Texas is poised to join Georgia and Arizona in the banning of private money from the administration of elections following studies that showed the undue influence hundreds of millions donated from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg alone affected the outcome of the November 2020 elections.
“The intent of the bill is to stop cash from coming in,” state Rep. Philip King (R-Weatherford), sponsor of the bill said last week during House debate. “This is third-party money that literally could come from another nation. It is not an appropriate means of funding elections.”
The House sent HB 2283 to the Senate on a decisive 89-52 vote. The Senate received the bill May 3.
Running up to the November elections, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which presented itself as a nonpartisan good government group that was helping local election officials conduct safe and secure elections during the pandemic. But post-election investigations by independent watchdog groups show the CTCL grants to elections officials, directed by former Democratic operatives heading the organization, targeted Democratic counties and made a difference in the final tally.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) reported that $36 million in “ZuckBucks” granted to urban counties in Texas had a profound impact on the turnout for Joe Biden, although former President Trump carried Texas by more than 600,000 votes.
“Urban and nearby suburban counties within the 14 studied roughly presented a 30% increase in turnout for Trump and 40% for Biden, compared to 2016 totals,” PILF noted in the results of a study published in March. “One of the most insidious effects these grants can have is injecting structural bias into the local election administration process. This grossly distorts what used to be straightforward election administration statistics studied in the aftermath.”
Moreover, PILF determined that "ZuckBucks" flipped some counties from red to blue.
“Tarrant County, the last urban red county in Texas, flipped in 2020 with Biden improving by 43% in raw votes over 2016 to Trump’s 18%,” the group found.
CTCL’s approach was similar in other battleground states.
The Capital Research Center (CRC) found that CTCL's grants in Arizona were heavily centered in four of the five counties that Biden won. Trump carried the other 10 counties in the state. Biden's counties made up 85% of his total votes. Maricopa County, by far the most populous county, received nearly $3 million. Conversely, only five of Trump's counties were granted CTCL money, and they totaled only 11% of his overall vote count. Biden carried Arizona by nearly 11,000 votes, the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1996.
“CTCL’s dealings with local government officials should receive thorough scrutiny from both the IRS and state officials,” Scott Walter, president of the CRC, told Legal Newsline for an earlier story. “The IRS’ legal line for nonprofits like CTCL when they fund voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts is unclear but can be violated.
"Likewise state law on private actors funding government offices is complicated but can be violated,” Walter added. “A presidential election is too important for the questions raised by CTCL not to be investigated, especially given the extraordinary correlation between where CTCL funded in Georgia and large shifts in voting patterns.”
