This week’s elections didn’t generate a lot of national attention, but NBC News reported on one notable result from one of the nation’s most closely watched battlegrounds.
Wisconsin voters on Tuesday approved a pair of Republican-backed constitutional amendments that will change how elections are run in the critical battleground state, according to projections from The Associated Press. The first measure, labeled on the ballot as Question 1, will ban the use of private funds in election administration — often referred derisively to by conservatives as “Zuckerbucks.”
With just about all of the votes tallied, the results on Wisconsin’s Question 1 weren’t especially close: Proponents prevailed by nearly nine points.
At first blush, this might not seem especially controversial. Voters in the Badger State simply took steps to ban private funding from the administration of public elections.
But below the surface, there’s a bigger story here.
Most normal people have probably never seen or heard the word “Zuckerbucks,” but in far-right circles, there’s a widely held belief — even on Capitol Hill — that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a non-profit organization did something nefarious during the 2020 election cycle.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote an analysis, contextualizing what transpired in the run up to Election Day 2020, which was held against the backdrop of a pandemic.
An organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) offered grants to elections officials aimed at bolstering [efforts to safely conduct election operations during Covid]. In total, the organization gave out nearly $320 million across the United States, to “ensure election officials had the resources they needed to conduct safe, secure elections for their community,” as a CTCL report explained. Elections offices applied for grants and were awarded money by CTCL before the election.
Most of the resources used by the Center for Tech and Civic Life came from a donation from the Facebook CEO.
The details of the conspiracy theory have always been a bit murky — a familiar dynamic, to be sure — but after conservatives and GOP officials learned that an out-of-state billionaire indirectly provided resources intended to help with safe election administration, it became an article of faith in many Republican circles that Donald Trump would’ve won Wisconsin were it not for the Zuckerberg-backed initiative. There has never been any evidence to suggest the non-profit organization’s grants were used for untoward purposes, but for assorted partisans — Sen. Ron Johnson, I’m looking in your direction — the conspiracy theory has merit anyway. The result was Question 1 and a successful change to how Wisconsin administers elections. It also means, as the Post’s analysis noted, that the state has made a shift “that will make it harder for counties to use outside assistance to ensure their elections run smoothly.” And while governing based on conspiracy theories never seems to work out well for anyone, it stands to reason that Wisconsin won’t be the last state to take steps to combat “Zuckerbucks,” as GOP officials address a problem that doesn’t exist.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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