He’s sorry, not sorry.
Data geek Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed this week he didn’t realize $400 million he spent on “getting out the vote” in the 2020 election benefited one party over the other.
But Republican sources are skeptical that the Facebook boss was unaware his so-called “Zuck Bucks” — pledged to help finance fair local elections — were spent unevenly after being given to two known left-wing organizations.
“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) this week.
“They were designed to be nonpartisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities,” Zuckerberg continued.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization led by Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, gave more than $350 million to the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) on the pretense of getting out the vote to everyone.
But the administrators of those groups had deep ties to the left, researchers told The Post, including CTCL founder Tiana Epps-Johnson, a former Obama Foundation fellow.
“Based on this letter he’s either being disingenuous or he didn’t do his due diligence on the people he gave money to,” Hayden Ludwig, director of research at Restoration News, told The Post.
The people who founded CTCL come from a defunct group called the New Organizing Institute, Ludwig notes. And back in 2014, CNN quoted a GOP operative who called the New Organizing Institute “the Left’s New Death Star.”
“These were people whose entire jobs were figuring out how to elect Democrats. Personally I think he went home and quietly congratulated himself on helping get Joe Biden elected. He found a big loophole and put $350 million into it,” Ludwig says.
An analysis shows that Zuck Bucks were disproportionately spent getting out the vote in Democratic-leaning counties in Georgia, which Biden won by just 12,000 votes.
The same thing happened in Arizona, where Biden won by 10,000.
According to the Foundation for Government Accountability, Georgia received more than $31 million in Zuck Bucks for the general election alone, one of the highest amounts in the country.
It worked out to nearly 9 percent of all Zuckerberg funding, even though Georgia has just over 3 percent of the country’s population.
A county-by-county analysis in Georgia by the Foundation for Government Accountability revealed a spend of between $7 and $15 in Zuck Bucks per voter in six of the largest counties in the state, which were all won by Biden.
Meanwhile, there was a spend of $1 to $3 per voter in the top six counties won by Donald Trump.
In Wisconsin, which had previously voted for Trump, the CTCL spent $47 per voter in Green Bay, when normally the legislature spent $7 per voter there and $4 in rural areas of the state.
“Most people think of political dollars as money that goes to a campaign or TV ad,” said Ludwig.
In this case, Zuckerberg’s money often went to calling or visiting voters directly, making sure they would send in a mail-in ballot.
“We looked at 8 or 9 battleground states and in every state we looked at we found the same pattern. CTCL cut checks that per person were significantly larger in big blue Democrat cities compared with rural Republican counties.
“Wisconsin CTCL grants averaged $3.75 per person in Biden counties versus 55 cents in Trump counties. The bottom line is that all this Zuckerberg money boosted turnout everywhere but it boosted turnout the highest in these big blue cities who got massive Zuck bucks from CTCL.”
Zuckerberg’s contribution was well known as far back as 2021, with William Doyle writing in The Post that “the 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.”
What baffles some is why Zuckerberg now chose to write the letter — in which he also admitted the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID content and said it was wrong to suppress The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a right-wing think tank, says he thinks Zuckerberg’s mea culpa, however wan, is a “cover your ass” move in case President Trump gets elected.
“What he wrote in the letter about Zuck Bucks doesn’t sound like the words of an innocent man,” Walter told The Post.
“Zuckerberg has brilliant data geeks that are looking at [huge amounts of] data all the time. It makes me think they may be seeing something about the upcoming election and that he may not want to look bad if there is another Trump administration.
“His explanation is vague and the evidence for his innocence or nonpartisanship is nonexistent. Furthermore he said a lot of this on the Joe Rogan podcast a long time ago. He didn’t have to write the letter.”
In fact, Trump railed against Zuckerberg in his upcoming book, accusing the tech tycoon of undermining him in the last election and warning of possible jail time.
Trump, 78, recounted meeting with Zuckerberg, 40, and seethed over the 2020 election in his upcoming book “Save America,” set to hit bookshelves on Sept. 3.
“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in the book, per a preview obtained by Politico.
Zuck Bucks was not just a matter of Democrats outspending Republicans. Private funding of election administration was virtually unknown in the American political system before the 2020 election.
“Funneling money through Democrat-run nonprofits in order to increase votes in the blue areas of key swing states, as Zuckerberg did, is an inherently partisan activity,” Mollie Hemingway, author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” told The Post.
“It’s good that he regrets what he did to unfairly meddle in the 2020 election, but the damage is done.”
Hemingway also pointed out that now the template had been set, even if Zuckerberg stops providing funding, other left-wing billionaires can pick up where he left off, which Walter agreed with.
“Zuckerbucks was the real Kraken,” he said. “There is no right-wing equivalent. The idea that billionaires and charities shouldn’t be influencing elections is not that hard to understand.”
This article was originally published by The New York Post.
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09.16.2024