Newly revealed emails show what appears to be an intensive effort by multiple private advocacy groups to manage numerous aspects of the 2020 election in several swing-state cities key to Biden’s 2020 election victory, shedding further light on the role private initiatives and private funding played in potentially influencing the outcome of that race.
The emails, obtained by the election integrity group the Amistad Project, show exchanges between city officials in several Wisconsin cities and members of the Center for Tech and Civil Life, a left-leaning election advocacy organization based out of Chicago.
CTCL has been the subject of controversy since last year when it distributed a multimillion-dollar series of grants targeted to Democratic strongholds in Wisconsin, a critical swing state in U.S. presidential elections. Those grants were meant to help shore up the cities’ voting systems and promote safe voting amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the fall of 2020, the organization announced that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had sent the group a $250 million gift to help expand those operations to more cities nationwide.
The group would go on to award over 2,000 grants to various jurisdictions around the U.S. Yet even as the group was preparing to expand its influence across the country, in at least one instance it was partnering with several other groups to manage the election in multiple Wisconsin cities that had been the original recipients of the CTCL grants.
Among the participating groups is the Center for Civic Design, a group whose mission is in part to redesign voting ballots in order to “make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant.”
Emails from August of 2020 show officials in Racine, Green Bay and other Wisconsin cities receiving absentee ballot instructions and envelopes designed by the Center for Civic Design, with an official from the Center for Tech and Civic Life noting that they have funds available to print the materials.
“Please let CTCL & CCD know how we can be most helpful moving forward,” two CTCL staffers tell the city officials. “If it’s useful, grant funds are available for cities that want to print new envelopes.” (The Wisconsin Elections Commission would eventually direct municipalities throughout the state to use a uniform envelopment format.)
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