Source: Arizona Secretary of State, “2020 General Election Results” and “Historical Election Information & Information,” https://azsos.gov/elections.
Posted on 05/17/2021 9:43:08 AM PDT by marktwain
Perhaps the biggest underreported story of 2020 was how one billionaire, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, joined with a sleepy Chicago-based 501(c)(3) public charity to effectively privatize the election in many states.
Meet the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), which funneled an unprecedented $350 million from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to local elections officials for COVID-19 “relief.” In a blink, CTCL grew from almost nothing—its 2018 revenues were just $1.4 million—to a titan with the means to heavily influence election outcomes in favor of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in key battleground states.
As part of our ongoing investigation into CTCL’s spending, the Capital Research Center has traced “Zuck bucks” to Arizona and Nevada.
Arizona and Nevada have long been considered easy pickings for Republicans and Democrats, respectively, but were considered too tight to call for most the 2020 election season. In the end, both broke for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, supposedly due to Trump’s unpopularity. But what if there’s far more than meets the eye in these states?
Weirdness in Arizona
First, a bit of history. Arizona comfortably favors Republicans running for president, hovering around 52 percent of the vote in elections over the past two decades. While President Bill Clinton won the state in 1996—the first Democrat to do so since Harry Truman in 1948—Democrats consistently flopped in the state before 2020, never garnering more than 45 percent of the vote. Republicans’ high-water mark was in 2004, when President George W. Bush won almost 55 percent of the state, a full 10.5 percentage points above his opponent, Sen. John Kerry.
But since then Republicans have slowly trended downward. In 2016, Donald Trump won Arizona by 3.6 percent, a disappointing margin compared to Mitt Romney’s 9 point margin in 2012. The margin was almost identical to Sen. John McCain’s margin in his own state in 2008, and probably indicates strong antipathy to Obama more than a particular fondness for either man.
In 2020, Biden won Arizona by a scant 0.3 percent—a margin of just 10,457 votes—gaining a staggering 735,893 votes over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 figures, bringing his total to 1,672,143 votes.
Barring ballot fraud, that is an absolutely stunning result—particularly given that the Biden campaign’s presence in Arizona was minimal, to be charitable, and during the campaign he first visited the state in early October. Biden himself has no historic ties to Arizona and twice lost the state as Obama’s running mate, both times by huge margins (9–10 percentage points) and losing nearly 18,000 votes from his 2008 figures in his 2012 reelection bid.
Chalking it up to President Trump’s supposedly historic unpopularity, as some pundits like to do, explains nothing. While Trump won a lower percentage of Arizona’s votes compared with his Republican predecessors, he still won a historic 1,661,686 votes—improving his vote count in the state by an unheard of 640,532 votes over his 2016 totals and 518,635 votes over Romney’s totals in 2012. That’s an impressive comeback for any politician.
Biden, on the other hand, outperformed every presidential nominee in Arizona history, Republican or Democrat, as shown in Table 1, which compares his votes in 2020 with past results.
Source: Arizona Secretary of State, “2020 General Election Results” and “Historical Election Information & Information,” https://azsos.gov/elections.
Arizona is a rapidly growing state, gaining an additional 1 million people (16 percent) between 2010 and 2020. But Biden’s preposterous performance can’t simply be explained by population growth. By any normal metric, Arizona should have been an easy win for Trump, even a blowout. Something’s fishy in the Copper State.
CTCL in Arizona
Enter CTCL, which made grants to nine Arizona counties just prior to the 2020 election, five of which have been confirmed by CRC to total just over $5 million.
See CRC’s research on CTCL grants to Arizona here.
Unlike true battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, victory in Arizona always came down to capturing Maricopa County, which was the key to Trump’s success in 2016 and his loss four years later.
CTCL’s grants may not have won Arizona outright for Biden, but they certainly helped him clinch victory by greasing the skids for voter turnout. CTCL grants largely seem to have had a similar effect as political advertisements, which pump up turnout in places where the candidate isn’t physically present to rally. No wonder that CTCL’s largest grant targeted Maricopa County and saw the greatest returns.
That result would be impressive for a political action committee (PAC) designed to do just that, but CTCL isn’t a PAC. It’s a 501(c)(3) public charity barred from intervening in elections. Mark Zuckerberg was, in effect, able to tilt the outcome of the vote in Arizona to favor Biden using the wrong vehicle, while receiving a tax break in the process.
Something Stinks in Nevada
Nevada—with less than half the population of Arizona (3 million to 7 million)—is something of its mirror opposite in elections. It became a Democratic stronghold only in 2008. Prior to that the last Democrat to win Nevada was Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968, with the state breaking for Republicans as far back as 1976 when the Republican Party dominated in the West.
For the past two decades, Democrats have typically hovered around the 50 percent mark, with popular candidates such as Barack Obama winning 55 percent of the vote and unpopular candidates such as Al Gore garnering only 46 percent.
After George W. Bush won Nevada in 2000 and 2004 (the first Republican to do so since his father in 1988), John McCain lost the state to Obama, underperforming Bush by a crushing 8 percentage points. In 2012, Mitt Romney chiseled away 3 percentage points from Obama’s majority but still lost the state handily.
In 2016, Trump lost Nevada by about the same margin as Mitt Romney. However, Hillary Clinton dramatically underperformed Obama by 4.5 percentage points—the worst Democratic performance there since 2000, nearly costing her the state. She ultimately won Nevada by just 26,000 votes, less than the margin by which she lost Arizona.
In 2020, Trump improved his margins by 158,571 votes, an impressive 31 percent increase over 2016. Biden scored an additional 165,733 votes over Clinton’s 2016 figures, an increase of 30.8 percent, giving him a 33,596 vote lead over Trump.
That’s utterly extraordinary. Trump improved his total vote share in the state by only 2 percent, but that belies the fact that he had the largest increase in votes in Nevada history—beaten only by Biden’s miraculous trove of largely mail-in votes.
In a normal election, Trump’s incredible surge over his 2016 turnout would have flipped Nevada into his column. Instead, Biden’s votes eerily seem to track with Trump’s, rising at almost the same rate to give him a modest lead.
Once again, Joe Biden outperformed every presidential candidate in history, as shown in Table 2.
Nevada Secretary of State, “Election Results – 1962 To Present,” https://www.nvsos.gov/sos/elections/election-information/previous-elections/election-results.
Statistically, that boggles the mind. Trump’s 158,000-vote increase is consistent with a state he aggressively courted in numerous massive rallies. But Biden almost never visited Nevada before early October, and even then his Las Vegas rally on October 9 drew a scant 20–30 people. Nor are his absurdly high margins explained by population growth; Nevada’s population grew by only 190,000 people (7 percent) between 2010 and 2020.
As in Arizona, Biden spent heavily in Nevada yet has no historic ties there that one would expect in a state whose voters turned out for him in unprecedented numbers. It’s true that as Obama’s running mate the pair drew historic turnout in 2008 and 2012, but did Biden really shatter even Obama’s 2008 record by more than 171,000 votes in 2020 (itself more than 113,000 votes above George Bush’s 2004 triumph)?
Flooding the Silver State with Zuck Bucks
Democratic strategy in Nevada comes down to racking up large turnout in two left-wing strongholds: Clark County, centered on Las Vegas, and Washoe County, home to Reno. Republican strategy naturally revolves around overcoming the Democrats’ advantage in these cities with rural turnout in the other 15 counties.
Enter CTCL and $2.7 million in grants split between just two Nevada counties, Clark ($2,394,036) and Washoe ($277,479)—the only two counties Biden won in the Silver State.
See CRC’s research on CTCL grants to Nevada here.
Besides Washoe and Clark Counties, Trump won Nevada’s remaining 15 counties by an average of 73 percent. He lost Reno by only 11,000 votes, but Las Vegas put Biden over the edge. In Sin City, Biden crushed Trump by almost 91,000 votes—almost three times his 33,000 statewide lead over Trump. Without a bumper crop of Biden ballots in Las Vegas, Trump would have won Nevada by a comfortable margin.
How much did CTCL’s $2.3 million grant to Clark County help turn out Biden voters? Clark County contains 71 percent of Nevada’s 1.8 million registered voters. If there was one jurisdiction where partisan get-out-the-vote infrastructure would pay dividends in Nevada, it was there.
Just how county elections officials spent their CTCL funds is unclear, as the public document describes its use as only “planning and operationalizing safe and secure election administration” during the COVID-19 pandemic. But a similar $10 million CTCL grant to Philadelphia stipulated that the city use the funds for printing and postage for mail-in ballots. In 2020, Nevada conducted an all-mail election, sending absentee ballots—which usually must be requested by voters—to every registered voter in the state.
CTCL’s grant to Philadelphia also required the city scatter “Secure Dropboxes” around the city for voters to drop ballots into. This matters because dropboxes sidestep basic voting integrity requirements, allowing anyone—without any identification—to drop any number of ballots into a private collection bin with no official oversight and no accountability after the fact. If a fraudster wanted to flood Philadelphia with phony ballots, CTCL’s Zuck bucks enabled him to bypass USPS mailboxes.
There’s no reason to believe CTCL didn’t require the same dropboxes be scattered around Reno, Las Vegas, and everywhere else its funds were sent. We’ll never know how many fake ballots entered into the election bloodstream this way.
Tax-Free Funny Business
Some may chalk up these anomalies to coincidence or dismiss Trump as so deeply unpopular he was doomed from the start. But there are too many oddities to ignore the former, and facts just don’t support the latter.
That Trump only modestly improved on past Republicans’ percentages of the vote in Arizona and Nevada is irrelevant. What matters are the raw totals he won, which were so huge they definitively put the “popularity contest” thesis to bed—and suggesting they could be surmounted only by a uniquely charismatic opponent with a powerful platform, as Barack Obama had in 2008, or else by cheating. Of the many things President Biden has been called, charismatic is not one of them.
Regardless, one villain also deserves the spotlight: the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which all but managed the 2020 election in battleground states where it had no business meddling given its nonprofit status. For the first time in history, Big Philanthropy privatized an American election—and the media couldn’t be bothered to notice.
Appendix
CTCL grant data for Arizona and Nevada (second tab)
CTCL grant data for Arizona including 6 remaining counties that did not receive any CTCL funding
Presidential election data for Arizona and Nevada
Ping.
Ping.
It is just so hard for me to believe that, at this point in time, there are still so many people whose minds could be changed by a tv or radio ad, a campaign flyer, or a speech.
With all the information available out there, looking at your tax bill, looking at your paycheck, looking at declining crime rates, looking at declining unemployment rates and an economy that was just purring along, if a person needs propaganda, ad or flyers to help them decide who to vote for, they probably shouldn’t be voting.
Interesting article, but I still think fraud had more to do with it the CTCL.
My Texas County turned the CTCL Money down, but a lot of traditionally conservative counties here in Texas took it.
I really think the US is doomed by the love of money by those in the drivers’ seats from local to states to national, including charities, religious, politicians of both parties.
I don’t find your thinking to be wrong or obtuse. People don’t get motivated by fliers, or propaganda for the most part. People are motivated by money.
Outside of BLM and Antifa, and government union democrats (notice I didn’t type working union employees) nobody was going to benefit from Biden monetarily.
So did he just out of magic, with no one showing up in Nevada or Arizona, just CRUSH all these new voters.......
The Arizona Maricopa audit will answer that.
To add your name to the growing Nevada ping list, FReepmail me...
Mark Zuckerberg - he’s either evil or he’s a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance. My bet is he’s just evil.
40K noncitizens voted in Arizona. If 75 percent voted for Biden, that’s a 20K vote swing right there.
It does.
Something stinks in every state with Ranked Choice Voting enabled voting machines.
Every state.
Fascinating, Captain.
I have posted it to FB. We’ll see if it gets me banned.
Is Mrs. Z part of the CCP?
This article is trying to point out that biden won. Money supposedly made the difference.. and changed minds to vote for biden.
Look!.. I don’t buy that for a second!... the left.. dems.. caught red handed, still carry on their lies and stole the election
Biden sits in the oval office... not legally, not elected.. he got there by pulling the most important robbery of our time. They stole the oval office and the republican party sealed their fate by letting it happen.
Biden and co HAS to be removed... the courts don’t let a bank robber keep the money he stole... and Biden must be evicted from the place he was put via stealing it.!!!
Unfortunetly, even Fox News will not cover it unless Tucker or Steve Hilton go there at some point. I have not heard them cover the Maricopa County audit, even to talk about the 99% negative articles about it.
It is starting to come out that the CTCL money, supposedly to help with the election during Covid, had a lot of strings attached. It was focused on mail-in-voting, drop boxes, and ballot harvesting. If the city/county/state did not comply, they had to give the money back.
CTCL was involved early and forced many of the election changes that even went against state election laws.
In some cases, maybe many, CTCL sent in their own people who took over the election from local election clerks, placed drop boxes more conveniently in Democrat areas, gained access to databases that told which registered voters had yet to vote, and go door-to-door offering to help people fill out and collect their ballots, even in states where ballot harvesting is illegal.
It makes me wonder if the Georgia SOS and Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, among others, were the ones who accepted the money and are resisting audits that might exposed how it was really spent.
The "referees" had a thumb on the scale.
The fix was in.
Consider if the election officials had done the same thing with Republicans.
This is essentially the idea of Critical Race Theory. Some groups do not do well. Therefore, the government must advantage some groups at the expense of other groups.
The purpose, of course, is to gain power through the votes of the advantaged groups, who are already manipulated by the government, thus completing a feedback loop to keep the perpetrator in perpetual power.
No doubt the CTCL money greased the fraud machines in play, but that still puts the fraud at the forefront of the reason for the the numbers. CTCL just provided cover, but what they did is itself a criminal act, and Zuckerberg should be doing hard time in the nastiest prison on the planet.
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