Zuckerberg election spending was orchestrated to influence 2020 vote
politicsay.com
politicsay.com
You can solve this problem by just…making it so everyone can vote, my dudes.
Yea here in india they solve that problem by giving out a bowl of biryani and packet of liquor in exchange for chance to take them to polling booth and a promise of a vote for them.
About the only problem is that next cycle you won’t see the food and drink if they don’t win. Which is life. Future promises are fair game.
“My reaction is that this was a carefully orchestrated attempt to convert official government election offices into get-out-the-vote operations for one political party and to insert political operatives into election offices in order to influence and manipulate the outcome of the election,” said von Spakovsky, a Republican who now runs the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative.
He added: “All states should ban private funding of government election offices no matter the source.”
The Federalist had a more indepth article; https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/12/the-2020-election-wasnt...
Also OP’s article is “editorialized” in the same sense that Triumph of the Will is “biased”. A statement like
> The Post’s publication of a report that said Zuckerberg effectively “bought” the 2020 election also sparked outrage from the New York State Republican Party, which retweeted a link to the paper’s front-page coverage.
Is not remotely warranted.
I assume you’re sympathetic to them rather than confused about that but figured I would ask than just assume.
Fun fact, Facebook tried to recruit me onto their elections team due to my past leadership experience with GOtV (Get Out the Vote) initiatives and I bailed from the interview process because nobody could describe the work in a way that didn’t sound creepy as fuck.
I asked why they were uncritically quoting the position of one of the most high profile partisan groups who have an extensive history of bad faith claims as though this was some neutral third party.
And as for the source, reading from Europe I must say I don't really see that much unbiased news/articles anymore not here and certainly not in the U.S. Everything political seems to have a leaning to it - left or right so there is from my pov no good unbiased sources.
Or maybe you could point me in the direction of the list over approved sites? :)
The counterquote:
> Spokesman Ben LaBolt said the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which received the bulk of the funding, “issued an open call to local election jurisdictions across the country and provided funding to all jurisdictions that applied no matter whether they were historically Republican, Democratic or swing districts.”
They even went on to say that more of the funded districts were historically Republican than democrat.
Reading the federalist article, it has a very aggressive tone. So it’s hard to take it seriously. Take this sentence, for example:
> CTCL demanded the promotion of universal mail-in voting through suspending election laws, extending deadlines that favored mail-in over in-person voting, greatly expanding opportunities for “ballot curing,” expensive bulk mailings, and other lavish “community outreach” programs that were directed by private activists.
It’s very clearly implying that giving more people a chance to have their vote counted correctly is a BAD thing.
What would be bad was if Zuckerburg’s money was spent by non-partisan non-profits campaigning for the democrats. That would need to be a campaign or PAC donation or something like that. It did not seem like that was the suggestion from those articles, though it was implied.
Either way, it’s OBVIOUSLY bad that the rich and powerful can donate huge swaths of money during election cycle. What we really need is:
- Better voting standards nationally, to maximize voter turnout across the board by default. This way no one feels like they need to donate millions of dollars to try to get people to submit their ballot in the first place.
- Reversing citizen’s united.
- Do public campaign financing with no outside donations permitted.
- Make sure that polling is funded well-enough. Polling locations shouldn’t need to accept outside money to operate. Similarly, polling needs to be available (closing polling locations in major cities is asinine)
I feel like the article tries to pin this on “big tech” specifically, probably because it’s one of the current Republican scapegoats, but the reality is all companies and rich donors already have a huge influence in our elections and politics. Some of the changes I mentioned have been proposed in congress, but it is very difficult to get bipartisan support because no one is keen on supporting a policy that might help them loose an election.
plot is targeting battleground states though ? Why does altruism only extend to swing states.