All About Wisconsin’s ‘Zuckerbucks’

A series of grants made to election administration agencies in 2020 was greeted with fury by the Republican establishment. These grants aimed at helping election administrators in Wisconsin and other states respond to the COVID-19 virus.

Wisconsin held its spring nonpartisan election in the first week of April 2020, just as the first wave of the pandemic hit. Given the timing, there was a reasonable fear that in-person voting could spread the disease to both voters and poll workers. Many poll workers were retirees and fit the demographic most vulnerable to catching the virus and dying from it. As a result, many decided not to help out.

Faced with a diminished population of poll workers, Milwaukee closed many of its voting sites, leading to long lines at the remaining sites. The line at Milwaukee’s Riverside High School stretched on for blocks. Photos of Milwaukee’s lines made the national news.

If Wisconsin’s low-turnout spring election was so badly affected by the pandemic, how much worse would it be for the much higher turnout general election in the fall? Among other things, the demand for absentee ballots was likely to explode. Clearly, agencies that administered elections needed to change in response to the changed environment, but neither the state nor the federal government was forthcoming with the necessary resources.

In response, an organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) offered grants to all American election agencies. Any agencies responding to this offer would receive a grant of at least $5,000 and in many cases much more. According to CTCL’s Form 990, these grants were funded by 22 contributors, with over $300 million from the foundation of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

In Wisconsin, the bulk of the funding went to the state’s five largest cities, Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha, and Racine. It appears that CTCL was favorably impressed because the five cities submitted a joint proposal that promised to work together to share their experiences.

The immediate reaction on the right was outrage. Typical was the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (CTCL), which quickly concluded these grants were disguised political donations, aimed at helping Joe Biden win Wisconsin and the presidency. Following the 2020 presidential election WILL issued a report, entitled “Finger on the Scale: Examining Private Funding of Elections in Wisconsin.”

Several lawsuits were brought against the grants. All were rejected by the courts.

Michael Gableman’s second (and final) report on the 2020 election, commissioned by the Republican-led Legislature, is largely devoted to an attack on the CTCL grants, which he compares to bribery, which is not how the Wisconsin statute defines election bribery. Whether or not a voter benefited from, say, shorter lines at the polling place or more convenient and secure absentee voting is not dependent on which candidate the voter chooses

Yet there has been fury of Republicans condemning “Zuckerberg grants” or ‘Zuckerbucks.” Since the 2020 election, 20 states dominated by Republicans have passed laws banning grants aimed at improving election administration. In the event of a future crisis affecting elections, these laws would prevent agencies in these states from accepting help from the private sector while leaving agencies in Democratic states free to accept offers of help. The ironic result could be a higher turnout in Democratic states and a lower turnout in Republican states.

There are several reasons to doubt that the CTCL leaders were motivated by a desire to help Biden win the election. First, the effort was an inefficient way to do so. CTCL’s Form 990 includes a list of grant recipients that runs to almost 300 pages. Most are in states that are safely Democratic or Republican, with little prospect of flipping their Electoral College vote from one party to the other.

For example, if the goal is to have the Democratic candidate win the election, why send $1.2 million to Montgomery City and County in heavily Republican Alabama, which Trump won easily? Conversely, why send $8 million to Los Angeles, in a state that is already a lock for Democrats? Unless one assumes that CTCL is incompetent, the obvious conclusion is that CTCL’s aim was what it said it was: to improve the process of voting.

WILL complains that the distribution of grants favored cities. Yet it appears that cities faced particularly severe challenges in dealing with Covid, as evidenced by Milwaukee’s long lines. Of Milwaukee County’s 18 cities and villages only two — Milwaukee and West Allis — applied for grants. Apparently, the other cities were confident that they already had the resources needed to meet the Covid challenge.

Finally, if the aim of the grants was to increase the Biden vote, it did not work very well. The graph shows the percent increase in voting between the 2016 and 2020 elections. As in most other states, both candidates received more votes in 2020 than four years earlier. However, in three of the cities—Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha—Trump received a larger share of the vote than did Biden compared to Clinton four years earlier. In the other two cities—Madison and Green Bay—Biden’s increase over Clinton grew more than Trump’s.

Put it all together, Trump’s gain in the Milwaukee 5 cities slightly exceeded Biden’s, as shown in the graph below. If the vote in the rest of Wisconsin had followed the same pattern, Trump would have been reelected. Instead, Trump lost the election because his vote increase lagged Biden’s in the rest of Wisconsin. Put another way, Biden’s vote increase in Trump country, not in those five cities getting the CTCL grants, was responsible for Biden’s victory in Wisconsin.

Republican attacks on the grants show more about the current state of the Republican Party than the grants. For the dominant faction of the GOP, winning elections has become paramount, far more important than protecting democracy. They project this view on the other party. As a result, they can only understand charitable grants made to help make voting easier and more secure as a secret plan to win an election.