote leftist candidates and agendas.”
This sharing of data “allowed direct access to data of unique political value to leftist causes, and created new vulnerabilities for digital manipulation of state electronic poll books and counting systems and machines.”
The Amistad Project, which began investigating the digital vulnerabilities of state election systems in spring 2019, learned that state and local elections officials did not preserve the legal right to access computer logs on the machines counting ballots.
“The first step to engage any computer forensic examination is to gain access to machine logs, yet scores of election officials failed to maintain the right to even review such information, much less establish a method for bipartisan review. In effect, America purchased a complex ballot box (computer) into which its votes would be deposited, but didn’t have the right to open the box and review the count.”
As the COVID-19 crisis worsened in March 2020, more and more lawsuits were filed by left-wing organizations aimed at weakening laws designed to protect the integrity of absentee ballots, the report noted.
Kline is correct.
Democrats aiming to make mail-in balloting mandatory for all Americans in the 2020 election attacked electoral integrity laws in well over a dozen in the courts in an attempt to overturn restrictions on voting-by-mail.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told MSNBC May 20 that going forward it would be called “voting at home,” after Democrats discovered that the idea of “voting-by-mail” didn’t excite actual voters. Voting in person is “a health issue” in the era of the pandemic, she said.
Democrats and other voting-by-mail advocates claimed voters shouldn’t have to risk their physical well-being to vote. Republicans countered that mail-in voting should not be expanded because it is so susceptible to fraud and that Democrats were using the pandemic as an excuse to rig the election.
The attorney leading the legal onslaught against fair elections was Marc Elias of the high-powered Democratic law firm Perkins Coie. Elias has a long history of successfully fighting electoral integrity policies in court, eliminating or weakening signature-matching requirements and ballot-receipt deadlines.
Elias is also an important figure in the “Russiagate” conspiracy, which aimed to overturn the result of the 2016 presidential election. A lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election cycle, Elias hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to conduct opposition research against then-candidate Trump. That research effort culminated in the laughable, thoroughly discredited 35-page dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele that purported to tie Trump to the Russian government.
While the leftist litigation was ripping electoral safeguards to shreds, battleground state governors began issuing emergency executive orders restricting in-person voting, which has many anti-fraud safeguards, while putting state resources into promoting high-risk, fraud-prone voting-by-mail.
“[T]his coordinated assault on in-person voting generally favored Democrat Party voters who preferred to vote in advance, while placing Republicans, who preferred to vote in person, at a disadvantage,” Kline stated in the report.
Combined, these actions helped to create “a two-tier election system favoring one demographic while disadvantaging another demographic.”
Infused with hundreds of millions of Zuckerbucks, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, “a previously sleepy 501(c)(3) organization … whose previous annual revenues never exceeded $1.2 million,” suddenly began asking Democratic Party strongholds to seek strings-attached grants that imposed strict conditions on the way recipient jurisdictions ran their elections.
CTCL gave $100,000 to Racine, Wisconsin, in May of this year, and asked its mayor to recruit four other cities (Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, and Milwaukee) to develop a joint grant request. The bloc of cities submitted a “Wisconsin Safe Election Plan” on June 15 to CTCL and, in turn, got $6.3 million from the nonprofit to implement the plan.
The plan treated state election integrity laws “as obstacles and nuisances to be ignored or circumvented,” as CTCL “retained the right, in the grant document, to, in its sole discretion, order all funds returned if the grantee cities did not conduct the election consistent with CTCL dictates.”
In effect, CTCL managed the election in the five affected Wisconsin cities.
The report stated that the CTCL-engineered plan also went around voter ID requirements for absentee ballots by defining all voters as “indefinitely confined” due to COVID-19, and later, after criticism from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, by directing election clerks not to question such claims.
The plan also ushered in the use of drop boxes for ballot collection, a move that disrupted the chain of custody of the ballot, and consolidated counting centers, “justifying the flow of hundreds of thousands of ballots to one location and the marginalization of Republican poll watchers such that bipartisan participation in the management, handling, and counting of the ballots was compromised.”
Electoral integrity watchdogs got wise to CTCL’s pro-Biden game early on.
A group of Wisconsin voters filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Election Commission against the group, claiming that election-assistance grants it gave to Democrat-dominated cities violated state law.
The complainant, Wisconsin Voter Alliance, based in Suamico, Wisconsin, claimed in the legal complaint that CTCL grants violated state law prohibiting the provision of monies to election officials to induce persons to vote or influence an election outcome.
Zuckerberg’s saturation-bombing of CTCL with money allowed the group to hand out so much cash that Democratic strongholds spent around $47 per voter, compared to $4 to $7 per voter in traditionally Republican areas of Wisconsin, according to Kline.
Zuckerberg-underwritten CTCL grants also found their way to election officials in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas.
CTCL grants in Pennsylvania were used to pay election judges in Philadelphia and other election officials. CTCL directed Philadelphia to increase its polling locations and to use drop boxes and eventually mobile pick-up units.
Zuckerbucks allowed Philadelphia to “cure” improperly completed absentee ballots in a manner not provided for in Republican-leaning areas of the state, the report stated.
For example, in Democrat-dominated Delaware County, Pennsylvania, one drop box was placed every four square miles and for every 4,000 voters. In the 59 counties Trump won in 2016, there was one drop box for every 1,100 square miles and every 72,000 voters.
“Government encouraging a targeted demographic to turn out the vote is the opposite side of the same coin as government targeting a demographic to suppress the vote,” Kline wrote.
“This two-tiered election system allowed voters in Democrat strongholds to stroll down the street to vote while voters in Republican strongholds had to go on the equivalent of a ‘where’s Waldo’ hunt.”
“These irregularities existed wherever Zuckerberg’s money was granted to local election officials. In effect, Mark Zuckerberg was invited into the counting room, and the American people were kicked out.”
If Biden ends up being sworn in Jan. 20, take a wild guess who will be receiving a presidential Medal of Freedom.
Lawsuit: Silicon Valley Billionaire Recruited Election Officials to Accept Grants from Zuckerberg
A lawsuit filed by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry in October 2020 alleged that an obscure nonprofit organization operated as part of a larger nonprofit founded and largely funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidyar attempted to recruit local election officials to apply for grants from the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL).
Landry filed the lawsuit on behalf of the State of Louisiana against CTCL, New Venture Fund DBA Center for Secure and Modern Elections, Dawn Maisel Cole, a private individual; and Full Circle Strategies LLC, “to prevent the injection of unregulated private money into the Louisiana election system.”
The lawsuit alleged:
- The New Venture Fund, operating in Louisiana under the trade name Center for Secure and Modern Elections (CSME), partnered with CTCL to solicit applications and information from Louisiana officials in connection with proposed grants [from CTCL as part of the $350 million in grants made nationwide in the 2020 election].
- CTCL and CSME worked their grant scheme in the State of Louisiana through a lobbyist by the name of Dawn Maisel Cole, owner and operator of Full Circle Strategies, LLC, as their Louisiana representative and agent to target registrars of voters, clerks of court, and local election officials.
- The scheme targeted 13 parishes, some to receive contributions of more than $500,000, accompanied by a request for detailed information about the operations, conduct and expenses of the registrars/clerk’s office.
- Ms. Cole directly solicited registrars and clerks of courts to accept contributions from CTCL and New Venture Fund for the operation of their respective offices.
These practices were prohibited, the lawsuit argued, because:
…private contributions to local election officials are unlawful and contrary to the methods for election funding established by law in the State of Louisiana, and such contributions by these defendants should be declared illegal and permanently enjoined.
The lawsuit was significant in part because it highlighted the role an obscure organization called the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, which describes itself as a “fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund,” played in advancing the efforts of the Mark Zuckerberg-funded CTCL in privately funding the administration of the 2020 election.
The New Venture Fund, in turn, is part of Democracy Fund, whose website says it is “an independent and nonpartisan, private foundation that confronts deep-rooted challenges in American democracy while defending against new threats.”
Pierre Omidyar, a Silicon Valley billionaire who founded Ebay, also founded and financially backs Democracy Fund:
Democracy Fund has committed more than $150 million to support a healthy democracy. Established by philanthropist and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar in 2011 and incubated inside Omidyar Network, Democracy Fund launched as an independent foundation in July 2014 and is a part of The Omidyar Group.
Civitas, a well connected public affairs firm founded and staffed by Democrat activists, counts CSME among its clients, but its website is unclear what services it provides the group.
According to the Form 990 Democracy Fund filed for 2019, the organization provided a $275,000 grant to CTCL that year.
As Breitbart News reported:
Private funding of election administration was virtually unknown in the American political system until the 2020 presidential election, when Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $350 million to the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), which provided funding to county and municipal governments around the country for election administration, and $69 million to the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which provided funding to 23 state governments, primarily through the Secretary of State’s office, also for the funding of election administration.
In late October, a Louisiana judge ruled against Landry and in favor of the defendants, as The Advocate reported:
Judge Lewis Pitman, of the 16th Judicial District in St. Martin Parish, ruled against Landry in the lawsuit last week. Landry said in an interview he would appeal the ruling. . .
In Louisiana, the clerks of court and registrars of voters had applied for around $7.8 million [in CTCL grant money], which the local officials said they would use to help pay for additional costs brought on by the pandemic. That includes equipment, personal protective gear and wages for election workers staffing early voting sites for longer hours.
The local officials have since backed off the grant money and won’t be tapping into the funds before the Nov. 3 election. Early voting is already underway.
According to the CTCL website, not a single Louisiana parish or city ended up with funding from CTCL in the November 2020 election.
But the previously obscured relationship between CTCL and CSME highlighted in the October 2020 lawsuit by Louisiana Attorney General Landry suggests that the relationship between these two groups may have extended to many states beyond Louisiana.
The two groups, for instance, delivered a joint presentation on election administration issues in January 2019. Scott Seeborg, the CSME contact in that January 2019 presentation, was hired in April 2020 as the Pennsylvania State Director for All Voting is Local, a non-profit whose mission statement says, “We fight to dismantle barriers to the ballot well before the next election, so that every voter can cast a ballot that counts.”
According to its website, “All Voting is Local Action is a campaign of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. We fight for the right to vote in eight states with distinct assaults on the right to vote.”
Those eight states are Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights website states:
The Leadership Conference’s founders came together in 1950 out of the belief that the fight for civil rights could not be won by one group alone, but needed to be waged in coalition.
Our members — which have grown from 30 civil and human rights organizations at our founding to more than 200 today — differ in size, scope, and structure. But what transcends our differences and unites The Leadership Conference coalition is our enduring common purpose: full equality for all.
That common purpose gave our leaders the wisdom to see that civil rights are women’s rights and LGBTQ rights and immigrant rights and workers’ rights and disability rights and human rights. That common purpose is our coalition’s inheritance. It is a living legacy that binds us together — in cause and community.
According to the website of the Leadership Conference Education Fund, “All Voting Is Local [is] housed within Access Democracy, an incubated project of The Leadership Conference Education Fund, [and] fights to protect and expand the right to vote for every American.”
In future stories, Breitbart News will explore the relationship between CTCL, CSME, and All Voting is Local in key battleground states of the 2020 election, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
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