Established Fact
The WILL Report found a statistically significant increase in Biden votes — estimated at more than 8,000 additional votes in Wisconsin alone — attributable to CTCL grants in the state. The OSC concluded that CTCL’s real motive was to “facilitate increased in-person and absentee voting” in targeted areas among voters fitting a “Biden profile,” with “safe voting” as pretext. CTCL’s designated technical partners included no public health or medical experts — all were election administration, voter outreach, or civic mobilization specialists. The WSVP was submitted to CTCL on June 15, 2020.
Citations
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, Finger on the Scale: Examining Private Funding of Elections in Wisconsin 13–15 (June 2021). WILL’s OLS regression measured the change in per-municipality Democratic turnout (Biden vs. Clinton 2016) against CTCL grant receipt across 1,869 Wisconsin municipalities, controlling for 2016 turnout, third-party vote, percent African American, household income, and municipality size. CTCL Grant coefficient: 40.93 (p<0.01) for Biden-Clinton; 8.359 (not significant) for Trump. Conclusion: “For President Biden there was a statistically significant increase in turnout in cities that received CTCL grants. In those cities, President Biden received approximately 41 votes more on average… Given the number of municipalities in the state that received grants, this is a potential electoral impact of more than 8,000 votes in the direction of Biden.” Available at will-law.org. The OSC reproduced this finding at Ch. 1, p. 31 (App. 503), available at justthenews.com. Counterpoint: A 2024 peer-reviewed study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Warshaw, Goldstein & McCrain) applying synthetic difference-in-differences methodology found CTCL grants increased Democratic vote share by 0.03–0.36 percentage points in Wisconsin — and concluded that the OLS approach used by WILL “is a dramatic overestimate” because grant-receiving areas already trended Democratic before 2020 and the parallel-trends assumption required by simple difference-in-differences is not satisfied. Available at pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
OSC Second Interim Report, Ch. 4, p. 71: “Safe voting was a pretext — the real reason for CTCL’s WSVP grants was to facilitate increased in-person and absentee voting in specific targeted areas inside the Zuckerberg 5.” Ch. 4, p. 38: “[T]he private funding… targeted only the ‘Biden profile voter.'” See also Ch. 2, p. 43 (“The Zuckerberg-funded CTCL/Zuckerberg 5 scheme would prove to be an effective way to accomplish the partisan effort to ‘turnout’ their desired voters”); Ch. 4, p. 72 (CTCL asking cities on June 10, 2020: “What steps can you take to update registered voters’ addresses before November? What steps can you take to register new voters? How much would each cost?”). Available at justthenews.com. Note: The composite phrase “facilitate increased in-person and absentee voting among Biden profile voters” synthesizes Ch. 4, pp. 38 and 71; it is not a single verbatim OSC quotation.
OSC Second Interim Report, Ch. 4, pp. 55–57. The eleven CTCL-designated partners were: (1) National Vote At Home Institute (absentee voting/ballot curing); (2) Elections Group / Ryan Chew (drop boxes/voter outreach); (3) Ideas42 (behavioral science communications); (4) Power the Polls (poll worker recruitment); (5) Mikva Challenge (Chicago-based student poll workers); (6) US Digital Response (absentee curing/onboarding); (7) Center for Civic Design (ballot design); (8) CSME Communications (advertising); (9) Brennan Center (election integrity/cybersecurity); (10) HVS Productions (voter navigator content); (11) Modern Elections (Spanish language). OSC at p. 56: “Importantly, none of the referenced ‘partners’ mandated by CTCL were health or medical experts that one might expect for efforts tied to the COVID pandemic; rather, as the grant contracts required, these were ‘experts’ in ‘election administration.'” And: “CTCL’s partners had nothing to do with Covid-19 safety. Neither CTCL nor its ‘partners’ were medical or health professionals. Instead, CTCL boasted that it had a ‘network of current and former election administrators and election experts available’ to ‘scale up your vote by mail processes.'” Available at justthenews.com.
Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan 2020, cover page: “Submitted to the Center for Tech & Civic Life June 15, 2020.” Available at techandciviclife.org. Note: The WSVP itself is extensively framed around COVID-19 from its first page, citing the April 2020 Wisconsin primary disaster, pandemic-driven absentee surges, PPE procurement, DMV closures, and polling place capacity constraints throughout. Any characterization that the WSVP predated widespread COVID accommodation discussions is not supported by the document.
OSC Second Interim Report, Ch. 4, p. 32: “The relative funding levels for personal protective equipment also gives the lie to a claim that the extraordinary injection of ‘Zuckerbucks’ into this election was necessitated by or intended primarily to ensure the election did not worsen the public health as opposed to influencing voting patterns.” See also WILL, Finger on the Scale 7 (spending breakdown showing 2.4% of total CTCL grants to Wisconsin on “Polling Place Rental & Cleaning Expenses” — the category most directly tied to COVID mitigation; the majority was spent on poll worker recruitment/pay, temporary staffing, voter outreach, and voter education). Available at justthenews.com; will-law.org.
OSC Second Interim Report, Ch. 4, p. 72: “On June 10, 2020, Vicky Selkowe informed the representatives of the other Zuckerberg 5 that: ‘[o]ur national funding partner, the Center for Tech & Civic Life, has one additional question area they’d like answered: “What steps can you take to update registered voters’ addresses before November? What steps can you take to register new voters? How much would each cost?”‘” This contemporaneous CTCL communication — conditioning grant funding on cities detailing voter registration plans — corroborates the OSC’s finding that CTCL’s programmatic priority was voter mobilization rather than pandemic safety. Available at justthenews.com.