Lonestar Bias: Texas Election Officials Received $36 Million to Turn State Blue
A new report documents that private foundations spent more than $36 million to pay local election offices in Texas to alter policies and practices in the 2020 election. The money was overwhelmingly spent in solid Democratic strongholds and designed to maximize turnout in these Biden-leaning jurisdictions. The money was concentrated in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and the Rio Grande Valley, according to a new report.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, with which I am associated, reviewed the grant letters and other government documents executed between Texas county election officials and the Center for Technology for Civic Life, a nonprofit that poured over $350 million nationwide into government election offices in order to have those offices adopt policies the nonprofit supported.
The nonprofit was funded by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg after a dinner meeting where controversial Biden Justice Department nominee Vanita Gupta advocated for the strategy in 2019.
Other organizations donated another $100 million nationwide to local election offices in addition to the Zuckerberg-related nonprofit, raising the total to influence government election policy to almost half a billion dollars. PJ Media was the first to report the details of this plan last April.
Documents from Texas county election officials obtained for the Public Interest Legal Foundation report show that the private dollars were focused on adopting procedures not always consistent with Texas law and practices, such as drive-through voting and voting by mail for any reason, contrary to Texas law.
In other words, the private dollars were used in a way to pressure officials to alter existing Texas election procedures adopted by the Texas legislature.
Texas Rep. Phil King has introduced HB 2283 to solve the problem and prohibit private dollars from flowing into government election offices. The bill has sat in committee since March 15.
The private dollars appear to have made a difference. Tarrant County received $1.6 million in Zuckerberg cash. Biden’s performance improved 43% in raw votes over Hillary Clinton’s compared to Trump’s increase of 18% in raw votes. The same dynamic played out in urban areas across Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Democratic urban cores opened the floodgates to Biden votes – all through the creation of structural bias.
Austin area counties also received Zuckerberg dollars, and raw Democrat vote totals there jumped 70 and 80 percent over 2016 in counties like Hays and Williamson, according to the PILF report.
So how does this happen? The Zuckerberg dollars turned urban offices into massive turnout machines. As I wrote:
What these grants did was build structural bias into the 2020 election where structural bias matters most – in densely populated urban cores. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines. The hundreds of millions of dollars built systems, hired employees from activist groups, bought equipment and radio advertisements. It did everything that street activists could ever dream up to turn out Biden votes if only they had unlimited funding.
It is true that red counties in Texas also received grants, but those were fig leaf grants designed to insulate the Center For Technology and Civic life from accusations of bias. More importantly, those grants were smaller, sometimes only $5,000, and barely enough to make any dent in behaviors, unlike the large blue-county grants in Texas.
If the Texas election were confined only to those counties that received Zuckerberg dollars, the report notes, Biden would have won Texas by 270,000 votes. That’s the point. The private dollars created efficiencies and capacities. When a given county is majority blue to begin with, such as Harris or Travis, and you create efficiencies and capacities in the election process in those counties, you are manufacturing votes for Democrats that did not exist before the efficiencies and capacities were put in place with Zuckerberg dollars.
Some might wonder why Zuckerberg money was wasted on Texas, a state Trump was sure to win.
Two answers. First, Texas was not always a certain Trump win. The October spin in the Democrat-friendly media was that Texas was in play. Second, and more importantly, the play in Texas wasn’t about 2020. It was about flipping Texas blue in the future. And if and when that happens, it will be done by building out efficiencies and capacities in the counties in 2020 that were part of the trial run.
Now you understand why banning private money that builds in bias in Texas is so important.
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