Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have spent $350 million to boost election turnout in heavily Democratic areas, which prompted lawsuits in four swing states.
Zuckerberg and Chan gave $250 million in September to the Center for Tech and Civic Life so that election officials could add more polling locations and ballot drop boxes.
They spent another $100 million in October.
But the lawsuits claim that they targeted the donations to benefit Democrats, which fits with the far-left political orientation of Zuckerberg, Chan, and the Big Tech indsutry.
Michigan’s Election Integrity Fund, the Wisconsin Voters’ Alliance, the Minnesota Voters’ Alliance, and multiple candidates and elected officials in Pennsylvania all filed lawsuits against the donations, Fox News reported.
They allege that it is illegal for local governments to accept private grants to influence the election.
“Imagine the reaction if the Trump campaign or the Kochs were paying for the counting of ballots,” said Tom King, general counsel to the Amistad Project, which is representing the plaintiffs. “Imagine if we were talking about a third-world country where a private oligarch is paying for collection ballots and counting our votes.”
The lawsuits claim that the CTCL’s funding is going toward 12 cities in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin that voted for overwhelmingly (75-25) for Hillary Clinton.
Zuckerberg criticized the lawsuits in a Facebook post.
“Since our initial donation, there have been multiple lawsuits filed in an attempt to block these funds from being used, based on claims that the organizations receiving donations have a partisan agenda. That’s false,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“These funds will serve communities throughout the country—urban, rural and suburban–and are being allocated by non-partisan organizations,” he said.
Left-wing organizations have donated to the CTCL, including the Democracy Fund, a group started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar in 2011.
Other groups that have also donated include the Skoll Foundation, founded by a former Ebay president, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges, and Whitney May in 2012 founded CTCL in Chicago.
These three people have deep ties to the Democratic Party, as former employees at the New Organizing Institute, a group that the Washington Post called “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts of digital wizardry.”
The NOI trained a significant percentage of the DNC’s party organizers.
NOI executive director, Ethan Roeder, headed former President Barack Obama’s digital systems during the 2008 and 2012 election.
