“Although about half the states ban private dollars from funding local governing of elections as a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial grants in 2020, a tech-aligned group will dole out individual $500,000 grants to jurisdictions for future elections.
The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, established in April, will award individual grants of $500,000 to at least two local jurisdictions out of 10 that the organization accepted into the program.
Greenwich, Connecticut, and Macoupin County, Illinois, each will get $500,000 under the alliance’s membership agreement, according to documents obtained by The Daily Signal through public records requests.
The Alliance for Election Excellence primarily is a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, or CTCL, which distributed $350 million in grants from a foundation run by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to local election offices. Critics say that money primarily benefited Democrat turnout in the 2020 election.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life teamed with several other technology and election organizations for the alliance. It includes the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, a project of the liberal New Venture Fund, a nonprofit funded by the “dark money” group Arabella Advisors. Arabella is known for bankrolling various groups on the Left.
“They are just bulking up in the states where this funding is still legal, which thankfully is a dwindling number,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election watchdog group, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
A letter from the Alliance for Election Excellence to election officials in each of the 10 jurisdictions, dated Dec. 1, says: “I am pleased to inform you that based on and in reliance upon the information and materials provided [that] the Center for Tech and Civic Life (‘CTCL’), a nonprofit organization tax-exempt under Internal Revenue Code (‘IRC’) section 501(c)(3), has decided to award a grant to support the work of Town of Greenwich (‘Grantee’).”
The letter says the amount of the alliance’s grant is $500,000, with the first $150,000 to be paid in December 2022 and another $350,000 to be paid in December 2023. That would place the bulk of the funding just ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“CTCL’s new effort, camouflaged as the ‘Alliance for Election Excellence,’ still tries to manipulate elections by giving money to government offices. But money always comes with strings, even if CTCL calls them ‘training’ and ‘mentorship,’” Scott Walter, president of the Washington-based Capital Research Center, an investigative think tank, told The Daily Signal in an email. “
Read more here at the Daily Signal
