Empower Wisconsin | Dec. 21, 2022
MADISON — The sequel to 2020’s Zuckerbucks election scandal is coming to a battleground state near you, and this time the liberal activists manipulating the strings don’t even have the pretense of COVID.
As Wisconsin Spotlight reported last week, the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) is handing out the first round of $80 million in election grants to 10 county and municipal election offices. Included in the center’s Alliance for Election Excellence is Madison — one of the “Wisconsin-5” cities that split more than $8 million in CTCL “safe elections” grants in 2020. The grants were funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan The couple donated hundreds of millions of dollars to CTCL’s election efforts, with the lion’s share of the money going to Democrat-heavy cities in battleground states like Wisconsin.
CTCL claims there’s no “Zuckerbucks” in this round of grants, but the players behind the program remain the same.
Madeline Malisa, an election integrity expert and senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, says the new wave of election administration funding from the liberal activist group is a huge threat to Wisconsin election integrity.
“The left has been disingenuous about what the money was for. They labeled it as nonpartisan but what we found out after the fact is that the bulk of these funds channeled through the Center for Tech and Civic Life had ties to left-leaning progressive groups in the Obama administration,” Malisa told Empower Wisconsin’s M.D. Kittle this week on the Vicki McKenna Show.
“They labeled them as COVID-19 response grants, but what we found out was that in many, many cases … it was a get-out-the-vote effort for Democrats,” she added. “And that’s exactly what’s going to happen yet again here if a ban is not enacted to stop it.”
Gov. Tony Evers vetoed Republican legislation that would have banned private funding in Wisconsin election administration. The Legislature could bypass Evers and his veto pen by passing a constitutional amendment in two consecutive sessions, and then taking the question to voters.
Madeline Malisa is our guest on today’s edition of PowerUp, Empower Wisconsin’s podcast.
