Grants from a progressive group funded by Facebook were used by voting officials in Lowell to strategically target voters, according to the Centre for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL).
Grants range from $5,000 for smaller communities up to $19 million in larger cities such as New York.
Real Clear Investigations found the CTCL provided the grants in exchange for election officials following a specific set of conditions designed by progressives in the system which is supposed to be free of political party influence.
This included strategically targeting voters, creating ballots and developing what are known as “cure letters” to correct ballots at risk of being thrown out for discrepancies in signatures.
Specific information about grant amounts is not yet available more than eight months after the 2020 U.S. election. The CTCL has refused repeated requests from media to detail how the grants were distributed and used.
$350 million for the grants came from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan as the social media giant Facebook continued its push into the political realm.
“This private funding has never been done before,” Hayden Dublous with the Foundation of Government Accountability said in an interview. “We hear about dark money and corporations buying ads but never have we seen hundreds of millions of private dollars going into the conducting of elections.”
The funding from Zuckerberg was near the total funding from the U.S. government, which was criticized for underfunding the electoral process at a critical time.
