Democracy is not free.
Tell that to the more than half of the states that have banned or limited donations to the approximately 8,000 city and county offices that run our elections.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
The beleaguered public servants who allow us to vote, whether for school boards or the presidency, are already woefully underfunded. Now, the big lie that won't go away (that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump) is making that lack of funding worse.
Red (and red) states have bought into the obnoxiously named “Zuckerbucks” conspiracy, a far-right falsehood that in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to election offices for no reason. stated: pay for expensive COVID-19 protections, but to help Democrats win. (The conspirators don't say exactly how they supposedly accomplished that.)
Election offices' need for money is evident from coast to coast. A 2021 study from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab found that U.S. investment in our voting system falls “near the bottom of public service spending, standing at roughly the same levels as local government spending to maintain parking facilities.”
However, maintaining parking lots is nothing like dealing with the complexity and costs of modernizing and securing voting machines; invest in better technology for vote counting and voter registration; staff and manage polling stations; combat disinformation, AI scams and cyberattacks, and protecting against threats of violence that have become a reality for election officials and their staff in the Trump years.
Despite the urgent needs of election administrators, 28 states (22 red and six swing states) have prohibited or restricted philanthropic funding for your electoral offices since 2020. Of those, only Pennsylvania combined its ban with state compensation funds. It's a double whammy: there is no private money, but public funds are scarce. As much as we'd prefer our elections not to be subsidized by private interests, if states aren't going to provide more public dollars, let's let the charity flow.
Historically, states and local governments have had the greatest responsibility for voting under our decentralized electoral system, with the federal government contributing woefully little. However, MAGA Republicans in Congress want to join the anti-Zuckerbucks trend and extend the ban on election administration donations to the entire country. Next month, the House could vote on a “Electoral integrity” package that'It is quite the opposite, and it includes the so-called End Zuckerbucks Law.
Fortunately, if it passed the House, the bill would almost certainly be buried in the Senate. But that still leaves state bans in place in large swathes of the country, including such crucial and hotly contested states as Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.
“What we've seen is not only a lack of investment in election departments in a way that ultimately makes them successful and keeps our election process safe, but also a really concerted effort to cut off other avenues of support,” Tiana Epps . -Johnson, executive director of the nonprofit organization. Center for Technology and Civic Life, told me.
The center, whose mission is to promote electoral modernization and civic engagement, distributed most of the $420 million Zuckerberg and Chan donated in 2020. The grants went to more than 2,500 government entities in nearly every state and Washington, D.C., every election office that applied. The Center for Election Research and Innovation, a nonprofit organization, doled out the rest.
To put the Zuckerberg-Chan gift in perspective, it was almost eight times larger than the $55 million that the federal government is providing to election offices this year. The grants, as announced, mostly paid for COVID response measures needed to safely conduct the 2020 election: purchasing masks and other personal protective equipment, supplying and handling many more mail-in ballots, hiring and training to additional staff and reach cautious people. voters.
But the funds also covered other expenses: In Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is located, election administrators used providing money on demand for meals to vote counters who were afraid to go out because of armed protesters there, according to Epps-Johnson. And some offices used donated funds to build ramps and make other accommodations for disabled voters, eventually bringing their facilities into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has been in effect for three decades.
Of course, local officials were grateful for the help. But state and national Republican groups taken to court and the federal electoral commission, alleging an illegal conspiracy to give Democrats an electoral advantage. The FEC, typically polarized and evenly divided between Republican and Democratic commissioners, voted unanimously in mid-2022 against all allegations and found “no reason to believe” the allegations against Zuckerberg, Chan and the nonprofits.
In fact, Republican claimants lost everywhere except one place: Republican-controlled state legislatures. Politicians, unlike the courts and the FEC, are not limited by truth and facts. The nonprofits that dispersed Zuckerberg and Chan's money “effectively took over the actual election machinery,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said. lied in 2022, praising a law he signed that bans private subsidies and makes other election changes stemming from conspiracy theories.
What's confusing is that Republicans are arguably defrauding themselves in defrauded election offices. Its base of rural and working-class voters could be especially uncomfortable — and perhaps deterred from voting — by fewer polling places and drop boxes, for example, and by restrictions on early voting and voting by mail. A coalition of voter advocacy groups and election administrators is forming. putting pressure on congress now for $400 million, practically matching what they once got from Zuckerberg. However, the MAGA House of Representatives is unlikely to be receptive.
Yes, democracy is not free. On the other hand, we have learned the hard way: Republicans are not committed to democracy.
@jackiekcalmes
