Florida counties are being forced to return money from the leftist Center for Tech and Civic Life after an election-integrity watchdog, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, filed suit.
PILF demanded the counties comply with a new law, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in response to the 2020 election debacle, that prohibits public election agencies from accepting private donations.
The state’s Republican-led legislature passed the bill in May after it was revealed that CTCL had hosted seminars targeting specific voters to help boost support for Democrats.
“The return of this money … is a victory for election integrity,” said PILF President J. Christian Adams.
Critics have dubbed CTCL donations “Zuckbucks” because the funding came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Zuckbucks were the biggest factor, juicing blue [Democrat] areas in 2020,” said Adams, adding that “a private citizen should not be allowed to influence how are elections are run.”
CTCL was founded by left-wing activist Tiana Epps–Johnson, who was granted one of the charter fellowships by the Obama Foundation to conduct her operations, ostensibly on a nonpartisan basis.
But damning evidence has shown that the nonprofit specifically targeted blue regions in battleground states, sometimes taking charge of local elections offices and imposing stipulations on how they used the funding.
Among the $350 million Zuckerberg funneled into his electioneering efforts was money to pay bonuses for partisan election officials and to install unwatched ballot drop-boxes in urban regions.
Prior to the 2020 election, Wisconsin resident Jay Stone filed a complained with the Justice Department warning about the threat CTCL posed to election integrity, according to Kenosha News.
“Just because CTCL is a nonprofit designation doesn’t mean they can spread their money any which way they want,” said Stone, a registered independent from Pleasant Prairie, Wisc.
The organization’s grant recipients were “clearly partisan,” he warned.
“What they’re doing is they’re inflating the Democratic votes and are targeting cities, so when you add up the entire state, Joe Biden wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” Stone added. “Their strategy is something that a campaign would do.”
Those three states, all of which Trump carried in 2016, were certified for Biden in the 2020 election under suspicious and contested circumstances.
Likewise, CTCL directed $51 million to Georgia, where Democrats, led by anti-integrity activist Stacey Abrams, secured a Biden victory and later flipped both of the US Senate seats, delivering control of Congress to Democrats.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has said that the Senate should investigate the activities of CTCL, to prevent billionaires from buying elections in the country in the future.
“Strikingly, it appears, the money [donated by CTCL] was spent in a massively partisan manner to drive up Democratic turnout,” said Cruz in May.
In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg donated $350 million to the Center for Technology and Civic Life. It appears that money was used to increase Democrat turnout.
I introduced an amendment to create a task force to examine the impact those #ZuckBucks had in 2020. pic.twitter.com/gY8tk9m1En
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) May 12, 2021
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
