Austin News

Travis County accepted $1.14 million from a group affiliated with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for the 2020 elections, according to a nonprofit group.

Public Interest Legal Foundation has identified $36 million donated by the Center for Tech and Civic Life to 14 “large and politically close counties” in Texas.

The money, which the foundation calls "ZuckBucks," was used to encourage voting by mail and move away from traditional voting procedures, the foundation said. Zuckerberg pledged $250 million to CTCL in September, Texas Scorecard reports.

“The large blue-leaning counties received huge sums to transform their elections,” the organization said. “Smaller red counties did not receive anything close.”

Counties used the grant money to pay for drive-thru voting, voter education outreach, hazard pay and personal protective equipment, the foundation said.

“In November 2020, Texas performed two kinds of elections,” the foundation said. “While the majority of counties (making up only 26% of Texas' population] stuck to established/publicly budgeted procedures, the rest took Silicon Valley money in return for preferred administrative practices.”

Private money “started the process of turning Texas toward procedures outside of the normal statutory framework for running elections,” the foundation said.

Dallas County received the most contributions in Texas from the Center for Tech and Civic Life at $15.1 million, the foundation said. That was followed by Harris County at $9.6 million, Webb County at $2.8 million, Bexar County at $1.9 million, Cameron County at $1.8 million and Tarrant County at $1.6 million.

The money helped flip Tarrant from red to blue in 2020, the foundation said.

“The Tarrant County election administrator’s budget for the 2020 election was originally $8.089 million,” the foundation said in a statement. “CTCL juiced that budget by almost 21%.”

Two bills are pending in the Texas Legislature on private donations to counties for elections.

One, HB 2283, will make it illegal for counties to accept money from private individuals or other third parties for elections. A proposed Senate bill, SB7, will require counties to receive permission from the secretary of state before accepting private donations.

“Private parties cannot be allowed to pay for preferred modes of elections in Texas or anywhere else,” PILF President J. Christian Adams told Texas Scorecard.

In another examination of the CTCL donations in Nevada and Arizona, the nonprofit Capital Research Center found that the money was concentrated in Democratic-leaning counties where large voter turnout would benefit Joe Biden’s candidacy, Legal Newsline reported.

In Arizona, Biden won five of the 15 counties, but those five represented 85% of his vote total in the state, the story said. CTCL also donated money to five of the 10 counties carried by former President Donald Trump, but those counties represented only 11% of Trump’s statewide total, Legal Newsline reported. Biden won Arizona by 0.3%.

Meanwhile, another nonprofit group, Restoration Action, has purchased $2 million in ads in three states to urge voters and U.S. senators to reject S.B. 1, the For the People Act of 2021, which the group argues threatens election integrity, Prairie State Wire reported.

The federal legislation will eliminate voter identification requirements  and signature verification on absentee ballots, the group says.