Private Money and Public Malfeasance Turned Wisconsin’s Election Into a Total Sham

If not for the intervention of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and rampant illegality on the part of state and local election officials, Donald Trump likely would have won Wisconsin in a waltz.

Over the summer, Zuckerberg donated a whopping $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a formerly obscure nonprofit founded and run by Democrat activists that had never previously spent more than $1.1 million in a single year. Flush with Zuckerberg’s cash — which incidentally qualified the tech titan for a heft tax deduction — CTCL sought out predominantly Democrat-heavy cities and counties in key swing states and awarded them substantial grants to promote absentee voting and otherwise increase turnout in areas that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

This fit neatly within the plan outlined in a book published at the beginning of this year by David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and the former manager of outreach and advocacy efforts for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The book, A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump, predicted that the 2020 presidential election would be decided by a “block by block” crusade to turn out Democrat voters in cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee.

It is notable, therefore, that Milwaukee was one of the six Democrat-leaning jurisdictions in Wisconsin that received more than $6 million in CTCL grants. These grants, which paid the salaries of election workers in addition to financing purchases of election equipment, dictated the way elections were conducted down to the most minute details, such as specifying the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes available to voters.

The Amistad Project of the non-partisan Thomas More Society has been investigating this scheme from the very beginning, and the group’s latest legal filing in Wisconsin — an emergency appeal to the state’s Supreme Court — identifies the CTCL grants as a critical component in a broader effort to circumvent election laws and exploit weaknesses in the electoral process for the benefit of Joe Biden.

Accepting private monies for the purpose of administering elections is itself a violation of Wisconsin’s election code, but that is far from the only law broken as part of this heist.

Election officials who received CTCL money, for instance, instructed clerks to accept without question absentee ballot applications from persons claiming to be “indefinitely confined” due to COVID — even if they had direct knowledge that those individuals were no longer indefinitely confined as of Election Day. This is significant, because indefinite confinement and hospitalization are the only two exemptions to Wisconsin’s otherwise stringent requirement that absentee voters provide photo identification when requesting a ballot.

As a result, the number of absentee ballot requests citing the indefinite confinement exemption skyrocketed in 2020 compared to 2016. Statistical analyses conducted by world-renowned data experts and mathematicians indicate that just under 100,000 applications improperly cited this exemption, meaning that those ballots should not have been counted under state law.

That’s only the most egregious violation detailed in the Amistad Project’s lawsuit, which also presents extensive evidence that local election officials illegally “cured” flawed ballots, including having election clerks fill in missing information such as addresses.

In fact, almost all of the provisions required as conditions of the CTCL grants ran afoul of Wisconsin law in some way, which is why the same practices were not generally followed by cities and counties that did not receive CTCL funding.

State lawmakers were very clear about the reasons for instituting laws to protect the integrity of absentee ballots, one of which is “to prevent overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election.” Inherent in the right to vote is the right to abstain from casting a ballot, and that right was roundly ignored by election officials who received funding through Zuckerberg and CTCL.

Illegal activities marred Wisconsin’s election process every step of the way, from the infusion of private monies into a public election to the “overzealous solicitation” of votes — many of them at least potentially fraudulent — that overwhelmingly benefitted Joe Biden.

Had it not been for Zuckerberg’s intervention and the widespread lawlessness that ensued, Biden probably wouldn’t have had even a remote chance of emerging victorious in Wisconsin. The only remedy at this point is to leave the appointment of the state’s 10 presidential Electors in the hands of the people’s elected representatives in the state legislature.