How the “nonpartisan” Center for Tech and Civic Life helped sway the election for Democrats, according to Mollie Hemingway’s book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, aand the Democrats Seized Our Elections.”
- The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization led by Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan, gave more than $350 million to CTCL in 2020. In 2018, CTCL’s budget had been only $1.4 million.
- One of CTCL’s founders is Tiana Epps-Johnson, a former Obama Foundation fellow who previously worked on the Voting Rights Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, a politically liberal advocacy group funded by progressive powerhouse foundations such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Epps-Johnson founded CTCL with Whitney May and Donny Bridges. All three worked on activism relating to election rules until 2015 for the New Organizing Institute, which The Washington Post described as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.”
- According to the Foundation for Government Accountability, Georgia received more than $31 million in Zuck Bucks for the general election alone, one of the highest amounts in the country. It worked out to nearly 9 percent of all Zuckerberg funding, even though Georgia has just over 3 percent of the country’s population.
- The money was not spent on COVID-related issues. For instance, the three counties that received the most Zuck Buck funding spent only 1.3 percent of that funding on personal protective equipment. The rest was spent on salaries, laptops, vehicle rentals, attorneys’ fees for public records requests, mail-in balloting and other measures that allowed elections offices to hire activists to work the election.
n Not all 159 counties in Georgia received the funding. Of those that did, Trump-voting counties received an average of $1.91 per registered voter, while Biden-voting counties received, on average, $7.13 per voter. - Trump won Georgia by more than five points in 2016. He lost it by three-tenths of a percentage point in 2020. On average, as a share of the two-party vote, most counties moved Democratic by less than one percentage point in that time. Counties that didn’t receive Zuck Bucks showed hardly any movement, but counties that were funded by Zuck Bucks moved, on average, 2.3 percentage points more Democratic.
- Democratic counties in Pennsylvania also were targeted for Zuck Buck infusions. The Capital Research Center determined that Biden won eight of the 10 highest-funded CTCL counties in the state, which together received $21,047,163, or more than 95 percent of all grants statewide.
- A Biden-winning county was over 3.5 times more likely to be funded by CTCL than a Trump-winning county. Trump counties received an average of $0.59 per capita, while Biden counties averaged $2.85 per capita.
- Philadelphia, the most richly funded Biden county, received $6.32 per capita, compared to a mere $1.12 for Berks, the most richly funded Trump county.