A group dedicated to voter integrity is calling on Georgia secretary of state’s office to provide transparency on how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $5.6 million donations to his office were spent during the 2020 election.
The Foundation for Government Accountability, led by former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, is concerned not only with the money given to Raffensperger’s office, but also the $45 million Zuckerberg linked organizations gave to local government election operations in the Peach State, according to Fox News.
The group’s CEO, Tarren Bragdon, said that the “Zuckerberg funding is an unprecedented example of using government employees and government resources to put your fingers on the scale, to the election outcome.”
Bragdon added, “It would be like giving private money to police departments to have officers do more stop and frisk in certain neighborhoods compared to other neighborhoods,” or “like giving money to the tax department to do increased audits in certain zip codes or neighborhoods versus other neighborhoods.
It has been reported that Zuckerberg-funded organizations gave $400 million to two organizations that funded local government election offices—and it came with strings attached.
Writing for the New York Post, William Doyle reported that Zuckerberg gave $419.5 million to two non-profit organizations, The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), that ostensibly donated money to local election offices for their operations.
However, according to former Ohio Attorney General Ken Blackwell, the funds came with specific instructions on how the money was to be spent.
Blackwell wrote the organizations “dictated exactly how elections were to be conducted, down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places. The Constitution gives state lawmakers sole authority for managing elections, but these grants put private interests firmly in control.”
CTCL also demanded there be universal mail-in voting by suspending existing election laws and extending deadlines that “favored mail-in over in-person voting” while also expanding “opportunities for ballot curing,” according to the New York Post.
For example, the two Zuckerberg organizations funded “vote navigators” in the swing state of Wisconsin. The vote navigators “assisted voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing, and witness absentee ballot signatures.”
CTCL claimed some of the funds were used to protect poll workers to help keep them safe from contracting the virus. But, according to The Federalists’ Mollie Hemmingway, “relatively little money was spent on measures to guard the health of election workers.”
These organizations appear to have had an outsized impact on the final election tallies. According to research conducted by the New York Post, Zuckerberg’s funds “significantly increased” Joe Biden’s vote margin in the key swing states.
And one of those key swing states was Georgia. And now some Georgians are demanding answers to how a Silicon Valley billionaire influenced elections in their state.