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House Republicans took steps to enshrine one of the conservative movement’s lesser-known conspiracy theories into law last week. And though it may stand little chance of passing in the Senate, Republicans passed a bill out of the House Administration Committee on Wednesday that would ban private donations to election organizations.
Ever since 2020, tinfoil hat-wearing Republicans have referred to such grants as “Zuckerbucks,” a reference to grants given by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to various state agencies to help them run elections during the pandemic. Conservative lawmakers and media figures have pushed the notion that these and other private grants somehow made the 2020 elections vulnerable to fraud, despite the Federal Elections Commission’s unanimous ruling that there’s “no reason to believe” Zuckerberg or his wife did anything wrong here.
Nonetheless, Wisconsin GOP Rep. Bryan Steil, who chairs the House Administration Committee, said Wednesday that “Zuckerbucks, or private funding of elections, is election interference plain and simple.” During the hearing on the bill last week, Steil suggested these grants were used ostensibly to help people vote in liberal areas and were therefore nefarious.
“These funds were intended to support poll worker recruitment efforts or the purchase of new equipment. But in reality, some of these funds were used primarily for voter registration events and get-out-the-vote efforts in Democratic-leaning cities and towns,” Steil said.
As The Hill noted, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan said that in more than 60% of the jurisdictions that received funding from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden. That would make it a pretty ineffective plot to help Democrats, no?
Regardless, more than half the states (many of them Republican-controlled) have subscribed to the GOP’s paranoia to ban election assistance grants like the ones Zuckerberg and Chan provided.
Democrats have even been in agreement with Republicans on the point of wanting to keep private funding out of the election administration process. But they’ve rejected the conspiratorial claims about the grants amounting to election interference, and they’ve bemoaned the fact the current Congress has refused to authorize additional funding to help elections run smoothly nationwide: In passing the bill to ban private election funding out of committee, Republicans overruled a Democratic amendment that would have authorized $5 billion to support election administrators.
So we have a scenario wherein Republicans — mirroring their approach to immigration — have identified a problem, have clear means to resolve that problem, but have chosen to whip up conspiracy theories rather than take meaningful action to address it.