By now, the term “Zuckerbucks” has become a common use term among conservatives, as it pertains to Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) grants given to local governments leading up to and, in some cases, after the November 2020 general election. In the months just prior to the 2020 election, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $350 million to the CTCL, which is quite a substantial hike from their 2019 revenue of $3.4 million.
The founders of the CTCL, most notably Tiana Epps-Johnson, a 2018 Obama Foundation Fellow, as well as Donnie Bridges and Whitney May were all co-workers at the New Organizing Institute (NOI). According to InfluenceWatch.org:
“New Organizing Institute (NOI) was a left-progressive group that trained digital organizers and campaigners for the Democratic Party and liberal political causes.”
The Washington Post described the NOI as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry” and CNN called it “the Left’s new ‘Death Star’”.
Cristina Sinclaire, the Secretary of CTCL, also seemed to be involved with the NOI. She is listed on Emerge California’s website as NOI's “Elections Administration Outreach Manager,” present tense, which is odd since the NOI was reportedly dissolved in 2015. Sinclaire is also cited on Emerge California’s website as working for the Obama campaign in Ohio in 2008. Emerge California’s website cites its mission as “empower[ing] Democratic self-identified women leaders who reflect the communities they serve to run for elected office—and WIN. This is our mission.”
But there was another company that received substantial funding from Zuckerberg and Co: The Center for Election Innovation and Research, or CEIR. They were awarded $69.5 million according to the Zuckerberg Chan website. CEIR’s executive director, David Becker, has a partisan past as mentioned here.
Becker was also recently featured in a Wisconsin election hearing with WI state senator Kathy Bernier, where they called for investigations into the election to be stopped. The hearing also seemed to serve as a public solicitation for lawyers to offer pro-bono legal defense for election officials by joining Becker’s Election Official Legal Defense Fund (EOLDN). The same man who ran the nonprofit that distributed $64.3 million in election funding, a majority to the four key swing states, is also the founder of the EOLDN. To date, there is no evidence that a single election official has been charged with a crime relating to the 2020 election in the battleground states.
So where did the initial Zuckerberg election funding go? And what was it used for? Well, according to InfluenceWatch.org, the top two states receiving CEIR funding were Pennsylvania and Michigan, which received $25 million combined. And of the top six states receiving funds, four of them were controversial “swing states”: Georgia was fourth on the list at $5.59 million and Arizona sixth at $4.78 million. New Jersey and New York, the other two states in the top six, were awarded $6.1 and $5 million each, respectively. All the remaining states were awarded an average of $1.57 million in grants, regardless of population (Florida was awarded the second-lowest amount of $287,000 despite being the most populous state on this list).
CEIR’s grantmaking during 2020 / https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/center-for-election-innovation-research/
And how was this money spent? In Michigan, the CEIR awarded a grant to the Michigan Center for Election Law and Administration (MCELA). The MCELA was originally founded by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who, according to their annual report, remained on the board of the MCELA until sometime between July 5, 2020 and May 31, 2021, two years after she ran for and won the MI Secretary of State position. Ironically, it seems of the 23 states awarded CEIR grants, Michigan was the only state where it wasn’t awarded directly to the Secretary of State’s office but rather to the Secretary of State’s non-profit. According to thestarnewsnetwork.com:
“Twenty-two other states received CEIR grant money, but Michigan was apparently the only state where the funds went to a nonprofit organization, rather than the office of the Secretary of State.
The final CEIR report, released on March 26, 2021, described how MCELA spent the $12 million grant in Michigan, but it did not offer an explanation as to why MCELA, rather than the Secretary of State’s office, received the funding”
It is worth noting that the MCELA showed $0.00 in revenue and expenses in 2019 before receiving $12.04 million in 2020, which was dispersed to Waterfront Strategies and Alper Strategies for $9.79 million and $2.09 million, respectively.
As noted by OpenSecrets.org, Waterfront Strategies is a liberal-leaning consulting firm:
“With more than $149 million given to the group by super PACs and hybrid PACs, liberal consultant Waterfront Strategies claims the top spot among outside spending vendors in 2018. Waterfront’s dominant position isn’t particularly surprising, as it is an arm of the massive D.C. firm GMMB Consulting. Between GMMB and Waterfront, the two groups have combined to be the highest-paid consultant in each election cycle since 2012.
Waterfront was the top vendor for several major liberal super PACs, including Senate Majority PAC, Women Vote! and League of Conservation Voters. The group also handled nearly all the advertising duties ($39 million) for outside spending reported to the FEC by Majority Forward, this cycle’s leading dark money spender.”
The president of the MCELA, Jen McKernan, in an interview with Michigan radio host Tracy Samilton, said “once you vote, all those groups urging you to get to the polls will be informed by elections officials that you’ve done it, and the messages will cease” referring to a text message campaign funded by the MCELA grants. This statement would imply either access to the voter rolls or cooperation in getting updates from election officials regarding individuals who already voted, when they voted and by what method.
This type of access to voter rolls was of particular importance to democrat operative Michael Spitzer Rubenstein, who, through FOIA’d emails, was negotiating with Racine City Clerk Tara Coolidge on obtaining real-time access to WI’s voter rolls in order to develop an app that tracks voter’s status throughout the election process. From those emails, he said “So all I need from you is the data from WisVote... You can download the full list of active voters and absentee ballots. I can process everything, so you won’t need to.”
It’s also worth noting that two days after the election in Maricopa Co, AZ, Elliott Kerwin was arrested by the FBI. According to the AZCentral, the FBI was searching for “records, information and communications related to:
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- Login credentials and accounts.
- Voter registration records and information, including protected voters’ information.
- The transfer, sharing, or dissemination of voter registration records and information, including protected voters’ information.
- Unauthorized access to the office’s website and computer systems.
- Attempts or threats to damage computer systems.”
And in Georgia, it was reported by Fulton Co whistleblower Bridget Thorne that a nonprofit organization lawyer had access to Georgia’s voter database in real-time on their personal laptop. She also mentioned that a separate nonprofit was developing a backdoor portal into the GA voter database. In the interview, she said “US Systems,” but it may have been US Digital Response, who was the entity cited by Spitzer-Rubenstein in his emails to the Racine City Clerk. According to Spitzer-Rubenstein, USDR is also a CTCL technical assistance partner.
Spitzer-Rubenstein Request
Why is all this access to the Voter Rolls necessary? Why is it worth, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars in grants awarded from left-leaning operatives in “nonpartisan” nonprofits? Perhaps Doug Logan’s testimony during the Pima County, AZ hearing on Monday, Dec 13th, 2021 can shed some light on the reasoning:
“When we take a look at the places we had resistance, the work that we’re trying to do in Maricopa, first and foremost, they did not want us to officially do any canvassing as part of our work...and I think we’ve seen from all the evidence that’s out there why that’s so important, because when you knock on the door and someone’s not actually there, you can see that person doesn’t exist and isn’t there. And if you prevent canvassing, you prevent that from happening.
The other area that we received a lot of resistance was of course anything that would give us any information that was tied in specifically with if something was connected to the internet. When we tried to get the admin tokens on the machines that would allow us to look at the network configuration, that was not something that was going to be provided. We had issues again, of course, with the Splunk logs. So, there seemed to be a lot of interest in making sure that we could not tell...Ben Cotton still found a lot of artifacts indicating that machines had been hooked up to internet, but oftentimes you can tell a lot by where you’re getting the resistance and where it is you’re getting pushback. And all these stories seem to push back specifically focusing on things associated with voter rolls.”
We know from the canvass work done by Liz Harris, James Knox and their group of patriots in canvassing Maricopa, that there are potentially 96,000 or so potential phantom voters, and 170,000 “switched votes,” based on the sample they were able to canvass from December 2020 and through 2021. We also heard testimony from Shelley Kais, Pima Co. GOP chairwoman, that there were similar discrepancies in a canvass done of Pima Co. Likewise, USEIP.org also found similar discrepancies throughout Colorado with their canvass efforts dating back to April 2021. There are numerous other organizations that are doing similar canvasses but are keeping their data and results close until they complete their task.
The relevancy of this type of private access to our voter rolls, the canvassing results we’ve seen out of Maricopa, Colorado, and Pima, the statement about the resistance from Maricopa regarding their audit, and the abrupt dismissal of the Antrim Co. case the day the routers and MAC addresses were to be handed over in discovery is a dagger to the heart of the arguments touted by mainstream outlets, politicians, and influential people surrounding the election: 2020 was the safest election ever. That is the “Big Lie.”
The circumstantial evidence surrounding these issues paired with other evidence such as late-night shutdowns in many of these states, ballots being dropped off at the backdoor of the TCF center in the middle of the night with no apparent chain of custody or origin, 1.1M mail-in ballots ordered in Fulton Co days before the election, the testimony of truckloads of ballots coming in to the METC center in Maricopa for days after the election from Runbeck Printing, USPS driver Jessie Morgan’s testimony about his missing USPS trailer with as many as 288,000 filled in mail-in ballots he was driving from NJ to PA, Nathan Pease’s testimony about 100,000 missing ballots in Wisconsin... when paired with the statistical analysis of people like Seth Keshel, Bobby Piton, Dr. Douglas Frank, and Matt Braynard...it begs the question: Why are we not investigating all of these states, specifically the access to the critical election infrastructure during the counting process?
So a quick recap: in the 2020 election, an organization co-founded by a 2018 Obama Foundation Fellow and an acting secretary who volunteered for the Obama campaign in Ohio in 2008, with $3.7 million in revenues in 2019 was awarded $350 million by the Zuckerbergs. The money was disproportionately distributed to liberal strongholds over conservative ones. We found out during the Pima Co. AZ hearing that some of the money was allocated after the election (Pima Co. received its $950,000 on 10 November).
CEIR executive director David Becker, who co-founded the registration database “ERIC” that is used in 29 states and DC and contains over 17 million voter records, received $69.5 million from Zuckerberg. We know those funds went disproportionately to PA, MI, AZ, GA. These four states received over half of the $65 million awarded to 23 states. They averaged $8.75 million per state while the remaining 19 states averaged $1.58 million per state. Ironically and purely coincidentally: these four states, all red states in 2016 and AZ and GA being historically red states, swung blue in the 2020 election after long, drawn-out counts with interim vote dumps and shutdowns on Nov. 3.
As more and more unfolds in this investigation, one thing is evident: the 2020 election was exactly as Molly Ball described it in her TIME Magazine piece “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”
“That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”
We know an election official in at least one state resigned from his post to take a lucrative contract to oversee elections and then returned to his Office of the Secretary of State position afterward.
We know an election vendor was paid handsomely for and given seemingly unfettered access to election equipment to perform tasks specifically designated to election officials.
We know there were ballot marking devices that seem to have gone without or with limited Logic and Accuracy testing in a county that did a last-minute court-authorized update days before in-person voting began. In that same county, we have a non-profit’s lawyers who seem to have access to real-time voting roll updates. And there was allegedly an effort to develop a backdoor portal to the voter rolls by another non-profit.
We know there is an election vendor who is referred to by a top county election official as a “partner, not a vendor” that prints ballots, mails them out, receives them back and stores them on a county’s behalf. This same vendor delivered over 700,000 “no stub” mail-in ballots to a county across the country just days before 11/3.
We know that a tech mogul whose platform censored conservative voices over the last year and suppressed information from credible mainstream outlets about both the election and the “pandemic” donated $400 million to two non-profits that were founded by partisan democrats.
We know those two organizations, either directly or indirectly, seem to have had access to the voter rolls prior to, during, and potentially after the 2020 election and contracted with other non-profits, one of which was founded by a Democrat Secretary of State.
We know that the private equity firm that owns one of the election vendors received $400 million in a direct offering from a foreign bank the month before the 2020 election. We also know that most of the election equipment vendors are owned by private equity firms.
What does all of this mean? It means our elections have been privatized. These organizations acting in a private capacity to manipulate and shape our elections are impervious to any citizen oversight in the form of FOIA requests.
The access and extent of these companies' involvement directly in our elections are unknown as each time routers and Splunk logs are to be made available, some cosmic force seems to stop the process dead in its tracks. In Maricopa, the Board of Supervisors refused to hand them over. In Antrim Co., the case was dismissed on standing the day the routers were to be turned over in discovery.
And our politicians, the benefactors of such manipulations, want us to pull the shades down and ignore the chaos in our streets, in our schools, in our businesses, and in our courts. They seem to encourage, or at least refuse to act, on the censorship of information on public town squares. Social media has become the 4th branch of government, acting with impunity to the Constitutional rights of Free Speech and Assembly.
Remember: according to Rasmussen, 56 percent of voters believe fraud impacted the 2020 election. 84 percent of the GOP and 32 percent of Democrats.
It is worth noting, in regards to FOIAable documents, that a court ruled in Arizona that Cyber Ninjas, as a contractor of the state senate, must hand over private communications within their organization. Why isn’t the same oversight being afforded to companies like Runbeck, who is called a “partner, not a vendor” by a Maricopa election official and stored returned mail-in ballots at their facility? Or VoteAtHome, who worked directly with election officials to develop an app to monitor ballots in real-time, and essentially forced an election official in Wisconsin to quit her post because of their overbearing involvement? Keep in mind, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein of VoteAtHome was reported as having his own keys to the building where ballots were stored. Or Dominion Voting, who was contracted with an apparent verbal agreement to run the Logic and Accuracy testing in Fulton County to the tune of $2,000 per person per day for a grand total of approximately $2,000,000?
Welcome to the United States of America, Inc.
Brian Lupo (CannCon) is an independent “citizen journalist” who has been de-platformed by YouTube without explanation days after a Media Matters hit piece was published about him.
You can now find CannCon and his daily content at Locals, Rumble, Telegram and on GETTR and Twitter.
