Tommy Washbush / Freepik assets
Mark Zuckerberg's credit card being declined by a credit card reader.
About 90% of what Republicans are peddling to promote election “integrity” is borne of either paranoia or sour grapes. Had Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2020 they would have thought everything had worked just fine here.
But they do have one proposal that I like. On the spring ballot is a constitutional amendment that would ban the use of private funds to run elections. Here’s why I think that makes sense.
First, a little background. This is an issue because the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life spent millions of dollars in 2,500 jurisdictions nationally to help run the 2020 elections. Republicans view it as a left-leaning organization, mostly because Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave about $300 million or more to its election efforts.
Here’s where Republican paranoia comes in. From what I can tell, CTCL is a good, well-meaning outfit. If it leans left, that’s not apparent from looking at its website. Some of what it does is to simply provide information and courses on best practices and the latest technology for local elections officials. But in 2020 it also provided grants to those local governments, with the idea that the pandemic had created special needs. Local officials had to apply for the money, but CTCL turned no one down. In fact, the money went both to places that voted for Biden and for Trump.
But dig a little deeper and the GOP’s paranoia starts to look like a more justified concern. CTCL gave $10 million to about 200 communities in Wisconsin. But $8.8 million of that went to Wisconsin’s five largest cities, all of which went for Biden. CTCL may not have planned it that way, but you can see how a reasonable person might conclude that their grants were more helpful to blue places than red ones.
And this points up the problem. What if the money didn’t come from Zuckerberg but from MyPillow guy and election denier Mike Lindell? And what if Lindell actually tried to target that money at Republican bastions? What if 90% of it went to places that voted for Trump? Would we be okay with it in that case?
Also, I don’t think there’s much validity, at least in Wisconsin, to the claim that election offices are being short-changed and need the private money. Madison got $1.5 million from CTCL. It used a little over a million dollars to pay a third party vendor to provide an “end-to-end absentee ballot mailing system” that would perform several tasks including folding and inserting ballots, inserting instruction materials and return envelopes, and printing voter information directly on the envelopes, according to a recent story in the Wisconsin State Journal.
That’s nice, but it hardly seems crucial. In fact, it seems like the kind of thing that would have been done just as well in-house if the city didn’t have $1.5 million it had to burn through. Does anybody really think that this Madison city council and this Mayor are going to underfund elections in a city that is so crucial to delivering votes for Joe Biden and Tammy Baldwin?
There’s also the argument out there that this shouldn’t be a constitutional amendment. While it’s true that Republicans put this on the ballot as such because Gov. Tony Evers vetoed legislation to the same effect, the use of private funds to conduct public elections does seem to me to rise to the level of something that belongs in the Constitution. And, anyway, Wisconsinites have amended their Constitution 148 times since statehood. It’s not exactly a sacred text.
There is a second constitutional amendment on the ballot that I’m not so sanguine about. It provides that, “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums.” There is already essentially that same provision in the statutes, so nobody seems to be quite sure why the Republicans want to put it in the Constitution. This seems unnecessary at best and possibly mischievous.
But without the amendment on private funding there’s no reason why we couldn’t have competing liberal and conservative groups funding election offices in parts of the state that would promise to turn out more of their voters. Let that happen and we really will develop a problem with election integrity.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
