Forget the Russians; Here's who's meddling with our elections; Zuckerberg pours $250 million into group funding voting drives in Wisconsin Democratic strongholds | Just The News

Zuckerberg pours $250 million into group funding voting drives in Wisconsin Democratic strongholds | Just The News

acebook's billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have gifted a quarter of a billion dollars to an election activist group pushing major government voting initiatives in several Democratic strongholds in the battleground state of Wisconsin. 

The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a group which styles itself as "a team of civic technologists, trainers, researchers, election administration and data experts working to foster a more informed and engaged democracy, and helping to modernize U.S. elections," announced on Tuesday that it had received $250 million from Zuckerberg and Chan.

The organization plans to "regrant [the money] to local election jurisdictions across the country to help ensure that they have the staffing, training, and equipment necessary so that this November every eligible voter can participate in a safe and timely way and have their vote counted."

Notably, the CTCL has already poured a significant sum of money into a voting initiative in five Wisconsin cities. The organization announced in early July that it had partnered with the cities to implement the Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, a "vision for a safe, inclusive, and secure voting process in 2020 elections" proposed by the mayors of those cities.

The mayors of Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine requested and received a collective $6.3 million from the organization in order to facilitate their respective election machines. A plurality of those funds — about 40% — went to support both vote-by-mail and early voting efforts. Around a million dollars went to "voter outreach and education efforts." 

The Center for Tech and Civic Life last month also distributed a $10 million grant to the city of Philadelphia for a similar initiative. The city in its grant request pledged to spend over half of those funds on "mail-in and absentee and processing equipment," along with roughly a quarter of the grant on "satellite election offices for in-person mail-in voting." 

Organization appears to target Democratic strongholds