How Zuckerberg Influenced the 2020 Election.

photorandy2023

1 year ago

I have written several postings related to Various topics involving elections and voting in America. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address additional issues in these topics.

How Private Money From Facebook’s CEO Saved The 2020 Election

Bill Turner knew he had a tough job. He took over as acting director of voter services in Chester County, Pa., in September, just two months before a divisive presidential election amid a pandemic. Huge voter turnout was expected, and COVID-19 required election managers like Turner to handle mail-in ballots on a scale they’d never seen and confront the threat of their staffers becoming sick.

These challenges had forced many election offices to burn through their budgets months earlier. Turner had previously served as the county’s emergency manager, experience that seemed apt for overseeing an election that many observers feared would become a catastrophe.

With a tight budget and little help from the federal government, Chester County applied for an election grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a previously small Chicago-based nonprofit that quickly amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to help local election offices — most notably, $350 million from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

“Honestly, I don’t know what we would have done without it,” Turner said.

The coronavirus pandemic — and Congress’ neglect — necessitated an unprecedented bailout of election offices with private money funneled through the little-known nonprofit. And the money proved indispensable.

Turner is one of 25 election directors from swing states interviewed by APM Reports who said the grant money was essential to preventing an election meltdown amid worries over a pandemic and a president who continues to openly question — without evidence — the legitimacy of the process.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life gave grants to more than 2,500 jurisdictions this year to help departments pay for election administration. The money arrived as historically underfunded election department budgets were sapped from unforeseen purchases during the primaries and were forced to spend money on election workers, postage and printing for the increasing number of voters who wanted to vote by mail.

The nonprofit gave Chester County $2.5 million for the election, which is more than the county’s 2020 budget for voting services.

Chester County is one of several large suburban counties that ring Philadelphia — once-Republican strongholds that have shifted in Democrats’ favor in recent years. Pennsylvania was pivotal to Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump, and his win in the state was fueled in part by his success in Chester County. He won it by 17 percentage points — nearly double Hillary Clinton’s margin four years earlier.

Turner used the grant to buy 14 drop boxes for ballots, pay staff to watch those sites and purchase body cameras that recorded employees collecting ballots from the drop boxes. He also spent a large portion of the grant on additional equipment and people to ensure that ballots were mailed out and counted quickly. The county processed 150,000 mail ballots for the November election in 36 hours. Without the new equipment and personnel, he said, it would have taken a week or longer.

“This grant really was a lifesaver in allowing us to do more, efficiently and expeditiously,” he said. “It probably would have taken a very long time if we didn’t have the resources to do this.”

Election precinct cases containing ballots, election materials and keys to voting machines are held under guard by the Allegheny County Police at the Allegheny County elections warehouse on Nov. 4 in Pittsburgh.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

The private money was needed in part because the federal government hadn’t provided enough funding. Congress allocated $400 million in March for election services, but that was just a tenth of what some officials said was needed.

“Despite election officials basically begging our federal government for assistance, that money never came through,” said Liz Howard, with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “Congress really failed our election officials.”

With little action from Congress, the private sector, led by Zuckerberg and Chan, stepped up. The couple awarded $400 million to nonprofits for election assistance — with most of it going to the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

The full extent of the grants isn’t known. The Center for Tech and Civic Life declined repeated interview requests from APM Reports to discuss the funding and how it was used. In late October, the group listed the jurisdictions that received funding on its website but didn’t disclose dollar amounts or funding priorities for each jurisdiction.

But through a series of interviews, public records requests and a review of public meetings, APM Reports pieced together the details of grant awards in the five swing states that decided the election. APM Reports obtained more than 30 applications and grant agreements between local election offices and the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The documents show requests mainly focused on the logistics of the election: increased pay for poll workers, expanded early voting sites and extra equipment to more quickly process millions of mailed ballots.

Some jurisdictions received grants that were a small fraction of their election budgets, while others saw theirs increase several times over. Suddenly, election administrators who had had to scrounge for resources could “fund their dream election,” according to Howard.

In the weeks since the election, allies of Trump have included the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s grants in their voter fraud conspiracy theories. They have challenged the legality and neutrality of the grants, claiming that the funding was aimed at boosting Democratic turnout.

But an APM Reports analysis of voter registration and voter turnout in three of the five key swing states shows the grant funding had no clear impact on who turned out to vote. Turnout increased across the U.S. from 2016. The APM Reports analysis found that counties in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona that received grants didn’t have consistently higher turnout rates than those that didn’t receive money.Enlarge this image

An election worker scans mail-in ballots at the Clark County Election Department on Oct. 20 in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Officials with the Center for Tech and Civic Life and government officials have defended themselves in court and in written statements by saying the goal was to ensure safe voting options during the pandemic.

“In this moment of need, we feel so fortunate to be administering an open-call grant program available to every local election department in every state in the union to ensure that they have the staffing, training, and equipment necessary so that this November every eligible voter can participate in a safe and timely way and have their vote counted,” the Center for Tech and Civic Life said in a statement on Sept. 24.

The nonprofit is also continuing to offer grants to communities that are holding runoff elections in Georgia in January.

While some election officials see little difference between private and government funding for elections, other officials are deeply worried about the precedent that the private grants may set. They say private donors could have a personal agenda. For example, Zuckerberg may have wanted to improve his public image after years of criticism that the misinformation and divisive rhetoric on Facebook have damaged democracies around the world.

“It’s really important that it’s a one-time thing,” said Rachael Cobb, associate professor of political science and legal studies at Suffolk University in Boston. Cobb said the private money was critical for election administration this year, “but over time, it in and of itself is corrosive.” She said continuing to use private money for such purposes “sullies [the election] in a way that we don’t need it to be sullied at all.”

But other election analysts say private funding is the best option if the federal government isn’t going to commit to sustainable long-term funding for election offices.

They also say the grants helped avert a potential disaster where long lines, missing mail and slow counting could have led Trump to further question the integrity of results in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.

David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said that without the grants, “it certainly would have taken them a lot longer to process and count those absentee ballots, which would have only made this post-election period more unbearable.”

Zuckerberg’s election spending was ‘carefully orchestrated’ to influence 2020 vote: ex-FEC member

A former federal election official on Thursday called the $400 million-plus that Mark Zuckerberg spent to help finance local elections a “carefully orchestrated attempt” to influence the 2020 vote — and recommended that all states ban private funding of election offices.

Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member, said the billionaire Facebook founder’s donations to a pair of nonprofits that doled out the cash to nearly 2,500 counties in 49 states “violated fundamental principles of equal treatment of voters since it may have led to unequal opportunities to vote in different areas of a state.”

“My reaction is that this was a carefully orchestrated attempt to convert official government election offices into get-out-the-vote operations for one political party and to insert political operatives into election offices in order to influence and manipulate the outcome of the election,” said von Spakovsky, a Republican who now runs the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative.

He added: “All states should ban private funding of government election offices no matter the source.”

The Post’s publication of a report that said Zuckerberg effectively “bought” the 2020 election also sparked outrage from the New York State Republican Party, which retweeted a link to the paper’s front-page coverage.

“Zuckerberg spent $419 MILLION trying to infiltrate a private takeover of our elections through ideological non-profits designed to turn out the Dem vote in 2020. All while silencing Republican voices. (including the NYGOP) We MUST rein in big tech NOW,” the state GOP tweeted.

Former US Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), who lost a January runoff to Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock, also retweeted The Post’s report.

“Zuckerberg infiltrated our elections, doling out $45M in GA alone to engineer a partisan takeover of our state’s elections operations,” she wrote.

“That’s why we are seeking transparency – from the [secretary of state] and Fulton County. There must be accountability now.”

Legislation to prohibit outside funding of elections has been introduced in 17 states this year, according to the Ballotpedia website.

In April, Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed one measure into law, saying, “With public confidence in our elections in peril, it’s clear our elections must be pristine and above reproach — and the sole purview of government.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, also a Republican, said earlier this week that a recent election reform law he signed had “banned Zuckerbucks” in the Sunshine State.

But in Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a GOP proposal in June, saying that “non-governmental grants” had helped local election officials “conduct safe elections under extraordinary circumstances” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The money donated by Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, was supposed to augment government funding and “promote safe and reliable voting” so that “every eligible voter can participate in a safe and timely way and that their vote is counted,” according to a September 2020 press release announcing the plan.

The report by researcher William Doyle, based on analysis using a machine-learning algorithm, found that the spending likely added about 200,000 votes to Biden’s expected tally in Texas, which wasn’t enough to keep Trump from carrying the Lone Star State.

Preliminary results suggest a “similar impact” on the voting in the crucial swing states of Wisconsin and Georgia, Doyle wrote in his report, first published by The Federalist.

Biden narrowly won both races, by less than 21,000 votes in Wisconsin and less than 12,000 votes in Georgia.

A spokesman for Zuckerberg and Chan said their critics’ allegations “simply don’t add up.”

Spokesman Ben LaBolt said the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which received the bulk of the funding, “issued an open call to local election jurisdictions across the country and provided funding to all jurisdictions that applied no matter whether they were historically Republican, Democratic or swing districts.”

“More of the jurisdictions that received funding historically voted Republican than Democratic, so the facts belie the claim,” he said.

The executive director of Center For Tech and Civic Life, Tiana Epps-Johnson, said in a statement they are a non-partisan organization “backed by Republicans, Democrats, and nonpartisan officials, which is why all local election offices responsible for administering election activities covered by the CTCL COVID-19 Response grant program were eligible to apply.”

“Every legitimate applicant was awarded a grant. Over half of all grants nationwide went to election departments that serve fewer than 25,000 registered voters,” said Epps-Johnson.

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only Californian to fund the administration of the 2020 election, however, with actor and former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger donating unspecified amounts to 33 counties in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

In a series of tweets announcing the plan, Schwarzenegger said he wanted to help “reopen polling centers” that were closed after the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that a section of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional.

The USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, which distributed the grants, didn’t respond to a request for the individual amounts but released a statement that said they were awarded on a “nonpartisan” basis.

“With the assistance of the grants from the Institute, participating counties opened 1,305 early voting and election day polling places and turnout increased by 6.3 percentage points,” academic director Christian Grose said.

Money From Facebook’s Zuckerberg Used to Undermine Election, Violate Law: Report

Hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were used to violate election laws, according to a new report.

The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, a national constitutional litigation organization, released the 39-page report, alleging that Zuckerberg’s $500 million given to election officials was used to treat voters unequally and to improperly influence the election for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The bulk of the funds went to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a nonprofit started by former managers and staff at the New Organizing Institute, a progressive nonprofit.

According to the report, the nonprofit earlier this year “began sending agents into states to recruit certain Democrat strongholds to prepare grants requesting monies from” it.

For example, the center gave $100,000 to Cory Mason, the mayor of Racine, Wisconsin, to recruit four other cities to develop a plan and request a larger grant from it. Those five cities submitted such a plan in June and received $6.3 million to implement it.

That kind of privatization of elections “undermines the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which requires state election plans to be submitted to federal officials and approved and requires respect for equal protection by making all resources available equally to all voters,” the report states.

“The provision of Zuckerberg-CTCL funds allowed these Democrat strongholds to spend roughly $47 per voter, compared to $4 to $7 per voter in traditionally Republican areas of the state. Moreover, this recruiting of targeted jurisdictions for specific government action and funding runs contrary to legislative election plans and invites government to play favorites in the election process.”

Mason’s spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did a Facebook spokesperson, nor CTCL’s media office.

“This effectively is a shadow government running our elections,” Phill Kline, director of the Amistad Project, said at a press conference in Virginia.

“Government has the core responsibility of managing elections. We don’t put out elections for bid. We don’t have elections brought to you by Coca Cola. It is government’s job to manage elections, and it must do so without a thumb on the scale.”

The project said the main foundations funding the efforts include The Democracy Fund, New Venture Fund, Skoll Foundation, and Knight Foundation.

Other nonprofits deemed key to distributing the money besides CTCL were named as the Center for Electronic Innovation Research, the Center for Civic Design, the National Vote at Home Institute, the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and Rock the Vote.

None immediately responded to requests for comment.

The parent organization of the Amistad Project, the Thomas More Society, lists lawyer Jenna Ellis, who was special counsel for the campaign of former president Donald Trump, as a special counsel, but notes her work for the Trump campaign was “wholly separate” and that she is not involved with the Amistad Project.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta was ‘pressured’ by Biden administration to censor Covid-related content

Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of the social media company Meta, said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his teams were “pressured” by the Biden White House to censor some content around the Covid-19 pandemic.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the judiciary committee, Zuckerberg said the pressure he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he came to “regret” that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information” there were decisions made in 2021 that wouldn’t be made today.

“Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden said in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

Zuckerberg in the letter also said the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation around Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but he said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg said his goal is to be “neutral” so will not be “making a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has sought to bridge the divide between his social media giant and policymakers to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

Zuckerberg says he regrets not being more outspoken about ‘government pressure’ on COVID content

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that he regrets not being more outspoken about “government pressure” to take down content related to COVID-19.

Zuckerberg said senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor” content in 2021.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken,” he wrote to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

“Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg added.

The Meta CEO also said the company “shouldn’t have demoted” a New York Post story about corruption allegations involving President Biden’s family ahead of the 2020 election while waiting for fact-checkers to review it.

The social media company has since updated its policies and processes, including no longer demoting content in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers, he noted.

Zuckerberg also said in Monday’s letter that he does not plan to make contributions to local jurisdictions to support election infrastructure this cycle, like he did during the 2020 election.

The contributions, which were “designed to be non-partisan,” were accused of being unfairly distributed between left-leaning and right-leaning areas and labeled “Zuckerbucks” by Republicans.

“Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” Zuckerberg said. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role.”

House Judiciary Republicans touted the letter as a “big win for free speech” Monday night.

“Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. Biden-Harris Admin ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story,” the panel wrote on the social platform X.

“Mark Zuckerberg also tells the Judiciary Committee that he won’t spend money this election cycle. That’s right, no more Zuck-bucks. Huge win for election integrity,” it added.

Meta and other social media companies have long faced accusations from Republicans of censoring conservative content on their platforms.

The Biden administration’s communications with social media companies about taking down COVID-19 and election misinformation were at the center of a case before the Supreme Court last term.

In a 6-3 decision in June, the court rejected challenges to officials’ communications with the companies, finding the two Republican attorneys general and private parties that brought the case did not have legal standing. The justices did not rule on the First Amendment issues in the case, however.

“When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement.

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present,” they added.

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg coming clean on Facebook censorship truly matters, as it cuts down Harris-Walz, ‘experts’ claiming to fight ‘misinformation’

Plenty of folks have a “now he tells us” take on Mark Zuckerberg’s letter detailing (and regretting) Facebook’s censorship of COVID dissent and of The Post’s October 2020 Hunter-laptop scoops.

But the Meta CEO setting the record straight absolutely matters, because the Biden-Harris-Walz crowd, and the forces behind them, are still all-in on social-media censorship in the name of fighting “misinformation.”

As is the left worldwide, from Canada and Brazil to France and Britain.

Zuck’s letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan basically just admits what the committee proved in hearings a year ago:

1) Kamala and Joe’s administration “pressured” Facebook to censor COVID-related content that question the government’s line, quashing not just opinion, but everything from satire to 100% accurate science.

2) Facebook bent to that pressure.

3) Facebook also suppressed our laptop reporting, news highly relevant to the 2020 election.

That last, incidentally, was covered up on purpose by the West’s “disinformation experts,” including at the FBI: Long before we got the laptop, they were conditioning US media and social media to expect a “Russian disinformation” dump centered on Hunter’s sleazy dealings in Ukraine.

Reinforcing it was the Biden-Harris campaign’s own disinformation effort — ginning up the “Spies Who Lie” letter.

And it was all preceded by the Hillary Clinton campaign’s disinfo success in creating the supposed Russiagate scandal by paying for utterly made-up “opposition research” on Donald Trump.

The New York Times and Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for their roles in advancing that total false narrative.

Disinformation is a real thing; it goes back to long before Vladimir Putin’s professional forebears fabricated “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

But the self-appointed “disinfo experts” across the West who claim that the way to fight it is to let them censor the rest of us are utter frauds.

They have their grip on the UK’s Labour Party, the Democrats here in America and other left-of-center parties across the West.

Under Harris and Biden, they briefly got their Ministry of Truth in the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board.

And they did have a White House office, with branches across the US intelligence committee and a guest-star role by Dr. Anthony Fauci, dedicated to the vast social-media censorship exposed by the Twitter Files and Jordan’s committee

Democrats on that committee, by the way, used their time in the hearings to attack the journalists who’d exposed the Big Brother feds.

And have you seen the video of veep-nominee Tim Walz (falsely) explaining, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy”?

So, yes, it absolutely matters that Mark Zuckerberg has come clean, and taken steps so that Facebook won’t get fooled again.

Because the “experts” are still busy plotting how to grab more power if Harris and Walz win this November — and looking to help make that happen.

How Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Rigged the 2020 Election to Defeat Trump

Mark Zuckerberg is best known for creating and leading Facebook, a company that’s made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. With an estimated worth of $80 billion, he poured hundreds of millions of his fortune into the 2020 election.

Here’s the thing: You probably had no idea at the time Zuckerberg was influencing the outcome of the most contentious presidential election in our lifetime. That’s because we didn’t learn the true extent of Zuckerberg’s financial contributions until the voting already took place.

Now, thanks to a new 40-minute documentary film from Citizens United Productions, we know what he did and how to prevent it from happening again.

Citizens United President David Bossie hosts and narrates the film, “Rigged: The Zuckerberg-Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump.” He joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” with director Jason Killian Meath. Listen to the full show or read a lightly edited transcript of our interview below.

Rob Bluey: David, let’s start with you. How did Mark Zuckerberg help defeat Donald Trump, and how did he get away with it?

David Bossie: Such a great question. What most people don’t know, and I would think that most people listening to this right now don’t know, is that Mark Zuckerberg spent $400 million in the 2020 election cycle, and he spent it specifically in just the last several months of the campaign through nonprofits.

He sent his money through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is he and his wife’s operation. They sent the money to these two very hardcore left-wing organizations, the Center for Tech and Civic Life and one other.

CTCL, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, received about $327 million. Just to put it in perspective, their budget in 2019 was $1 million. Their budget for 2020 was $328 million. It’s just an incredible flow of money that came in there.

Their money went out in these grants to state and local election officials. They basically used that money for a giant, massive Democrat get-out-the-vote effort using the drop boxes and mail-in ballots and absentee ballot programs to generate votes for Joe Biden.

I submit that if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t spend the $400 million in the last three or four months of the campaign, Joe Biden does not win.

Bluey: What was it that inspired you to make this film? We’ve heard President Trump talk about the stolen election. We’ve had other people talk about a rigged election. This must have been a massive undertaking on your part to wade through documents and information that many people in the legacy media would have just easily ignored.

Bossie: Yeah, they have, much like the Hunter Biden laptop story. They suppress these stories. They don’t want to tell the stories. They don’t cover the stories. These are important issues. The biased corporate media that we live in and with today, they decide what the American people know and what they don’t know.

Much like half of America that voted and supported Donald Trump, I was frustrated, and I felt like there needed to be an answer to this thirst out there in America, this passion that has made election integrity, which is kind of a boring subject and most people don’t care about it.

It’s not in the top five or top 10 issues in America when you look at the polling data. Election integrity is now at the top of polls especially Republican primary voters. They don’t want to vote for somebody who is not going to take a position to answer and solve the problems of what happened in the past.

So with that question out there and my relationship with President Trump that has been longstanding, we decided that we would try to take this on. It was only through the process of making it did we understand the actual narrative.

This is my third film with Jason Meath. His ability to put this together, his ability to see the narrative and that forest through the trees because it’s so detail-oriented. But you have to keep it interesting and high level while at the same time giving them the granular detail that’s necessary for people to understand and feel like they took away something. It’s a real art form, and it’s really hard to do. My writing partner on this, Jason Meath, did an amazing job on it.

Bluey: Jason, how are you able to uncover the information that’s featured in the film?

Jason Killian Meath: I always know that when I’m going into one of these projects, it’s going to be meticulously researched and sourced, and we are not going to leave anything to chance and going to be very thorough. And that is certainly the case here.

I received a call from Dave, I would say a little bit before Thanksgiving last year. And he told me about this Mark Zuckerberg money. I had to Google it because I had maybe heard a little bit about, but the mainstream press really just doesn’t cover this.

I started researching it. We started talking, as we were planning the pre-production of the film, more facts were coming out about this because there’re numerous investigations and various folks in various election integrity outfits that were looking at this. Scott Walter’s Capital Research Center was looking at various aspects of the Zuckerberg-funded money that went into the election.

And so I started learning pretty much at the same time as making the film, what we were really talking about and what really had transpired in 2020. And the more I learned, really the more shocked I was and really knew that we had a story here that needed to get out.

There’s been talk about this. There was a book called “Rigged” as well that detailed some of this and it was very good. So we were able to follow some of the tax filings, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and CTCL were putting out there that also helped guide us as to where this money was distributed.

Bluey: It’s a captivating film. It’s really beneficial for a lot of our Daily Signal listeners and our audience who asks us all of the time for this evidence, and now you’ve given them a real blockbuster film to do that. President Trump was at your premier at Mar-a-Lago. He also stars in the film. Who are some of the other people who you interviewed, and what information do you bring to light in the film itself?

Bossie: Folks can go to rigged2020.com, and you can stream it on any device anywhere in the world at any time. I urge you do that. You can go there just to watch the trailer. You can watch and read about the film.

You can learn about our incredible cast from Ken Blackwell to Ken Cuccinelli to Cleta Mitchell to Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, Congressman Jody Hice. We have Newt Gingrich and Kellyanne Conway, and of course, President Trump in the film. We have Michael Gableman, who is a former Supreme Court justice in Wisconsin and the special counsel appointed by the state legislature, conducting his investigation. It is a really star-studded cast. The interviews and the narrative that we were able to tell through those interviews really is very powerful.

Then, of course, the documentation of it. We gained access to this information not through any other way other than the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s own IRS 990 forms, which were just filed this January, so it’s only been three or four months since we’ve had really access to the detail of it.

In those tax returns in Wisconsin, as an example, it showed grants to Kenosha of $860,000, $1.1 million to both Green Bay and Madison, $1.7 million to Racine, and $3.4 million to Milwaukee. Those are three Democrat strongholds in the state. It was about 85% of the money, of Zuckerberg’s money that in the state went to Biden-controlled districts.

By the way, the Zuckerberg defenders say that a majority of the grants went to Trump-leaning counties. I don’t care about that. That may be true. It may not be true. But $5,000 and $10,000 grants don’t change an election. What changes an election are the 162 grants that we uncovered that totaled $272 million, and 92% of that money went to Biden districts. That’s putting your thumb on the scale of an election.

Bluey: Jason, when the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative would make these donations that you talk of, what was the stated purpose for doing so, and how was that money actually spent?

Meath: In the tax filing, it is written you have to declare what you are spending the money for. It’s part of the law. You’ve got to say where’s this money going. And it’s very clear, we have it in the film, on their tax filing it said it is to conduct safe elections during the COVID-19.

And so what is a safe election? You would think PPE and gloves and things like that to keep you safe from getting COVID. But that is not at all what the money was spent for and maybe a very small percentage. I think we heard figures of 3%, 6% something along those lines, it went to any PPE or COVID protection.

The bulk of the money, the vast majority, the hundreds of millions of the money, went to get-out-the-vote operations.

Bluey: Who are some of the other major players involved in this scheme particularly those who have a long history in Democrat politics?

Bossie: That’s a great question. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is just a repository of their cash—really so that they can give it out. In the movie, we talk about other places that they give to, all left-wing: the Obama Foundation, the Clinton Foundation. Many, many of the who’s who of the left wing, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative donates to.

The person who is the chief strategist for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is David Plouffe. David Plouffe was Barack Obama’s campaign manager. Another person involved is Joel Benenson, who was the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Of course, David Plouffe is an author of a book, “A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trump.”

These are dedicated partisans who Mark Zuckerberg hires and works with to give them the money to do strategically what they want. One of those went to, as I said, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which received a huge majority of the money: $327 million of the $400 million went to them.

The two leaders of that group, Tiana Epps-Johnson, an Obama fellow at the Obama Foundation, and Donny Bridges, both had previously worked at the New Organizing Institute, which is a hardcore … Mark Levin calls it a communist organization. The New Organizing Institute, the Washington Post called the Democrat Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry. These people really understand data. They understand digital operations. They understand the strategy on how to win.

In his defense, Mark Zuckerberg says this was through a nonpartisan 501(c)(3). Well, these are the people who are running it. That’s like you setting up a foundation and putting me in charge of it and saying it’s nonpartisan. Nobody’s going to think that Dave Bossie woke up tomorrow and is not going to be the conservative activist that he’s been his entire life. It begs credulity.

Bluey: Now, you focus on three states in the film, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. What happened there and why are those three so important?

Meath: We decided on those three states because when you look at the vote tallies of the 2020 election, those three battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin—comprised 42,000 votes in those three states. So, 42,000 votes in those three states is the reason that Joe Biden is president. We conducted most of our focus on those states.

I will say though, that when you look at where the money was spread around, they spread this money to states that were very safe states like New York and California, and Massachusetts. Just about every state received money. And I do believe that was because they wanted an insurance policy. They wanted to make sure that the popular vote total for Joe Biden, if you remember when he won, everybody was talking about how no other president had ever received this many votes.

And I always was left scratching my head thinking, first of all, there’s a pandemic, and we were told that nobody was going to be able to vote and people were going to be afraid to vote. Second of all, Joe Biden did not run on a campaign. He basically hid in his basement most of the time, and when he did go out, there was maybe 10 or 15 people standing in circles—in socially distanced circles—to look at him and he couldn’t even fill up those.

So that always left me scratching my head, like how in the world did this many people … how are they so enthusiastic to go out and vote for this man?

Well, it turns out that they had a lot of help from $400 million donations to get these people to get these people to mail-in votes, get these people to go to drop boxes, and churn out votes wherever they could possibly find them. Not even just in the battleground states, even though those were extremely important for the electoral win. They also juiced those popular numbers.

Bluey: The vast majority of the money went to Democrat-heavy areas. Did any of the nearly 400 million go to election offices and areas that were more likely to support President Trump?

Meath: They will say more grants went to Trump districts than to Biden districts. And that may be true. But the problem is, when you look at the grants, if you applied for a grant, I don’t care who you were. They’d give you $5,000, maybe $10,000, but they didn’t give $42 million, $20 million dollars, $15 million dollars to Trump districts. They were giving those to Joe Biden-heavy areas. That’s where the serious money went.

You can’t flip an election on $5,000, but you can flip an election putting $25 million into a jurisdiction or $40 million into a Democrat-rich county. That’s where you start flipping the election.

Bluey: Thank you for connecting those dots for us. We’ve heard how the left used COVID-19 to change voting laws, some illegally in states like Pennsylvania, but this reaches a whole new level what you’ve just described. Why didn’t we see this coming in 2020, and what are some of the ways that we can prevent it from happening in the future?

Bossie: Such good questions. It is very important what you just pointed out. All of this was under the guise of COVID-19, of performing a safe election for everybody. We talk about it in the film. Even NPR says a very small percentage, and when I say very small, single-digit percentages, went to actual COVID safety masks and Plexiglass and the like.

All of the money really went to GOTV efforts to make Joe Biden able to win this thing. I was involved in the campaign. Look, I was the deputy campaign manager. Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and I ran it in 2016. In 2020, there was a different group of people, but we still were able to help. But I didn’t get involved in the GOTV effort or the Election Day operations effort in 2020.

We didn’t see around the corners that guys who run presidential campaigns need to see around. Your job is to see around a corner. It’s very difficult to do. The RNC has to do its part. They have to have a machine.

By the way, in this midterm election right now that we’re in, there is no overriding national campaign to help run it. It really is the RNC, but maybe a little bit the [National Republican] Senatorial Committee, the [National Republican] Congressional Committee but not really. It’s got to be the RNC who, without a doubt, owns and operates what is going to happen as far as the Election Day activities and the legal side of things.

Meaning, are we going to go into court before Election Day, not after it’s over, not after we’ve had a problem but before? Are we going to do this over the summer and into the fall to make sure that we are fighting ever fight that can be picked?

They have Marc Elias. They have a guy who all day long he and his team sit around, and they are going state by state, county by county, across the country to try to figure out, where can they win, where can they do damage to the Republican Party. We have to do the same.

We have to have a dedicated group of people who are willing to go and fight the fight every single day. Lawyers and political operatives who are going to scour the country to find these weaknesses, to find the places where we’re being adversely affected and go fight those in court before Election Day, not after.

Bluey: One question that I have for you in light of what has transpired recently. Could Zuckerberg or perhaps another billionaire step in and do this again in 2022 during the midterms this year or 2024?

Meath: So think about this. They did this to a president. They were able to be extremely effective in changing the results, or certainly, helped change the results at the very least of a United States presidential election defeating a sitting president. If they can do that, well, now they’re emboldened and they can do anything they want and nothing is stopping any other tech billionaire from coming in and throwing money into a race at the current rate.

There are 17 states that are trying to pass laws to ban the use of this type of private money. But the problem is in a lot of those Democrat swing states, the Democrat governors are vetoing the bills. So there’s nothing to say that in those places, in those areas, that this would not happen again.

And I also would mention that in states like Pennsylvania and others that were very critical in terms of giving the election to Joe Biden, they ignored their own laws in 2020. Many of these states saw this money coming in. Many of these election offices saw this money flowing into their doors and ended up ignoring a lot of their voting laws in favor of throwing out drop boxes onto street corners or distributing mail-in ballots wherever they possibly could.

Just in my house I received five mail-in ballots. I mean, why do I need five mail-in ballots for myself? And this was happening all over the place. So there’s nothing to really stop them unless more states, more crucial states pass election integrity laws.

Bluey: With that being said, what is your message to state legislators who are debating this right now, either in their states or considering doing something in the future that would forbid private funding of government elections in the future?

Meath: A film like this can certainly help try to get us on message and to try to see the gravity of what’s going on in our elections. And the more information like this that we can get out to people. We interviewed Rep. Janel Brandtjen, who’s in the Wisconsin Legislature. And she’s in the film along with Michael Gableman, who was appointed to conduct an investigation of what happened in Wisconsin. And it is very telling when you talk to them, what they’re up against.

Even some Republican lawmakers are scared to talk about election integrity, mainly because if you remember, right after President Trump questioned the election results and other conservatives questioned the election results, the media, and the Democrats freaked out to the point where they wanted to cancel them all, they wanted to throw them off television.

They wanted to call them traders. They wanted to call them even worse names because they were spreading disinformation in all of this. All that’s a smokescreen because this isn’t disinformation, this is the truth, and people need to be armed with the truth in order to make bold moves. And that’s what legislatures need to do: put on their battle armor, get armed with the facts, and go out there and try to correct our very broken election system.

Bluey: And Jason, as I understand it, you and Citizens United Productions have faced your own challenges in terms of getting the message out. Not only through advertising, but perhaps other big players in the media world who perhaps don’t want this message reaching voters. Can you explain some of the difficulties you’ve had in Silicon Valley and other areas?

Meath: Dave is much closer to the day by day of what’s happening in terms of PayPal restricting the movie and platforms restricting getting our advertising and our message out. That happens, of course, to conservatives all the time.

I can tell you as a filmmaker who happens to make films that don’t tow the liberal line—in other words, a conservative filmmaker—I can’t even approach some platforms. I don’t even bother. I know that nobody at Netflix is going to take anything that I’m making.

Think about it, you’re a mid-level guy buying a film that talks about election integrity and the fact that maybe Donald Trump was right in questioning the election results. Your boss is going to fire you. The guy that owns Netflix is a raging liberal. So I get that they’re hamstrung here, but these people try to shut down conservatives all the time.

They’re going to try to stifle this movie. And that’s one reason that Citizens United was brilliant in starting their own platform, rigged2020.com, which has all of their films and all of their content on there for people to watch. And from what I understand, 59 countries around the world are accessing and streaming this movie. So people all over the world are interested in this. And the only way that they’re going to find out the truth is by going to rigged2020.com and subscribing to watch the film because it’s very difficult to get these messages out in any other platform.

Bluey: Before I let you go, I’ve got to ask the question of what President Trump’s reaction was to the film when he was able to see it at Mar-a-Lago?

Meath: The president came up and he said to everybody in attendance, his quote was, “I really liked a lot of movies over the course of my life. ‘Citizen Kane’ was excellent. ‘Gone With the Wind’ was excellent. ‘Titanic’ was excellent, but this is the one I most look forward to seeing.”

So that was straight from the president at the premier. And when he said that it made it all worthwhile because that’s what we’re doing it for. We don’t want another 2020 to happen again.

Bossie: I watched [Trump] watch the movie. It was really interesting. I’ve done a lot of things with the president, but I’d never watched a movie with him before in a movie theater. After it was over, he stood up and turned to me and he said, “You know this is really sad.” I didn’t know where he was going with it. He said, “This is really sad. It’s sad that this happened, and it’s sad that you had to make this movie.” He said, “You know what? It’s actually depressing. What you just described in this film is so powerful. It should never have happened. It did happen, and it’s depressing that that’s the reason that Joe Biden is president.”

But on the other hand, he’s happy now to have the facts and evidence. It was borne out in North Carolina because he talked about the movie at the rally that he had there in North Carolina. He also showed the trailer several times to the crowd. It was incredibly well received.

The president is a fighter. It’s why he and I get along so well. We’re both fighters, and we are never going to stop fighting for what we believe in.

Bluey: David, tell our listeners one more time how they can get the film.

Bossie: Please go to rigged2020.com. You can stream it anywhere in the world on any device. You can use PayPal. You can use Apple Pay.

Back when I started making films, we were on VHS. Today, it’s all digital, and you can watch it anywhere in the world. It’s an amazing thing.

When I showed the president the trailer for it the first time, I actually pulled it up on my phone and mirrored it to his television in his office. The technology today, younger people take it for granted, but it is an amazing thing. The impact and the depth you can now have with a film. Whereas back in the day, it was really hard. You had to go to a movie theater or send it to somebody on a VHS. Today, digitally it’s a game-changer.

People can send this film, “Rigged,” all across the country and please do. Make sure people know this film exists. Go to rigged2020.com and watch it for yourself.

Bluey: You have made dozens of fantastic films throughout your career. It is truly remarkable. Thank you for the work that you do each and every day, David, because we are grateful. We know the power of video and film is just so impactful.

Bossie: It is really. Thank you for reminding me because all of those films, our entire library is up at rigged2020.com, the entire catalog of films, all 27 films are there. “Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny,” with Newt Gingrich and Callista Gingrich, another film which is one of my favorites. “Nine Days That Changed the World,” and my film on Pope John Paul II. It is, in my opinion, one of the great films. It came in second at the Vatican Film Festival many years ago. I just love that. That’s one of my favorite films. I urge everybody to go watch this film. Then you get to enjoy lots of other films that are up there.

Bluey: David and Jason, thank you so much for joining us today.

Bossie: Thanks for having me.

Meath: Thanks for all you’re doing, Rob. Appreciate it.

Without Zuckerberg money, limited private funding available for elections

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is no longer helping to cover the cost of running elections, and grants to local governments will be far smaller this year.

In 2020, a group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wifegave$332 million to local governments to run the presidential election amid a global pandemic, prompting a Republican backlash that led to more than two dozen states banning or limiting private funding for elections.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life is again awarding grants this fall — but in much smaller amounts. The $2.5 million it plans to give to small and midsize communities in as many as 19 states totals less than 1 percent of what it spent in 2020. The grants will have nowhere near the nationwide effect they did in the last presidential election but could nonetheless spark controversy.

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan,are not participating in the program this year, according to the center.Zuckerberg has said he made one-time donations to the center in 2020 because the covid-19 pandemic fueled a spike in costs for election officials.

But election costs remain daunting, and they can be particularly challenging for cash-strapped rural communities, said Tiana Epps-Johnson, the center’s founder and executive director.

“It’s really been clear that there are many rural election departments right now that have really critical funding gaps,” she said in an interview. “We know that 5 or 10 or $25,000 can go a really long way toward meaningful improvements in smaller jurisdictions.”

Election officials have long complained they don’t have enough money. Running elections across the United States costs $2 billion to $5 billion a year, according to estimates from academics and election officials. Congress allocated $55 million for elections this year, leaving states and local governments to come up with most of the funding they need.

Election officials’ financial needs were acute in 2020 because of the pandemic. They used the funding from the Center for Tech and Civic Life to overhaul polling places, provide workers with hazard pay, set up ballot drop boxes, and purchase cleaning supplies, protective gear and expensive ballot-processing equipment to accommodate the rise in mail voting.

Republicans branded the grants as “Zuckerbucks” and called them unfair because so much of the money went to urban areas, where Democratic voters are concentrated. They argued Democrats would cry foul ifGOP megadonor Charles Koch or other conservatives helped cover the cost of overseeing elections in Republican-leaning areas.

The Anti-Defamation League has called the term “Zuckerbucks” antisemitic, and the center said it provided funding to every election agency that made alegitimate request, including ones in heavily Republican areas.

Legal challenges to the donations failed, andmany states restricted private election funding after Donald Trump lost the presidential election. House Republicans have pushed for a national ban on nonprofit groups providing funding for elections.

“Americans deserve to have confidence in their elections, which means elections should be free from undue private influence,” Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) said during a February congressional hearing.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life’s Johnson said her group was making funding available because Congress isn’t meeting its obligations.

“It should absolutely be coming from public sources,” she said of election funding. “But until they are stepping up at the scale of the need … we are going to continue to do that work.”

This year’s grants, announced Friday, will be awarded to rural and “nonmetro” communities, as defined by the Agriculture Department, in 19 states, including deep-red Wyoming, Republican-leaning Alaska, and political battlegrounds Michigan and Nevada. Some of the states, such as Illinois and Washington, are solidly Democratic but include heavily Republican rural areas.

Nearly 5,000 communities are eligible for grants, and most of them have fewer than 5,000 residents of voting age, according to the center. The smallest communities can apply for up to $5,000, and the largest ones can apply for up to $100,000.

Resources

npr.org, “How Zuckerberg Influenced the 2020 Election.” By Tom Scheck, Geoff Hing, Sabby Robinson, and Gracie Stockton; nypost.com, “Zuckerberg’s election spending was ‘carefully orchestrated’ to influence 2020 vote: ex-FEC member.” By Steven Nelson and Bruce Golding; theepochtimes.com, “Money From Facebook’s Zuckerberg Used to Undermine Election, Violate Law: Report.” By Zachary Stieber; abc7chicago.com,” By Colin McCullough; thehill.com, “Zuckerberg says he regrets not being more outspoken about ‘government pressure’ on COVID content.” by Julia Shapero; nypost.com, “Yes, Mark Zuckerberg coming clean on Facebook censorship truly matters, as it cuts down Harris-Walz, ‘experts’ claiming to fight ‘misinformation’” By Post Editorial Board; washingtonpost.com, “Without Zuckerberg money, limited private funding available for elections: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is no longer helping to cover the cost of running elections, and grants to local governments will be far smaller this year.” By Patrick Marley; dailysignal.com, “How Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Rigged the 2020 Election to Defeat Trump.” By Rob Bluey;

Voting and Elections

Without Zuckerberg money, limited private funding available for elections

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