WND Can’t Stop Repeating Election Lie About Zuckerberg Money

Bob Unruh repeated one of WorldNetDaily’s favorite lies about the 2020 election in a Jan. 19 article:

One of the organizations that facilitated a major undue election influence operation during the 2020 presidential race has announced plans for another campaign during the 2024 race, but this time instead of using “Zuckbucks” from Mark Zuckerberg, it wants to use federal tax dollars, a new report charges.

The organization is the Center for Tech and Civic Life and it was that group that handed out hundreds of millions of dollars, provided by Zuckerberg, to elections officials who often used it to recruit Joe Biden voters.

It was one of the major undue influences on the 2020 race, as such dollars, more than $400 million, never before had been injected into an American election, especially when those funds were outside the normal election spending procedures that are monitored.

Unruh has never provided any evidence to back up his claim that Zuckerberg money was “mostly” or “often” used “to recruit Joe Biden voters” (or even that any money did). And as we’ve pointed out every time Unruh and WND push this bogus claim, that’s not what happened.  In fact, any election office could have received the money — intended to help run an election during a pandemic when local jurisdictions failed to offer all the funding needed — and, indeed, more Republican-dominated jurisdictions than Democratic-dominated ones accepted the money.

The reason for Unruh’s latest repetition of this lie is to complain — citing a freakout by the right-wing Federalist website — that CTCL wants to play a role in the 2024 election to “facilitate applications by elections officials for money from a massive federal government grant program administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency” to help election agencies. This prompted Unruh to crib further from the Federalist article, citing a right-wing group called the Caesar Rodney Institute, which seems to exist mainly to manufacture conspiracy theories about how the Zuckerberg money was spent:

The report said during the 2020 race, “CTCL money financed the takeover of election offices at the city and county level by partisan activists and made those offices a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data-sharing agreements that were favorable to Democrat candidates.

“Many CTCL-funded election offices then became launching pads for intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and precisely targeted, door-to-door voter turnout and mail-in ballot-chasing efforts in densely populated urban areas packed with potential Democrat voters,” the report said.

But as one observer noted, money going toward urban areas “not de facto evidence of partisan intent. Highly populated localities need more resources to run an election where there are far more voters.” Still, Unruh cribbed further from the Federalist to state that “the report notes that the purpose of election officials is to maintain polls and count votes accurately, not participate in partisan ‘get-out-the-vote’ campaigns on behalf of one political party.” Neither Unruh nor the Federalist provided any evidence that encouraging people to vote is a crime.