Organization Trends
BREAKING: New IRS Disclosures Confirm Flood of Private Money to Elections Offices from Zuckerberg Grantee
Newly released filings for the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) reveal how the infamous Chicago-based nonprofit funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to local elections offices in an effort to privatize the 2020 election and put Joe Biden in the White House.
For over a year, CRC has been on the cutting edge of reporting on this “dark money” behemoth, which used the COVID-19 pandemic to support an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots with unaccountable drop-boxes in critical Democratic cities.
The group’s IRS Form 990 filing for 2020 reveals thousands of grants to elections offices across the country. We’re still combing through them, but it’s already clear that our key findings from nine state reports earlier this year—Arizona and Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Virginia—will be confirmed in the coming weeks.
New discoveries reveal that Mark Zuckerberg funneled $328 million through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest community foundation in America and a notable donor to left-wing causes. Zuckerberg is perhaps the single largest donor to the foundation, dumping close to $2 billion into the pass-through since 2010.
The foundation’s CTCL grant was the second-largest it paid out in 2020; its Zuckerberg-backed $69.5 million grant to the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR)—a CTCL ally which passed the funds on to secretaries of state—was the foundation’s third-largest that year.
We’ve also discovered a $25 million grant from the New Venture Fund to CTCL, linking the latter to a $1.7 billion “dark money” empire run by Arabella Advisors in Washington, DC. Wherever Arabella operates, you can be sure to find the most sophisticated activist campaigns on the Left.
Partisan Is as Partisan Does
CTCL is a product of the professional Left founded by three veteran Democratic campaign operatives whose last gig was training left-wing activists for the New Organizing Institute, which the Washington Post once hailed as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.”
In late 2020, these operatives devised a strategy to unseat President Trump by boosting turnout for Democrats in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and other battleground states.
CTCL claims its COVID-19 “relief funds” were distributed on a nonpartisan basis and meant to make voting safer—never mind the $400 million Congress allocated to elections infrastructure via the CARES Act. But earlier this year, House Republicans investigating CTCL pointed out that less than 1 percent of its COVID-19 “relief funds” went to personal protective equipment (PPE).
The group’s defenders—most recently the normally right-leaning Washington Examiner—try to prove CTCL’s nonpartisanship by pointing out that the group gave more grants to counties which voted for Trump than for Biden.
Yet the data betray partisan patterns favoring large, Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia, where elections officials were given early notice of CTCL grants before their counterparts in Republican counties by professional Democratic consultants.
In Pennsylvania, CTCL grants to counties Biden won averaged $3.11 per capita and just $0.57 in counties Trump won. And in Arizona, CTCL grants provided $5.83 per capita in counties Biden won versus $1.29 in counties Trump won.
“Zuck Bucks” paid for private drop-boxes across key cities to hoover up mail-in ballots, bypassing the U.S. Postal Service in what was effectively the country’s first mail-in election—thanks to last-minute election law changes by Democratic secretaries of state and endless pressure from activist groups like the National Vote At Home Institute.
In Wisconsin, CTCL’s grant to Green Bay caused the city to effectively “take over” county election functions, according to a former local elections clerk. CTCL itself worked “primarily with our five major Democratic base cities,” she told John Solomon over the summer, breaking processes across the key battleground state:
As we got closer to the November election, we found out that this outside group had come in and was basically trying to redo our forms and documents that we use statewide. And these people were from out of state and had no business doing that.
CTCL funds even paid for Racine, Wisconsin’s “mobile voting precinct”—a $250,000 van purchased in 2021. Does CTCL plan to plague the country with “relief funds” every year?
The Tip of the Iceberg
Twelve months of steady digging by CRC and other watchdog groups has put CTCL on the defensive, with the group boasting in October that its private funding of public elections offices somehow made 2020 “the most secure election in U.S. history.”
We’ll let the facts speak for themselves.