Congress Zooms In On Zuckerbucks

During a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, an all-star panel of conservatives and election integrity experts detailed the stunning extent to which the progressive ruling class, Democrat operatives, and the left-wing nonprofit sector have conspired to undermine confidence in our elections and thwart the will of American voters at the ballot box.

The February 7 hearing was titled “American Confidence in Elections: Confronting Zuckerbucks, Private Funding of Election Administration,” and featured witnesses Will Flanders, Mollie Hemingway, and Scott Walter, who walked through the depths of Democrats’ war on election integrity and the threats it poses to the American constitutional order.

Flanders, a research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, kicked off the hearing with an account of interference by left-wing nonprofits during the 2020 election. “There are credible reasons that the 2020 election shook the faith of many Americans in the electoral process,” he stated. “With the justification of the COVID-19 pandemic, many systems and rules were unilaterally abandoned without following proper legislative procedure, and new techniques were used to drive targeted voter turnout that existed in legal gray areas.”

This, Flanders contends, calls into question the fairness and impartiality of the election itself.

Among the most serious perpetrators of election interference in 2020, Flanders noted, was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a left-wing “election reform” group that gave hundreds of millions of dollars to state-level election officials in 2020. $328 million came from Mark Zuckerberg – funds which have since become known as “Zuckerbucks.”

Though CTCL insisted its election grants were made primarily to provide equipment to protect voters from COVID-19, House Republicans discovered in 2021 that less than one percent of the group’s funds were allocated toward protective equipment. Instead, the overwhelming majority of the funds were used to expand mail-in ballot and drop box procedures, among other administrative changes.

During the hearing, Flanders stated that at least one CTCL program—namely a 2021 “voter van” program that disproportionately targeted Democrat areas—was “ultimately judged to be illegal.” This initiative, he said, serves as one of many reasons Americans continue to doubt the integrity of our election process.

Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist and author of the 2021 book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, further outlined what is at stake if more is not done to secure our elections. “The American system of self-governance is under attack,” she said. “We have allowed the private takeover of government election offices by partisan oligarchs and their armies of activists who use those offices and their authorities to tilt the election toward favored candidates.”

Hemingway later called out CTCL’s attempts to flip swing states like Georgia by specifically targeting blue counties. “In addition to [Georgia] getting the largest percentage of funding of any state, you look at it on a county-by-county basis, and… Democrat-voting counties got dramatically more funding than the Republican-based counties,” she said. “The targeting was in areas where [Democrats] thought they could get the most votes.”

The panel’s third witness, Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, offered further details on how CTCL’s grants bolstered Democrat turnout. In Wisconsin, for instance, Walter noted that the group gave 28 grants that exceeded a $5,000 minimum to cities in the Badger State. Of those cities, Donald Trump only won eight. The remaining 20 cities won by Biden, however, received 90 percent of all CTCL grant funds in Wisconsin.

“Election offices are the referees of American elections, and the parties are the teams trying to score. If you heard the refs in the Super Bowl were aiming to boost the total points scored, would you feel better about the game’s fairness? What if you learned the refs were receiving money and training from people who previously worked for one team’s offensive coaching staff?” Walter asked. “I don’t want either party’s operatives playing the refs, and I know Americans won’t be confident in elections as long as this scam continues.”

Though congressional Democrats predictably accused the panelists of engaging in “election denialism” and baseless conspiracy theories, the facts on the ground point to a disconcerting reality for leftists, who have long disingenuously insisted that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure election in American history.

Already, groups like CTCL are working behind the scenes to interfere in this year’s presidential election. As The Federalist reported, in 2022 CTCL launched an $80 million initiative intended to “systematically influence every aspect of election administration.”

The hearing further underscored that conservatives have a significant amount of work to do in the coming months to ensure that the 2024 election remains free, fair, and secure.

For the good of election integrity, transparency in our voting laws, and the cause of American democracy itself, every voter—Republican, Democrat, and Independent—should hope that our leaders learn from the mistakes of 2020 and work to ensure voters can remain confident in the election process when they head to the ballot box this fall.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.