John Gizzi touted in his April 4 Newsmax column:
Wisconsin voters resoundingly elected to ban out-of-state election interference with vote counting Tuesday.
Barely 24 hours later, Newsmax learned that members of the Republican National Committee were discussing launching a movement nationwide to eradicate the influence of outside money in election administration such as that deployed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2020.
With nearly all votes counted, 54% of Badger State voters supported Question 1 to ban all private funding of elections. An even larger number of voters (58%) voted to enact Question 2 to restrict the administration of elections “to only election officials designated by law.”
[…]California National Committeeman Shawn Steel agreed and cited the role of Zuckerberg in the 2020 election.
“Candidates triumph with huge turnouts — Zuckerberg understood this,” he said. “He orchestrated a labyrinth to funnel over $400 million into Democrat communities to significantly push up the vote for Joe Biden in battleground states. Zuckerberg was the most influential person in the 2020 presidential election and made a bold move. Fortunately, Wisconsin voters have made that practice illegal to interfere with federal elections. Hopefully, other states will do the same.”
Steel is lying, and Gizzi couldn’t be bothered to fact-check. As we’ve documented regarding WorldNetDaily’s repetition of this lie, no evidence has been provided to support the claim that any of that money was spent to specifically recruit Democratic voters, and encouraging people to vote is not a crime. 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. Others have pointed out the false premise under which the Wisconsin ballot initiative was promoted.
Nevertheless, Gizzi continued:
In her book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” author Mollie Hemingway documented how the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization led by Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla, “gave more than $400 million to non-profit groups …. Most of those funds — colloquially called ‘Zuckerbucks’—were funneled through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a group led by three Democrats with a long history of activism.”
“The couple also heavily funded the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a group run by a man who used to be the senior attorney at the left-wing People for the American Way,” she added. “That group also funneled Zuckerbucks to governmental entities.”
Gizzi did not indicate whether Hemingway offered any evidence that, innuendo aside, any of this money was actually used for explicitly partisan purposes, and it’s entirely likely no such evidence exists.
UPDATE: Gizzi uncritically repeated some of these claims in an April 2 column touting the vote:
Republicans who dubbed the money “Zuckerbucks” complained the bulk of the funds went to Democrat strongholds and claimed it was an attempt by the billionaire to tip the vote in favor of Democrats. The argument came amid claims made by former President Donald Trump and his supporters that widespread voter fraud led to Biden’s 2020 win.
Gizzi did not quote anyone who supported the funding, though he did note that “Three courts and the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission rejected complaints challenging the legality of the grant money.”