Keystone Today

Pennsylvania election officials would be prohibited from accepting private money to help underwrite the cost of election administration under legislation approved along a 113-90 party-line vote in the Pennsylvania House.

The prime sponsor of the bill, Rep. Eric Nelson (R-Westmoreland), said that the legislation “addresses a major concern brought forth during the 2020 election, that the lure of private money has seeped into the election system.”

“Email evidence has proven Pennsylvania’s highest election officials notified specific counties of grant opportunities weeks before other counties were made aware,” Nelson continued in a statement issued yesterday after the bill’s passage. “Our state’s highest offices were vulnerable to perversion by deep pockets with private election contracts. It is just plain wrong, and this bill will stop it.”

By email evidence, Nelson refers to reports that top Democratic officials, including some in Gov. Tom Wolf’s office, helped direct private money to election officials in Democratic counties, with no proportional funding directed to Republican counties.

Democratic challenger Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes in the November 2020 election. Trump, who had carried the state in 2016, made baseless claims about voter fraud costing him the Quaker State.

The New York Post cited a report by Terry Tracy, CEO of Board & Liberty, showing that former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar under Wolf invited Democrats counties such as Bucks County to apply for the grant but not Republican-led counties.

An analysis provided by the Post shows that Republican counties of Mifflin and Mercer getting 66 cents and 73 cents respectively per voter, while Philadelphia County, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, received $8.87 per voter.

The money was provided by the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL), which received nearly $400 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg leading up to the 2020 general election. The CTCL grants helped to drive up the Democratic vote in battleground states, according to extensive research into the influence of the grants by nonprofit Capital Research Center (CRC).

In Arizona, for instance, CTCL funded four of the five counties that Biden won, according to Capital Research Center. The biggest beneficiary was Maricopa County, which doubled Biden’s count over Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.

Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Arizona since 1996. Numerous recounts both statewide and in Maricopa County found no evidence of voter fraud, as falsely claimed by Trump and many of his supporters. 

The private funding ban was a provision in a sweeping election bill vetoed by Wolf in June. Wolf’s office told the Allentown Morning Call that he opposes Nelson’s bill in its current form.