A project run by The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit organization that controvertibly utilized Mark Zuckerberg’s money to increase Democratic voter turnout in the 2020 election, is buying space for regional election offices to store voting equipment and ballots.
The Alliance for Election Excellence (AEE), led by Tiana Epps-Johnson and the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), started with almost $100 million in April 2022 and is responsible for providing private funding for the nation’s election infrastructure. According to reports, the CTCL disobeyed local election officials and used mail-in voting in the 2020 campaign to boost turnout in districts that were virtually entirely Democratic. The CTCL allegedly used hundreds of millions of dollars from the founder of Facebook’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to get mail-in votes before the election, demonstrating the partisan conflict of interest by supporting the conversion of many election offices to vote-by-mail.
According to a news release from the AEE, Macoupin County, Illinois, has received funds to support operations since it is one of the alliance’s “Centers for Election Excellence.”
“As a Center for Election Excellence, and part of the initial cohort making up the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, they received grant funding allowing them to purchase a building for more secure and accessible space to administer elections,” explains the announcement.
The Macoupin County Clerk, Pete Duncan, emphasized the potential conflict of interest that could arise from using the room to keep voting devices and ballots:
“We’ve run out of space in general but the big thing was there simply was no real secure storage space for our voting machines and ballots – two things that absolutely need to be secured – and the space became difficult to manage when we needed to add in-person voting to already overcrowded, unsecured space.”
“The $500,000 grant will be used to purchase and update the new building. Conveniently located directly across from the county courthouse, it will serve as a secure location for equipment as well as allow for an independently accessible space for early voting,” explains the AEE.
