Arizona State Senate Passes Bill That Prohibits Private Funding of Election Administration

The Arizona State Senate passed a bill on Tuesday prohibiting the private funding of election administration.

The Republican-controlled state senate passed HB 2569, a bill banning the private funding of election administration and management, in a straight party-line vote 16 to 14.

The bill, which passed the Republican-controlled Arizona House of Representatives last month in a 31 to 29 party-line vote, now goes to Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, for his signature to become law.

“HB 2569 is common sense legislation that will ensure Arizona’s elections are free from outside influence and that our voters can have confidence in the integrity of the process,” State Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek), who sponsored the bill in the House, told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.

“Nearly half a billion dollars in private funding was spent by out of state Democrat billionaires to influence the administration of county and state elections operations nationally, including millions here in Arizona. The Arizona legislature doesn’t want billionaires from any Party, or of any kind, attempting to influence our election system,” Hoffman added.

As Breitbart News reported in December, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, contributed a total of $419 million to two non-profit groups, The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which provided privately funded election administration in the 2020 presidential election around the country.

Critics of that private funding of election administration, such as Phill Kline of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, called it fundamentally unfair. In the report issued by the Amistad Project in December, Kline wrote:

The 2020 presidential election witnessed an unprecedented and coordinated public-private partnership to improperly influence the 2020 presidential election on behalf of one particular candidate and party. Funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other high-tech interests, activist organizations created a two-tiered election system that treated voters differently depending on whether they lived in Democrat or Republican strongholds.

As Breitbart News reported last month:

The entire bill is expressed in a single sentence: “Notwithstanding any other law, this state and a city, town, county, school district or other public body that conducts or administers elections may not receive or expend private monies for preparing for, administering or conducting an election, including registering voters.”

Phill Kline, executive director of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More, considers the Arizona legislation a model for other states to follow to prevent the controversial private funding of election administration conducted in key battleground states in the 2020 presidential election by the Center for Technology and Civic Life, which received $350 million from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

Kline told Breitbart News Arizona’s HB 2569 is “far superior” to bills proposed in other state legislatures whose intent is to prohibit the private funding of election administration “because it does not permit an end run in which private funding could go first to the county authority and then to the board of registrars.”

Rep. Hoffman is optimistic that other states will follow Arizona’s lead in banning the private funding of election administration and management.

“The passage of this bill is a win for Arizona and a win for America, as I fully expect other states to follow suit in prohibiting this deeply troubling new Democrat tactic,” Hoffman said.