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Comment by ppsreejith | Hacker News Reader

> let me recall that it’s controlled by Zuckerberg who spent $419 million to influence US election administration in a seemingly partisan way

For more context, from: https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/policy/zuck-bucks-consp...

> He offered nearly half a billion dollars in grants to any election official who wanted one, as long as those officials spent it on what a lot of people would consider mundane essentials: ballot sorters, drop boxes, poll workers and — because it was 2020 — hand sanitizer.

> And when those election officials applied for more money than he originally offered, he kicked in another $119 million to satisfy the rest of the requests.

> At a time when Republicans are rapidly restricting access to the ballot box in states across the country, spending nearly half a billion dollars to do the exact opposite of that is tantamount to a partisan choice. Or, at least, it was bound to be viewed that way.

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Expanding and insuring ballot box access shouldn’t be considered partisan.

That it is represents a failure in whatever party seeks to restrict voting.

Part of the reason Zuck Bucks are viewed as partisan is because of the way in which they ended up being deployed.

>On average, Biden counties received $2.85 per vote, compared to Trump counties that only received $0.89. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10090603/Mark-Zucke...

But couldn’t that simply be explained by GOP counties applying for less aid?

So long as every county could receive funds equally, the fact some received less isn’t at all damning.

So if someone like elon musk or peter theil did something like this, they gave $419 million to a bunch of red states all while aggressively promoting trump, would you still claim it's "not damning"?

This is an example of an extremely wealthy person influencing an election, plain and simple. It's odd to me that we're all just supposed to be ok with it.

Are there stories of red counties applying for the money and not getting it? Or perhaps it was only marketed towards Dems?

What’s the argument as to what happened here?

From zucks own form 990 IRS filing. CTCL awarded all larger grants – on both an absolute and per capita basis to deeply Democratic urban areas.

E.g.

https://capitalresearch.org/article/shining-a-light-on-zuck-...

That’s not an answer though.

The parent to your comment is asking what caused CTCL to give more to Democratically aligned counties. Everyone agrees it happened - I am just unconvinced it has a strictly partisan explanation. They are asking for proof it’s malicious. Just stating there is a difference in funding isn’t proof the CTCL acted with partisanship.

There are many latent variables besides GOP/Dem, Urban/Rural that could cause the difference. For example when examining barriers to voting, time spent in line or number of polling places/capita are easy KPIs. Urban areas tend to score poorly on these metrics. If the funding was allocated by these metrics urban areas will win more funding.

There are many reasons a totally non partisan group would prioritize grants to urban areas. Chief among them might be that partisans have deliberately underfunded urban locations and sometimes been caught saying the reason was for their partisan gain.

Or the simplest explanation: a party that discourages voter turnout is in charge or rural areas. Officials in those counties are less likely to ask for funding that makes voting easier.

> And the total amount of the grants was not determined based on population. Rather, amounts tracked with blue votes. The average grant amount per registered voter for a Biden-carried jurisdiction was more than 50 percent larger than the average for those that Trump carried. [1]

>Emails from the Office of the Pennsylvania Governor and the Pennsylvania Department of State show that former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and an official in Gov. Tom Wolf’s office knew about private 2020 election grants and invited Democratic-leaning counties to apply, appearing to aid the selective process at a time when other counties were unaware. No email shows any official in either office providing similar information or assistance to any of the commonwealth’s Republican-leaning counties. [2]

It appears that the grant process were overly influenced by politics both from an application, and an outcome perspective.

I'm against privitization of election processes.

[1] https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/03/02/show_me_...

[2] https://broadandliberty.com/2021/10/19/former-sec-of-state-b...

Ok so… who asked for the funding and didn’t get it? Did Republicans apply for large grants in equal numbers and not get any? What happened to result in Democratic areas getting most of the money?

You’d think that for all this is, there’d be a sob story somewhere of the Republican counties that wanted better access to voting and didn’t get it. So… what happened?

Voting access expansion and protection should not be considered partisan. End of story.

So if we decided to channel all voter access expansion and protection funds to the Koch Brothers that would be totally fine because it should be considered non-partisan? In the most abstract sense, it isn't partisan. In the actual implementation, it is partisan.

I wouldn’t want all voter access funds channeled by the Koch brothers, but if they decide to fund non-partisan GOTV efforts, I would applaud it.

Even if they ended up donating more to areas likely to vote their way. More voting is good period. If GOTV funding is spread unevenly then more GOTV funding to neglected areas is the solution.

"Zuckerberg and Chan tapped prominent Republican election lawyer Michael Toner to review the grants CTCL awarded last year to counties and other jurisdictions across the country.” Toner, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, “discovered that more Republican jurisdictions, defined as municipalities that voted for Trump in 2020, applied for and received grants from CTCL"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/zuckerberg-funded-el...

This would result in exactly the disparity in "dollars per vote(r)" that was pointed out above. Because if more people apply for and get the same amount of grants as a smaller group of people, then the former group will have less dollars per individual.

Correlation is not causation and Daily Mail is trash.

The Daily Mail's sidebar is trash, selected articles sometimes have a high level.

They seem to use their network of paparazzi/journalists to actually research facts on the ground. It is paid for by the fact that 95% of the content is indeed trash that sells.

But the 5% that isn't trash contains classic what/when/where/how style facts in great detail. For select topics like the trucker protests in Canada the Daily Mail is one of the best publications.

No, the Mail is all trash. But they're also notorious plagiarists (in the modern way, where you quickly rewrite somebody else's story.) So if you have a scoop that panders to a reactionary audience, the Mail will steal it, not link back to you, and become the outlet who becomes the main social media share for it. They will do no checking or verification on the story beforehand, but if it eventually turns out to be a made-up story, they'll just delete it. They've already got the juice, so now that it turns out you're wrong they're happy to refer people to you for the credit.

I even remember noticing they stole one of their uplifting weight-loss stories from another tabloid.

edit: they have lots of photos, though, which is the best thing about tabloids.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/zuckerberg-funded-el...

Looking past the raw number of grants to the total amount of money granted, however, from zucks form 990 IRS filing. CTCL awarded all larger grants – on both an absolute and per capita basis to deeply Democratic urban areas.

E.g.

https://capitalresearch.org/article/shining-a-light-on-zuck-...

On pure scale alone, surely urban areas have far more voters, and therefore more need for funds than much smaller red counties?

>The group that got the bulk of Mr. Zuckerberg’s money — the Center for Tech and Civic Life — sent some 2,500 grants to government elections offices in 48 states. Defenders of Mr. Zuckerberg contend that more grants went to Trump areas while conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast amount of money was targeted to critically important areas for Mr. Biden. In fact, approximately 160 of the 2,500 grants were for $400,000 or more and totaled a whopping $272 million — and 92% of the money flowed to jurisdictions that Mr. Biden carried. [1]

>Much of Mr. Zuckerberg’s money is documented by CTCL’s tax filings. The January 2022 report shows grants of $860,000 to Kenosha, $1.2 million to both Green Bay and Madison, $1.7 million to Racine, and $3.4 million to Milwaukee. These five critical cities alone received about $8.5 million of the $10.1 million that flowed into Wisconsin from CTCL, and $5.1 million dollars of Mr. Zuckerberg’s money was spent in Arizona. Four difference-making counties — Maricopa, Pima, Apache and Coconino — were carried by President Biden and received nearly 76% of CTCL’s grants. This funding helped Biden grow his turnout by nearly 700,000 votes in funded counties over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 total. CTCL sent $45 million to Georgia — more than any other state in the country — and 94% of the funds went to jurisdictions carried by Mr. Biden. [1]

It is pretty clear that pushing extremely well-funded get out the vote operations in highly democrat areas in the most key swing states is enough to swing an election.

This is dangerously partisan.

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/12/mark-zucker...

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