House GOP Eyes Investigation Of Big TechAligned Election Grants
Not only should Republicans in Congress investigate new rounds of private donations to local elected offices, they should be the basis for legislation.
As The Daily Signal previously reported, the Coalition for Electoral Excellence has awarded grants ranging from $500,000 to $1.5 million in 10 counties.
In 2020, 24 states banned or limited the acceptance of private funds for elections in the wake of a nearly $400 million campaign scandal involving Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
Zuckerberg's new round of campaign donations was in cities and counties that did not provide for such restrictions.
The largest recipient of Zuckerberg's donation in 2020 is the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a liberal nonprofit that runs America's Choice Excellence and several other organizations, and is funded by Arabella Advisors.
The 2021 bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code to ban 501(c)(3), the final Zuckerback bill, was the lead sponsor of Rep. Claudia Tenney, RNY, co-chair of the House Elections Integrity Group. Organizations are exempt from direct funding of the tax administration responsible for elections. The bill was referred to the Ways and Means Committee, where he died.
Tenney linked continued private funding to local election offices to President Joe Biden's March 2021 executive order to encourage federal agencies to register voters and partner with private organizations.
"It's a serious problem, and it's part of the executive order that allowed some so-called Zuckerberg propaganda. The center of technology and civic life is back," Tenney told the Daily Signal at a news conference. “The Biden administration has delegated federal agencies to oversee vote counting and voter registration outside state board of election departments.”
The Biden administration has ignored demands from Congress, the media and members of watch groups to disclose the private organizations that federal agencies work with to poll voters.
A Florida federal court on Thursday heard a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Government Accountability Foundation, a Florida-based watchdog group, about how the Justice Department followed Biden's voting mandate.
Tenney said the House Electoral Integrity Group, which currently has more than 60 members, may expand.
"Additional interference by private institutions like the Center for Technology and Civic Life is not going to be helpful to preserve the integrity of the election," Tenney said. “We will continue to move forward on the Commission on Election Integrity, which I co-founded with my colleague Mike Garcia from California. We have many new members interested in joining, and we always want a Democrat to join us, because we think this is a bipartisan issue.”
Representative Kevin Hearn, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the largest Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, said the use of private funds to elect Congress should be investigated. Hare said the matter could be brought to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, R-Ky.
"It's funny stuff," Hearn told the Daily Signal. "Aid programs — whether domestic or foreign — have generated a lot of controversy because there's really no legal regulation."
"I think the congressman's accountability for the OGR (Committee on Oversight and Government Reform) is something we're looking forward to because he deals with a lot of these issues," Hearn said. After his confirmation, he caused a lot of stress.
Ohio Republican Jim Banks, one of the original sponsors of the Tenney to Zuckerberg Act, along with the Indiana Republican, supported reinstating the law.
Stuart Whitson, legal director of the Government Accountability Foundation, called the US election "Zuckerbucks 2.0" impeachment.
While Zuckerberg stopped funding the Center for Technology and Civic Life, other influential interests are now doing so.
"It looks like they're trying to continue the same plan to overturn the states that Zuckerberg blocked when they passed," Sarah told the Daily Signal in a phone interview. "We have indicated that even this new plan would be illegal under state law."
Hayden Ludwig, a senior research fellow at the Washington-based Center for Capital Think Tank, told the Daily Signal that two big questions for congressional investigators to examine are whether it is appropriate for private companies to influence how elected officials manage their systems. .
"After the recent CTCL scandal, this is a repeat of the same scheme when nearly half of the states restricted or banned Zuckerberg," Hayden Ludwig told the Daily Signal.
"The problem is almost exactly what we saw in the 2020 election, where tax-exempt nonprofits take money from party donors and funnel money to government agencies to influence their local budgets and policies," Ludwig said.
Last month, Ludwig identified two companies among the New Venture Fund, a nonprofit backed by the Arabella consortium of advisors.
Madison, Wes. The coalition's announcement of a $1.5 million election grant lists the Center for Safe and Smart Elections and the Institute for Responsive Government as coalition partners to manage elections. Both companies are under the New Venture Fund umbrella.
The Center for Technology and Civic Life, which conducts media inquiries about electoral excellence, did not respond to The Daily Signal's multiple requests for comment for this report.
The Coalition for Electoral Excellence is a five-year, $80 million project. The largest fund is the Audacious project, which is associated with large tech sectors including Microsoft and Amazon. Inside Philanthropy describes The Audacious Project as "a group of high-tech fundraisers who are very generous with their donations."
The Asian Development Bank has selected 10 areas of electoral excellence for its electoral assistance and training programmes. Some are located in battleground states like Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, and Nevada, while others are located in all the blue states, including two counties in California, two states in Illinois, and one city in Connecticut (Greenwich).
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