This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
One of the organizations that facilitated a major undue election influence operation during the 2020 presidential race has announced plans for another campaign during the 2024 race, but this time instead of using "Zuckbucks" from Mark Zuckerberg, it wants to use federal tax dollars, a new report charges.
The organization is the Center for Tech and Civic Life and it was that group that handed out hundreds of millions of dollars, provided by Zuckerberg, to election officials who often used it to recruit Joe Biden voters.
It was one of the major undue influences on the 2020 race, as such dollars, more than $400 million, never before had been injected into an American election, especially when those funds were outside the normal election spending procedures that are monitored.
It is The Federalist that has posted the report by William Doyle, the research director at The Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, who specializes in economic history and private funding of American elections.
He cites an email "sent to a network of election officials and nonprofit organizations" by the CTCL.
It claims it will facilitate applications by elections officials for money from a massive federal government grant program administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"This program could potentially funnel more than $700 million to election offices during the 2024 election under the auspices of CTCL officials and their partners in the nonprofit world of left-wing election activism," the report said.
The federal program targeted is FEMA's 2024 Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program.
While that, the government said, is to "support states, local communities, tribes, and territories as they undertake hazard mitigation projects, reducing the risks they face from disasters and natural hazards," CTCL, in its "creative interpretation," is claiming elections, under Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, are a "critical service" deserving of competitive FEMA grant funding, the report said.
The CTCL's coming "webinar" will claim, "As a core element of government function, elections are a critical service and eligible for this government funding," the report said.
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FEMA notes that there's $1 billion available during the current grant cycle. Previously, huge amounts of cash have been handed out through the program for flood mitigation, and such.
The report noted the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute obtained an email from CTCL's Andra Abbate that said the program is a unique funding opportunity for elections activists.
The report said during the 2020 race, "CTCL money financed the takeover of election offices at the city and county level by partisan activists and made those offices a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data-sharing agreements that were favorable to Democrat candidates.
"Many CTCL-funded election offices then became launching pads for intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and precisely targeted, door-to-door voter turnout and mail-in ballot-chasing efforts in densely populated urban areas packed with potential Democrat voters," the report said.
Since then, multiple states have adopted laws banning the private funding of election management.
But the report charged, "Democrat election activists are nothing if not ingenious, however. By tapping into a huge reservoir of potential federal funding, CTCL, and its partners could skirt the prohibitions against 'private funding' of elections, while gaining de facto control over a much larger funding source than could be provided by individual billionaires such as Zuckerberg, all the while using it to mount the same sort of technical, data-driven, and activist-led manipulation of the election system in favor of Democrats that they mounted in 2020."
However, the report notes that the purpose of election officials is to maintain polls and count votes accurately, not participate in partisan "get-out-the-vote" campaigns on behalf of one political party.
