Keystone Today

The Capital Research Center analyzed what effect Mark Zuckerberg’s $350 million investment with the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) had on Pennsylvania.

“Arguments over this year’s vote in Pennsylvania continue to rage, but one critical aspect deserves more attention: the millions of dollars that flowed from the family of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg into the state’s election offices,” Scott Walter wrote. “The cash first went to a supposedly ‘nonpartisan’ nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which then re-granted the money to local election offices in dozens of counties in Pennsylvania and thousands more election offices across America.” 

When the center began analyzing the effects of the money, it first examined funding in Georgia and, Walter says, the report was so surprising that the state’s Senate asked him to testify about it and President Donald Trump’s campaign even included the report in their legal briefs.

In Pennsylvania, Walter said the outcomes are just as stark as Georgia. Walter said that CTCL has not disclosed the funding, so every detail has not been disclosed.

“This stonewalling is especially obnoxious because federal law requires CTCL to disclose on its annual filings with the IRS all grants of $5,000 or more to government entities,” Walter wrote. “But the clever partisans at CTCL know that their filing for 2020 grants can be kept in the dark until a year from now, and ‘dark money’ is what powers CTCL’s heavy thumb on election scales across the nation.”

The center found that CTCL funded slightly more counties that favored Trump than Biden, 13 to 11, but that statewide, Biden only won 13 counties, so CTCL funded 85% of the Biden counties compared to 24% of the Trump counties.

The data lays out that a Biden-winning county was 3.5 times more likely to be funded by CTCL than a Trump-winning one and that Biden won six counties in Pennsylvania that delivered 100,000 or more votes. CTCL funded 100 percent of those six.

Trump won only four counties that delivered him 100,000 or more votes and CTCL funded 75 percent of them.

Philadelphia County was the most richly funded and no Biden county received less than $0.55 per capita. The least-funded Trump county received $0.18.