Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, and his secretary of state, participated in a controversial program that directed private funds to election officials leading up to the 2020 general election, according to a recent Broad & Liberty report.
Broad & Liberty is a self-described nonprofit organization that is “dedicated to fixing our media culture.”
The report cited emails from Wolf’s office and from former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar inviting Democratic counties to apply for grants from the Center for Tech & Civil Life (CTCL), a nonprofit group with a stated mission of helping election officials through the COVID-19 pandemic but unveiled as a get out the vote organ for the Democratic Party.
Hundreds of millions in funds were provided to CTCL by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, Broad & Liberty said.
“It wasn’t until after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Pricilla Chan, announced a $250 million donation to CTCL on Sept. 1 that an invitation to all counties was sent—a month and a half after counties like Philadelphia, Allegheny, and Delaware had been invited,” writes Todd Shepherd, chief investigative reporter with Broad & Liberty.
Shepherd cites an Aug. 15 email from Boockvar to Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, saying, “Commissioner Marseglia, by this e-mail I am connecting you with Jessica Walls-Lavelle. Jessica, I told Commissioner Marseglia that there may be some election administration nonprofit grant funds available, and Bucks County is interested.”
E-mails also show that Walls-Lavelle “was instrumental in facilitating election grant applications for Delaware, Chester, and Montgomery counties, among others, in the summer of 2020—counties that were later heralded by news organizations like NPR as the linchpin to Biden’s eventual win in Pennsylvania.”
No such e-mails were sent to Republican-leaning counties in the state, Shepherd writes.
Republican counties did receive CTCL money but at a rate well below Democratic counties, research shows. Berks County, for instance, received just under $2 per registered voter while Philadelphia County received nearly $9 per voter.
“Most people don’t appreciate how massive and sophisticated the left’s network of voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups really is, and this is a perfect example of how it works,” Hayden Ludwig, senior investigative research with Capital Research Center, which has investigated CTCL, told Broad & Liberty.
“These nonprofits hide behind their IRS-imposed ‘nonpartisan’ status to stay tax-exempt, but they’re all funded by a basket of wealthy liberal foundations, unions, and mega-donors to provide GOTV infrastructure for the Democratic Party in every election cycle,” he said.
