Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan donated $419.5 million to help make the 2020 election possible. The money went to thousands of polling stations around the country. Their donation was spent on infrastructure, personal protective equipment, and mailers that informed voters about how they could cast their vote safely during a pandemic, among other needs.
But at least half a dozen state legislatures, most of them run by Republicans, are working to prevent such donations from enabling their elections, reports The New Republic.
"With support from a dark-money group called the Foundation for Government Accountability, or FGA," it writes, "Republicans in numerous statehouses have been pushing legislation to ban these kinds of donations — which the FGA has dubbed “Zuckerbucks”—from ever being made again. The playbook is to use the kind of language that’s more often heard on the political left: the idea that elections are a public good that ought to be paid for out of public coffers and that the influence of billionaires can have a corrosive effect on democracy.
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There seems to be agreement that election offices shouldn’t have to rely on third-party funding from the Zuckerbergs of the world to pay for their basic functions. However, New Republic writes, "it’s hard to take this rhetoric seriously when it’s not accompanied by a campaign to ramp up government spending on elections and solve the problems that inspired his donation in the first place."
These new state laws need to be viewed through the lens of Republicans’ reaction to the 2020 election: their widespread refusal to accept Donald Trump’s loss, and the new voting restrictions that many states have imposed in the name of ensuring “election integrity.” Without an influx of federal and state dollars to the offices of city and county clerks, these bans on private funding will likely amount to one more measure that undermines elections instead of protecting them.
