Democrats Enjoyed Zuckerberg Paying Hundreds of Millions to Set Up Their Own Private Election Forces That They're Looking to Spend One Billion Dollars On Private Vote Collection Efforts in 2024

Did you enjoy the hundreds of millions Mark Zuckerberg spent on pumping money into blue jurisdictions to "help" them collect, "correct," and count votes?

Then you're going to love this.

Steve Miller for Real Clear Investigations:

Democrats and their progressive allies are vastly expanding their unprecedented efforts, begun in 2020, to use private money to influence and run public elections.

Supported by groups with more than $1 billion at their disposal, according to public records, these partisan groups are working with state and local boards to influence functions that have long been the domain of government or political parties.

Registering and turning out voters - once handled primarily by political parties -- and design of election office websites and mail-in ballots are being handed over to those same nonprofits, which are staffed by progressive activists that include former Democratic Party advocates, organized labor adherents and community organizers.

Republicans have opposed such efforts, passing legislation in 24 states since 2020 curbing the private financing of elections. But the GOP does not have a comparable, boots-on-the-ground effort to influence election boards and workers, and the private-funding bans haven't proved absolute in some states.

"There is a cottage industry of 501c3s in public policy and in the political arena, trying to shape the future of immigration or education or any other topic," said Kimberly Fiorello, a former Republican state representative in Connecticut. "Increasingly they are about elections, election administration, election technology, ballot design, and all with big funding. These groups seem innocuous, but they aren't innocuous because they are funded by one political side."

Many of the progressive groups seeking to influence elections are connected to Arabella Advisors, a Washington-based, for-profit consulting company founded by Eric Kessler, a White House appointee during the Clinton administration.

Arabella again -- the biggest "dark money" operation in history.

Say, remember when Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself as usual, objected to "dark money"?

Since Democrats became the masters of dark money, suddenly the media's objections to it completely dried up.

Arabella's projects, which include the New Venture Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund and Secure Democracy USA, had combined revenues of $1.3 billion between 2020 and 2021, tax filings show. Nonprofits supported by Arabella in 2020 gave out $529 million to "defend democracy."

That coincided with the rise of private-public election partnerships as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated an estimated $350 million to the progressive Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) to support local efforts in the pandemic-challenged 2020 election.

The voting was marked by social-distancing rule changes encouraging early and mail balloting, imposing policies that Republicans seek to roll back to pre-pandemic rules. The grants of "Zuckerbucks"or "Zuckbucks," as they are referred to by conservative critics, were supposed to be nonpartisan, but research indicated they were disproportionately allocated to areas to boost Democratic voter turnout.

posted by Ace at 02:00 PM

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