Big Sky Times

Private funding in election administration isn’t going away despite Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement in April that the Facebook founder would no longer funnel money to nonprofits to grant to local and state election officials, according a new study into Montana’s acceptance of the cash.

In its introduction, the study, “The Final Frontier: Zuckbucks in Montana” by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), says that “direct left-wing funding of election administration is the latest aspect to exert control over our election process."

“Purchasing the process – not the short term electoral outcome – is the real play,” it continues. “It does not matter if Mark Zuckerberg is balking at putting up more money to fund elections, others are coming to take his place in states with no legal safeguards.”

Zuckerberg dumped most of his election money, $400 million by some estimates, into the Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL), a nonprofit run by former Barack Obama operatives. CTCL has recently launched a new effort, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. It has already amassed over $80 million for local election officials to access.

The PILF study includes emails from elections officials discussing legislation that would have banned the practice – nearly all were opposed.

“It is deeply troubling how addicted election officials are to this Zuckerberg money,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “An important bill banning the private funding of elections failed to pass in large part because of these officials’ opposition to the bill. Montanans’ election process is still up for sale to the highest bidder.”

To date, 24 states have banned or restricted the use of private money in election administration, according to an ongoing investigation by the Capital Research Center (CRC). Montana was not one of them.

Hayden Ludwig, CRC’s senior investigative researcher, had high praise for the PILF study, for giving a “glimpse into how CTCL determined for the counties into how much they would receive.”

“Everything we’re learning about how CTCL distributed its grants reveals a pattern of partisan bias,” Ludwig told the Big Sky Times. “CTCL clearly used unknown internal guidelines for determining how much money each county received, but to my knowledge hasn’t publicly disclosed what those guidelines were. Yet these same activists are demanding the American people take the word of a private, secretive organization run by left-wing operatives that there’s nothing fishy about Zuckbucks.”