Zuckerberg
© UnknownFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg spent millions ahead of the 2020 election.

The 2020 election wasn't stolen — but it could have been paid for. Mark Zuckerberg's millions bought lefty activists access to local election offices, allowing them to organize massive get-out-the-vote efforts in Democrat-dominated cities from the inside.

US cities and counties shouldn't be outsourcing election administration to partisans. But the vast Facebook-founder-funded campaign seduced many into doing just that.


Comment: Actually, the 2020 election was stolen, but The Zuck's shady, but-not-quite-illegal help wasn't unwelcome.


Through the Center for Technology and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research, Zuckerberg put an unprecedented amount of private funding — $419.5 million — into mail-in and get-out-the-vote efforts in 2020.

That's nearly as much as the $479.5 million in federal and state matching funds for COVID-related election expenses the same year. But Zuck's bucks came with strings that boosted the activists' drive to change rules to favor absentee voting and ballot harvesting — and to secure partisans' access to election information, such as how many people voted in various areas.

As author Mollie Hemingway and researcher William Doyle outline for The Post, the left used Zuckerberg's gifts to exploit the pandemic to change long-established voting rules, with the clear goal of creating a structural bias to give Democrats a leg up. The money wasn't spent evenly across the country but focused on counties where Democrats thought they would be more competitive.

In Wisconsin, for instance, Zuck's money funded "vote navigators" to "assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing" — fixing otherwise unacceptable ballots — "and witness absentee ballot signatures." One activist there even tried to get direct access to the Milwaukee Election Commission's voter database.

And it worked. Of 25 CTCL grants of $1 million or more to cities and counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, 23 went to places Joe Biden won.

In Georgia, Doyle found, counties that received Zuck bucks were, on average, 2.3 points more Democratic in 2020 than 2016; non-funded counties barely moved.

All of this was happening in a close-fought race, with just tens of thousands of votes out of millions swinging the crucial Electoral College wins that sent Biden to the White House.

It is worth reiterating that the election wasn't stolen. No one invented voters or changed votes. But private partisans shouldn't be allowed to do the job of local election boards. And CTCL's "non-partisan" designation seems like a lie because it concentrated in areas that helped Democrats most.


Comment: It is worth re-iterating that The Post's editorial board is dead wrong. Why are they closing their eyes to the mountain of evidence? A small selection:


It reeks — but Democrats are striving to make the arrangement permanent. A law to try to stop private groups from working on elections was vetoed by Wisconsin's Democratic governor.

They claim that states trying to stamp down on the funny business are jeopardizing democracy. But democracy should never be outsourced.