The Wisconsin Voters Alliance has filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Election Commission over the donation of millions of dollars from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), an organization funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, to five Wisconsin cities that overwhelmingly vote Democrat. According to the group, “These grants are intentionally limited to these heavily Democratic areas for the purpose of boosting voter turnout there in a clear effort to sway the election statewide.”
According to a press release, the Wisconsin Voters Alliance has filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Election Commission over the donation of millions of dollars from the Center for Tech and Civic Live (CTCL) to five Wisconsin cities to encourage voter turnout, all five of the cities have a long history of voting overwhelmingly for Democrats.
Phill Kline, Director of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, representing the Wisconsin Voters Alliance (WVA), commented: “This initiative by CTCL is clearly designed to provide a boost in registered voters, limited only to traditional leftist strongholds, in a critical swing state that is likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election on November 3, 2020,” Kline said. “Allowing private monies to control state spending on voter turnout is an invitation to the state to engage in partisan politics in the operation of elections that represents a present danger that favors one class of voters at the expense of others – clearly picking winners and losers in a critical swing state that may determine the outcome of the presidential election this year,” he concluded.
Kline added, “We’ve seen government playing favorites in elections before. Through much of last century, southern states made it difficult for blacks to vote and easy for white citizens to vote, promoting racism in the manner they orchestrated their elections. Government targeting a demographic to increase turnout is the opposite side of the same coin as targeting a demographic to suppress the vote.”
In a press release, the Wisconsin Voters Alliance states:
Cumulatively, CTCL has thus far granted $16.3 million to the five cities in Wisconsin and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which cast over 82% of their over one million combined total votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016. President Trump won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes and Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes that year.
In Wisconsin, CTCL has granted a total of $6.3 million in municipal funding from private sources to the Cities of Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine. The grants were issued directly to the cities and not the Wisconsin Board of Elections, which is responsible for managing elections throughout the state. A plurality of the funds — about 40% — went to support both vote-by-mail and early voting efforts. Around $1 million dollars went to “voter outreach and education efforts.”
Breitbart News recently reported that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, both of whom run the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative charitable foundation, plan to donate $300 million to help with preparations for the upcoming presidential election amidst the Chinese virus pandemic.
Zuckerberg and Chan plan to donate to two non-partisan organizations in order to help them recruit poll workers, rent polling places, purchase PPE kits for poll workers, and a number of other measures needed to ensure that voting stations will be safe as the pandemic continues. The organizations they have chosen are the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
Kline commented on the CTCL stating: “This initiative by CTCL is clearly designed to provide a boost in registered voters, limited only to traditional leftist strongholds, in a critical swing state that is likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election on November 3, 2020. Allowing private monies to control state spending on voter turnout is an invitation to the state to engage in partisan politics in the operation of elections that represents a present danger that favors one class of voters at the expense of others – clearly picking winners and losers in a critical swing state that may determine the outcome of the presidential election this year.”
The full complaint filed with the Wisconsin Election Commission can be found here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
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