Zuckerberg and Center for Election Innovation and Research

5,456 Views | 53 Replies | Last: 3 yr ago by VitruvianAg
aggiehawg
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AG
Posted this in the election day thread but needs more visibility.

LINK

Quote:

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced on September 1 that they were providing $300 million in funding to support non-profits to provide assistance to city and county election offices, with $250 million going to CTCL and $50 million going to the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR).
According to a press release, CTCL used the $250 million to support the following at the local level:
"
  • Poll worker recruitment, hazard pay, and training
  • Polling place rental
  • Temporary staffing support
  • Drive-through voting
  • Equipment to process ballots and applications
  • Personal protective equipment (PPE) for poll workers
  • Nonpartisan voter education from cities and counties
"
Prior to the September 1 announcement, CTCL had announced various grants it was making to city and county election offices, but without specifying the source of the funding for this activity. In July 2020, CTCL announced it would provide $6.3 million in grants to five cities in Wisconsin to support their administration of the November 2020 elections.

In August, CTCL announced that it was preparing an additional round of election administration assistance grants for rural counties.

In August, CTCL signed a grant agreement with the City of Philadelphia to provide it with $10 million in election assistance. CTCL also provided $2.2 million in election assistance to Delaware County.

Several counties in Georgia, including DeKalb, were also working with the National Vote at Home Institute and CTCL to support their election administration.


aggiejayrod
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AG
nothing to see here, Facebook is a completely unbiased if slightly right-wing company.

/concerned moderates
titan
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S

The same Mark Zuckerberg who admitted under oath at the Big Tech hearings on Capitol Hill that most of his employees "lean left"???
FrioAg 00:
Leftist Democrats "have completely overplayed the Racism accusation. Honestly my first reaction when I hear it today is to assume bad intentions by the accuser, not the accused."
bmks270
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AG
So elections are now being funded and organized by billionaires instead of our local governments?

Elections seems like one thing tax dollars should be spent on. There should be no donors, non-profits, and influence peddling in organizing the elections (with the exception of allowing party observers).
RyanAg08
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Quote:

Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR)


Why does such a thing exist? Each legally qualified person gets one vote, and then you count that vote. This isn't rocket science.
pfo
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AG
That's frightening. The NRA, Harley Club of America , Center for American Families and Constitutional Society, and Declaration of Independence Society needs to provide similar voter polling station training to our people... just to make sure to keep it fair.
titan
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S
bmks270 said:

So elections are now being funded and organized by billionaires instead of our local governments?

Elections seems like one thing tax dollars should be spent on. There should be no donors, non-profits, and influence peddling in organizing the elections (with the exception of allowing party observers).
One place always sympathetic to the liberal side was the opposition of bundles of money being counted as valid in the same one an individual's contribution is. The case law liberals have objected to is complex, but it has never not sounded like a very nice way of saying bribery, imo.
FrioAg 00:
Leftist Democrats "have completely overplayed the Racism accusation. Honestly my first reaction when I hear it today is to assume bad intentions by the accuser, not the accused."
dmart90
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Quote:

In August, CTCL signed a grant agreement with the City of Philadelphia to provide it with $10 million in election assistance. CTCL also provided $2.2 million in election assistance to Delaware County.
Why would the City of Philadelphia need $10M in election assistance? What valid reason exists for this? I'm really not getting it...
aggiehawg
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AG
dmart90 said:

Quote:

In August, CTCL signed a grant agreement with the City of Philadelphia to provide it with $10 million in election assistance. CTCL also provided $2.2 million in election assistance to Delaware County.
Why would the City of Philadelphia need $10M in election assistance? What valid reason exists for this? I'm really not getting it...
Payroll a/k/a bribes to poll and vote counting workers to cheat.
JW
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AG
1984
bat61
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What the hell is CTCL?
aggiehawg
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bat61 said:

What the hell is CTCL?
Click on the link, doofus.

Quote:

The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Chicago, Illinois. As of September 2020, the group described itself as "a team of civic technologists, trainers, researchers, election administration and data experts working to foster a more informed and engaged democracy, and helping to modernize U.S. elections." The organization was founded in 2015.


aggiehawg
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AG
Let's circle back around to this. Ken Blackwell, former Sec of State for Ohio has been following this. He writes:

Quote:

Let's not forget that liberals have been consumed by a fixation with removing Donald Trump from office for longer than he's actually been in office. The sordid story of the 2020 election heist begins all the way back in January 2017, when Barack Obama's former campaign manager and senior advisor, David Plouffe, took a job leading the policy and advocacy efforts of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a "charitable" organization established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Earlier this year, just as it was becoming clear that Joe Biden would be the Democratic Party's nominee for president, Plouffe published a book outlining his vision for the Democrats' roadmap to victory in 2020, which involved a "block by block" effort to turn out voters in key Democratic strongholds in the swing states that would ultimately decide the election, such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Minneapolis.

The book was titled, A Citizen's Guide to Defeating Donald Trump, and it turned out that the citizen Plouffe had in mind was none other than his former boss, Mark Zuckerberg. Although Plouffe no longer officially managed Zuckerberg's policy and advocacy efforts at that point, the political operative's influence evidently remained a powerful force.
Quote:

Under the pretext of assisting election officials conduct "safe and secure" elections in the age of COVID, Zuckerberg donated $400 million as much money as Congress appropriated for the same general purpose to nonprofit organizations founded and run by left-wing activists. The primary recipient was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which received the staggering sum of $350 million. Prior to Zuckerberg's donations, CTCL's annual operating expenses averaged less than $1 million per year. How was Zuckerberg even aware of such a small-potatoes operation, and why did he entrust it with of the money he was pouring into this election cycle, despite the fact that it had no prior experience handling such a massive amount of money?

Predictably, given the partisan background of its leading officers, CTCL proceeded to distribute Zuckerberg's funds to left-leaning counties in battleground states. The vast majority of the money handed out by CTCL especially in the early days of its largesse went to counties that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Some of the biggest recipients, in fact, were the very locales Plouffe had identified as the linchpins of the Democrat strategy in 2020.

Zuckerberg and CTCL left nothing to chance, however, writing detailed conditions into their grants that dictated exactly how elections were to be conducted, down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places. The Constitution gives state lawmakers sole authority for managing elections, but these grants put private interests firmly in control.
Illegal as hell, in my view. And this is even more infuriating.

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Amistad Project lawyers tried to prevent this unlawful collusion by filing a flurry of lawsuits in eight states prior to Election Day. Unfortunately, judges were forced to put those lawsuits aside without consideration of their merits because the plaintiffs had not yet suffered "concrete harm" in the form of fraudulent election results. The law had no remedy to offer because the left's lawless schemes had not yet reached fruition.
Quote:

In the meantime, CTCL continued splashing Zuckerberg's cash only now, the organization was intent on finding Republican-leaning jurisdictions to give its donations a veneer of bipartisanship. Of course, the number of votes in play in those counties paled in comparison to those in the liberal counties. Philadelphia County alone, for instance, projected that the $10 million grant it received from CTCL would enable it to increase turnout by 25-30 percent translating to well over 200,000 votes.

The left didn't put all of its eggs into the CTCL basket, though. High-ranking state officials simultaneously took significant steps to weaken ballot security protocols, acting on their own authority without permission or concurrence from the state legislatures that enshrined those protections in the law.

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In Wisconsin, Democrat Secretary of State Doug La Follette allowed voters to claim "indefinite confinement" in order to avoid having to provide a photocopy of their ID when requesting an absentee ballot. The exemption was intended for legitimate invalids, but COVID offered a convenient excuse for circumventing the law, despite the fact that Wisconsin had no pandemic-related lockdown rules that would have rendered anyone "indefinitely confined." The impact was far-reaching. About 240,000 voters claimed the exemption in 2020, compared to just 70,000 in 2016.

In Michigan, Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson unilaterally voided the legal requirement that voters provide a signature when requesting an absentee ballot, establishing an online request form. She then took things a step further by announcing that she would "allow civic groups and other organizations running voter registration drives to register voters through the state's online registration website," granting partisan groups such as Rock The Vote direct access to Michigan's voter rolls.
Quote:

In Pennsylvania, election officials in heavily-Democratic counties that received CTCL funding allowed flawed mail-in ballots to be "cured" that is, altered or replaced prior to Election Day. In other counties, officials rightly interpreted this as a flagrant violation of state law. On the night before Election Day, less than 24 hours before polls were due to close, Democrat Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar sought to imbue this illegal practice with the appearance of validity by issuing a statement authorizing counties to contact voters who had cast improper ballots. Even if Boockvar had the statutory authority to do this, which she did not, the timing of her memo made it impossible for rural counties to take advantage of it to nearly the same extent as urban counties.

In numerous states, officials also absurdly consolidated the vote-counting and ballot-curing process in sporting arenas and other large venues, rather than the ward- and precinct-level offices that normally handle the job. This made absolutely no sense as a pandemic-related safety measure, but that didn't stop the officials from citing COVID as their rationale.

Consolidating the vote-counting tied the other efforts together. Instead of a manageable number of ballots being transported to small offices and counted in the immediate presence of observers from both parties, truckloads of ballots were brought to a single location, inevitably resulting in confusion and commingling of ballots from various sources. Securing those ballots from the time they left voters' hands to the time they were officially counted should have been the top priority of election workers, but it's not even clear whether there were logs kept identifying which ballots were delivered by which trucks and when. If such logs even exist, they have not been disclosed.

At the same time, election officials could claim that they were adhering to legal requirements that observers be "in the room" during the counting process while using COVID as an excuse for relegating those observers to the "penalty box," far from the actual counting and curing.
Quote:

These election workers, it should be noted, were paid directly by CTCL's grants. These supposedly impartial arbiters of our electoral process are supposed to work for the people, but they were on Zuckerberg's payroll.
LINK

Infuriating!!!
YouBet
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Anytime you ever read anything about voter advocacy or voting drive initiatives or voting support and assistance or voting improvement initiatives it's 100% a front for ensuring Democrats win by any means necessary.
Ag4coal
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What they actual ****.


I am withholdings from calling this election fraudulent because I'm not jacked up to over throw a government. But we NEED election security to be re-evaluated. Only one party is trying to stop that from happening.
aggiehawg
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Bump because people are ignoring the massive money to steal the election.
Funky Winkerbean
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I'd like to see the balance sheet on that outfit. IRS needs to visit them.
EskimoJoe
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Troutslime said:

I'd like to see the balance sheet on that outfit. IRS needs to visit them.


Im sure they are next on the list after the audit of the Clinton foundation is complete.
BennyBlancoFromTheBright
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Disgusting and infuriating -- skulls need to be bashed for this type of treason.
Including those who condone it (see all the trolling liberal threads on here).
policywonk98
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AG
Falls in line with the $35 million no bid contract SoS CA Padilla, awarded to SDK Knickerbocker to manage the mail in balloting initiative in CA. The firm was clearly a pro-biden firm.

Really is unbelievable how many different angles the Dems took to control as many aspects of this election as they could with Dem operatives.
texrover91
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Posted this weeks before the election when everyone said Biden didn't have a ground game
richardag
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Infuriating and illegal.
-We understand why children are afraid of darkness ... but why are men afraid of light?
Plato
Funky Winkerbean
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I might despise Zuck as much as Schiff
aggiehawg
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Bump because of the Georgia hearing.
Funky Winkerbean
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Trump needs to pull an Obama and have the IRS give them a call.
aggiehawg
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Bump. Again read the Blackwell article I posted. Zuckerberg controlled the grants and recipients had to break state election laws to get the money.

Follow the money.
Funky Winkerbean
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I hope this is where the FBI is.
aggiehawg
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Troutslime said:

I hope this is where the FBI is.
I wasn't following all of the Georgia committee hearings in depth but one of the times I peaked into watch, there was a Trump person hitting heavily on CTCL and the money they gave DeKalb, Fulton and other Georgia counties.

So to recap what happened in Georgia: In spring 2019 because of issues with the 17 year old voting system that were electronic only with no paper receipt were thrown out by a federal judge. A few months later in July 2019, Sec State Raffensperger announces his selection of Dominion and mandates they be used statewide. The total deal is around 109 million. And again the lawsuits fly challenging the security (among other things) of Dominion's Democracy Suite.

With such a price tag some counties flat out couldn't afford those machines. Enter CTCL with these "grants." Grants that mandate how the election is to be run, contrary to state law.

Then you had the Stacey Abrams inspired lawsuit that went state wide to change the election procedures through the Consent and Settlement Agreement in March 2020. When Sec of State Raffensperger started to implement those changes, he was again violating the state election laws but on a statewide level.
aggie appraiser
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wow
aggiehawg
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AG
More on this.

Quote:

I do know, however, of a scheme by left-leaning out-of-state donors Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan to give $350 million to an allegedly "nonpartisan" nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which in turn re-granted the funds to thousands of governmental election officials around the country. CRC has begun state-by-state studies of how these funds were used, beginning with Georgia (Pennsylvania is next). As I testified Friday to the Georgia state Senate, the Georgia data are startling.

We can't specify all funding CTCL gave to Georgia counties, because the Center isn't disclosing that information to the Associated Press or anyone else, even though they're required to reveal it in their next IRS filing (which conveniently won't appear until a year from now). But using local government records and news accounts, we've uncovered many of the largest grants, mostly given to the largest urban areas, and CTCL has disclosed which counties received grants, though not the amounts. Notably, CTCL funded less than one-third of all counties.

We've correlated the grants with the official vote totals for the counties involved. Here are some notable discoveries we've found:

Quote:

We've correlated the grants with the official vote totals for the counties involved. Here are some notable discoveries we've found:
  • Nine out of ten of CTCL's largest known grants went to counties Joe Biden won.
  • Of the ten counties with the greatest shifts to the Democratic presidential candidate (comparing 2016 to 2020 votes), nine received CTCL grants.
  • These nine grantees averaged a 13.7 percent shift toward the Democrat. Two, Cobb and Gwinnett, were among the four counties that delivered Biden the most votes.
  • Although CTCL funded more counties won by Donald Trump than by Biden in raw numbers, it only funded 21 percent of all Trump counties versus 55 percent of Biden counties. So a Biden county was more than two-and-a-half times more likely to receive funding.
  • CTCL funded all four counties that provided Biden 100,000 or more votes.
  • And CTCL funded those four counties lavishly. Per capita, they received between $4.38 and $10.47 for every man, woman, and child.
  • By contrast, so far as we currently know, only one county won by Trump was funded above one dollar per capita (Cherokee), and that county's Democratic vote leapt up 70 percent, compared to a 24 percent rise in its Republican vote. Trump counties like Carroll, Camden, and Lumpkin received about a half-dollar or less.
  • Biden carried 33 counties that delivered him 10,000 or more votes. CTCL funded 70 percent of them. By contrast, Trump carried 46 counties that gave him 10,000 or more votes, but CTCL funded only 20 percent of them. So the most vote-rich counties for Biden were three-and-a-half times more likely to be funded than Trump's most vote-rich counties.
  • Totaling votes in all 44 counties CTCL funded, the Republican presidential vote rose 207,000 over the last election. The Democratic presidential vote jumped by 530,000, or more than two-and-a-half times the Republican rise.
Do these numbers sound nonpartisan? If not, shouldn't the authorities in Georgia and other battleground states, and authorities in Washington, start investigating what happened, and whether CTCL, which is legally forbidden to act as a partisan in elections, overstepped the law? There may be perfectly ethical explanations for all this that involve zero electoral influence by outside parties, but public trust in elections requires avoiding even the appearance of conflicts of interest.

I gave the Georgia senators some obvious questions to ask: How did these relationships between CTCL and counties in Georgia begin? Did CTCL reach out first? What preconditions did the Center put on its funds? Did the counties fulfill their budgetary and other obligations under Georgia state law when using these funds? Who designed voter "education" materials and advertisements?
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That's still a live question for Georgia and her voters, because CTCL is already offering more grants to county offices for the U.S. Senate runoff elections in January. As I told the Peach State senators, some states forbid this kind of funding. Georgia can too.
LINK
aggiehawg
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Quote:

AMHERST, Va., Sept. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, voters in four battleground states filed lawsuits in federal courts to block the alleged funneling of millions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg, Google, and others through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), intended to use government employees to influence the outcome of the presidential election on November 3. The Complaint claims that the use of the funds violates a federal law known as the Help America Vote Act, which prohibits local governments from accepting private federal election grants without state legislative approval and results in government playing favorites in the election process.
Quote:

The complaints detail how CTCL has used the funds to issue "grants" to local municipal governments, which are allocating them to fund election activities. These efforts are intentionally targeting Democratic strongholds for the purpose of boosting voter turnout in those areas that delivered overwhelming majorities for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election in a clear effort to sway the statewide 2020 elections.

"Government cannot be in the business of playing favorites in elections. These targeted funds pay government officials to turn out the vote in blue jurisdictions while the governors in these states are making it difficult and actually discouraging in-person voting on Election Day in more conservative areas of the states," explained Phill Kline, the Director of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, representing the voters in the four federal lawsuits. "Government targeting Democrat portions of a state to increase voter turnout, while also targeting Republican areas of the state to make it harder to vote, violates the basic premise of American jurisprudence that we are all equal before the law," he added.

"While Mark Zuckerberg can use his private funds to help voters, these city and county officials can't use the funds from CTCL to favor a certain class of voters over another. America has a dark history of voter suppression before the Voting Rights Act became law. This rigging of the game is the other side of that same coin," Kline concluded.

Cumulatively, CTCL has thus far "granted" nearly $26 million to the defendant cities and counties, which had cast nearly 76% of their over 2.5 million combined total votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016. President Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes, Minnesota by 44,593 votes, Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes, and Wisconsin by 22,748 votes that year.

CTCL is a left-leaning election activist group pushing major government voting initiatives in Democratic strongholds, which raises alarms about the integrity of the November election and demonstrates a present danger in allowing private groups to influence elections. The group boasts that its major funding sources include Google and Facebook, and the group just recently received a contribution of $250 million from billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.

According to the complaints, the CTCL funds are being used for equipment for mail-in and absentee voting; satellite election offices for in-person mail-in voting; in-person voting at polling places on Election Day; dropboxes, in some cases hundreds of them, for hand-delivering mail-in ballots without U.S. post marks; and voter registration programs. In Michigan alone, the precincts that receive funds from CTCL may have up to a $100 to $1 funding advantage over precincts that rely on Michigan Election Commission funds alone to help manage their elections.
Quote:

The defendants in the federal lawsuits include the cities of East Lansing, Flint, Lansing, and Wayne County/Detroit, Michigan; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Delaware County and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine, Wisconsin. The plaintiffs are the Minnesota Voters Alliance; the Election Integrity Fund (Michigan); several state legislators and congressional candidates in Pennsylvania; and the Wisconsin Voters Alliance.
LINK

Note the date. Before the election.




BadMoonRisin
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I posted this a few days after the election. I was shocked.

https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3154874/replies/57866860

To give you a comparison, $400M is the same amount that the federal government allocated to states to run their election. Zuckerberg matched that amount. This should not be legal.

Also, remember how Zuck was telling people that the media needs to parrot out that you might not know who the winner is until "several days or weeks" after the election? Wonder why that was.

This whole thing was telegraphed in plain sight....no wonder sleepy Joe didnt even bother attempting to look like he was running a real campaign.
I know I ain't leavin' you like I know He ain't leavin' us
I know we believe in God and I know God believes in us
clarkebkr07
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AG
I have been very intrigued by this, and thank you for bringing attention to it. Did the courts ever hear the cases?
aggiehawg
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AG
clarkebkr07 said:

I have been very intrigued by this, and thank you for bringing attention to it. Did the courts ever hear the cases?
Trying to track that down. Don't know.
thirdcoast
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I trust Zuckerberg more than Soros.

Zuckerberg testified to AOC that he thought it was bad to censor and good to expose lying. Soros would NEVER say that.

Also, in terms of staffing...how could it get any worse with DPS level gov workers screwing things up now.
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