Established Fact
Georgia counties including Fulton and DeKalb accepted multi-million-dollar CTCL grants in 2020 — Fulton County $6,309,436 and DeKalb County approximately $4.7 million for the general election plus an additional $4.6 million for the December runoff — and used the funds to operate voting locations, hire election staff, purchase processing equipment, and deploy drop boxes. CTCL grant agreements, as documented in Wisconsin where verbatim agreement text was produced in litigation, incorporated clawback provisions allowing CTCL to “discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part of the grant funds if it determines, in its sole judgement, that” the county had not met the agreement’s conditions. Whether the Fulton and DeKalb agreements contained identical language has not been established in publicly available documents retrieved for this analysis, but CTCL used a standardized grant template across jurisdictions. Georgia subsequently prohibited local election boards from accepting private grants other than from government sources, enacting Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-71(b) and § 21-2-212(f) through S.B. 202 in 2021 — legislation that would have barred the 2020 grants had it been in effect at the time.
Citations
Fulton County, Georgia accepted a CTCL grant of $6,309,436 on September 15, 2020, used for 240 voting locations and high-speed tabulators. See Capital Research Center, CTCL Grants to Georgia Counties — 2020 (spreadsheet), https://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/CTCL-Grants-to-Georgia-2020-v4-website-12-2-2020.xlsx ; see also Appellants’ Appendix § 1, Trump v. Kemp, No. 22O155 (U.S. Supreme Court), at timeline entry for Sept. 15, 2020, https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163392/20201214094650555_Appendix%20section%201.pdf
DeKalb County, Georgia received a $4.7 million CTCL grant for the November 2020 general election and an additional $4.6 million for the December 2020 runoff. See DeKalb County, Ga., Press Release, “DeKalb Receives $4.7 Million Grant to Improve Elections Process” (Oct. 2020), https://www.dekalbcountyga.gov/news/dekalb-receives-47-million-grant-improve-elections-process ; DeKalb County, Ga., Press Release, “Additional $4.6 Million Grant Provides DeKalb Funding for Personnel, PPE for Historic Runoff” (Nov. 2020), https://www.dekalbcountyga.gov/news/additional-46-million-grant-provides-dekalb-funding-personnel-ppe-historic-runoff.
DeKalb’s press releases confirm the grant funded hiring of new staff, ballot-processing equipment, and early voting locations. Fulton’s grant funded 240 voting locations.
The quoted clawback language is drawn from the verbatim text of CTCL grant agreements as produced in Wisconsin election integrity litigation. See Wisconsin Election Commission Complaint (Final Draft), ¶55, p. 018: “CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part of the grant funds if it determines, in its sole judgement, that (a) any of the above conditions have not been met.” https://fox11digital.com/PDFs/WEC-Complaint-FINAL-Draft-4.pdf. The five-city Wisconsin agreement similarly made the entire $6,324,527 repayable if CTCL, “at its sole discretion, determined these cities had not complied with CTCL’s terms.”Id. ¶39. No publicly available Georgia-specific CTCL grant agreement text has been retrieved for this analysis; the Wisconsin language is cited as documentation of the grant template CTCL used across jurisdictions.
Georgia S.B. 202 (2021), codified at Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-71(b) and § 21-2-212(f), prohibits county election boards from accepting private grants other than from governmental entities. This prohibition was enacted after the 2020 election; the 2020 grants did not violate this law as it did not yet exist. See Honest Elections Project, Letter to Georgia Attorney General, at 2–3 (Feb. 2023), https://honestelections.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/AG-Letter.pdf.