A Democrat-linked tech alliance will now give individual $500,000 grants to jurisdictions in future elections.
QUICK FACTS:
- The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence will now award grants of $500,000 to at least two local jurisdictions out of the ten that the organization accepted into the program.
- The alliance, created in April, primarily is a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, or CTCL, which gave $350 million in grants to local election offices from a foundation run by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife in 2020.
- The CTCL teamed with several other technology and election organizations for the alliance, including Arabella Advisors, a Democrat-linked consulting firm that funds the “misinformation” research industry.
- According to public records obtained by The Daily Signal, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Macoupin County, Illinois, each will get $500,000 under the alliance.
- “The more the Alliance [for Election Excellence] is investigated, the more strings to its money will be found. If Republican operatives tried this scam, the media would rightly blast off their camouflage and expose the partisanship,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, an investigative think tank, told The Daily Signal.
- Walter claimed that the CTCL is run by Tiana Epps Johnson, who previously helped manage the New Organizing Institute, a group The Washington Post called “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.”
PRESIDENT OF THE WASHINGTON-BASED CAPITAL RESEARCH CENTER SCOTT WALTER ON THE DEM-LINKED GROUP DONATING TO ELECTIONS:
“CTCL’s new effort, camouflaged as the ‘Alliance for Election Excellence,’ still tries to manipulate elections by giving money to government offices. But money always comes with strings, even if CTCL calls them ‘training’ and ‘mentorship,’” Walter told the Daily Signal.
BACKGROUND:
- In April 2022, Zuckerberg announced he would not be donating to election offices after receiving criticism that the nearly $400 million he injected into the 2020 presidential contest unfairly bolstered Democratic turnout.
- “They are not donating for something like this, ever again,” said Brian Baker, a spokesman for Zuckerberg and his wife.
- Republican lawmakers, conservative-leaning news outlets and watchdog groups claimed Zuckerberg’s massive donation in 2020 was used unjustly to encourage Democratic voters, particularly in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Michigan.
- “They were virtually all given to very heavily blue municipalities,” said Bill Doyle, an economist and principal researcher at the Caesar Rodney Institute for American Election Research.
- Zuckerberg and his wife also donated an additional $69.5 million before the 2020 elections to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that distributed funds primarily to state election officials.
