The second is anger. You are probably familiar with this term and its connotations in right-wing conversations. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is saying that somehow he bought Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. As with all President Trump’s hyped claims about the election, this is not true. However, this claim is untrue in a more complex way than the others, meaning that President Trump has prospered where others have not.
On Tuesday, that included voter approval of changes to the way Wisconsin conducts elections. This makes it difficult for counties to access outside aid to facilitate elections.
Two amendments to the state constitution, each approved by a majority of voters, would block outside funding to help administer elections and limit control to government officials. News site Boltz investigated the potential impact of the latter amendment. For example, would representatives of companies that sell voting equipment be prohibited from providing assistance to county employees? The former amendment, on the other hand, is more specifically aimed at squeezing Zuckerbacks.
So let me explain what happened.
You will recall that the 2020 presidential election unfolded at a strange moment in history, with a global pandemic killing hundreds of Americans a day. Election officials were scrambling to find ways to conduct election operations safely and respond to increased requests for remote voting.
An organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) provided grants to election officials to help strengthen these efforts. As the CTCL report explains, the organization works nationwide to “ensure election officials have the resources they need to conduct safe elections for their communities.” A total of nearly $320 million was donated. The election office applied for a grant and he received funds from CTCL before the election.
Most of that money came as part of donations Zuckerberg made to CTCL, hence the name “Zuckerbucks.” Mr. Zuckerberg’s involvement has come in handy as Mr. Trump rushes into a debate aimed at undermining confidence in Mr. Biden’s victory. Here we had Big Tech CEOs from liberal California, often donating to liberal metropolises. —To get more people to vote. A conspiracy theory was born.
Wisconsin Republicans seized on the idea with enthusiasm. The Republican-led Congress commissioned a report on the 2020 results that focused on “Zuckerbucks” (a term that was included in the report itself) as the reason Trump lost the state. The report quickly became an embarrassment for the Republican Party, with House Speaker Robin Vos (R) calling its author “probably the greatest embarrassment I’ve ever experienced.”
Nevertheless, Republicans moved to lock down systems that Democratic voters thought would make voting easier, including funding like the one provided by CTCL.
But CTCL’s funding rhetoric is ridiculous. It makes sense that counties with larger populations and more voters would require more resources in presidential elections. In Wisconsin, the average population of counties not receiving CTCL funding was approximately 40,000 people. The average population of those receiving CTCL grants was close to 200,000. A subsequent independent study found that CTCL grants had no appreciable impact on the outcome of the 2020 election.
In Wisconsin, counties that received at least some CTCL funds shifted their vote share more to the left in the 2016 presidential election than counties that received no such funds. However, a look at county population densities shows that this is by no means uniform. Thirteen counties that received CTCL funds (usually given to municipalities within those counties) shifted to the left from their 2016 results, while six counties shifted to the right. Counties that did not receive CTCL funding voted more Democratic in 2020 than in 2016.
Milwaukee County, the state’s most populous county and recipient of CTCL grants, swung to the left by about 3 points between 2016 and 2020. Nationally, metropolitan counties swung slightly to the right. But large suburban counties had a more pronounced leftward shift nationally than in Wisconsin. And in Wisconsin, it was even more pronounced. NonCTCL county.
So did Milwaukee benefit from CTCL funding in a way that pushed it far enough to the left to give Biden a victory? There is no evidence of that. Comparing Milwaukee’s results to those of other metropolitan counties across the country shows that they are in line with expectations given the density of the white population. After all, this is the main reason why big cities moved up in 2020 compared to 2016, leading to smaller Democratic support among nonwhite voters.
There remains no evidence that the 2020 election results were tainted by fraud or illegal voting in any state, including Wisconsin. This is why Trump and his allies are so eager to highlight other alleged wrongdoings. There’s an intuitive appeal to the vague suspicion that tech executives are sneaking around Midwestern states, and a helpful ambiguity about the intended impact. It was enough for the Wisconsin Republican Party to offer voters in the state a solution to a problem that Republicans had concocted.
It is very important to underline one further point here. Even if Zuckerberg personally spent money in Milwaukee with the express intention of getting more Democrats to vote…that’s just electoral politics. There is no insinuation here that for any reason these voters should not have been allowed to vote, only that their votes were unfairly made possible (for Republicans) by an outside actor. . This is not an anti-cheat measure. Rather, it is clearly anti-Democrat.
It was added to the Constitution during the primary election, when fewer voters participated.
