Butler County Formally Rejected CTCL Funding on Election Integrity Grounds, Documenting Partisan Design (PA)

The Butler County, Pennsylvania Board of Commissioners formally declined CTCL funding, with Commissioner Kimberly Geyer documenting in an official narrative submitted to the United States Department of Justice that acceptance would compromise election integrity by subjecting county operations to the influence of “a private/public entity.” The same document, co-signed by Commissioner Leslie Osche as Chairman, identified Zuckerberg’s media/tech philanthropy and Progress PA among the external forces that the commissioners concluded had targeted Butler County — a stronghold carried by Trump with 72% of the vote in 2016 — as part of a broader effort to influence the 2020 election outcome. The document further records that Governor Wolf withheld federal CARES Act election funding from Lebanon County for over a month in 2020, releasing it only on August 14, 2020 — a period during which CTCL private funding was simultaneously flowing to Democratic-leaning Pennsylvania counties that had received preferential early access to the grant program. This contemporaneous, official county-level record of CTCL rejection and documented concern about external targeting provides direct evidentiary support for the partisan design theory. The acceptance of CTCL funds by counties concurrently receiving federal HAVA and CARES Act assistance raises the additional question of whether the grant conditions subjected county election officials to the strictures of the federal program fraud statute.