A Philadelphia think tank has linked a self-proclaimed nonpartisan elections organization to Pennsylvania Democratic Party officials. | Photo courtesy of Unsplash
A Philadelphia think tank has linked a self-proclaimed nonpartisan elections organization to Pennsylvania Democratic Party officials. | Photo courtesy of Unsplash
The ties between the Democratic Party and the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), an organization presenting itself as a nonpartisan elections group, are becoming clearer seven months after the November 2020 General Elections.
A report by Broad & Liberty, a public policy think tank out of Philadelphia, detailed an email thread that connects CTCL to a Democratic Delaware County councilwoman, a former Barack Obama staffer and a current staffer for Pennsylvania's Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf. Also in the mix is a direct mail consulting group, Deliver Strategies, which has worked for numerous Democratic campaigns.
The topic of discussion in the email thread was pursuing grant money from CTCL.
Running up to the November elections, CTCL granted millions of dollars from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to local election officials in battleground states with the purported mission of ensuring fair and safe elections during the pandemic. The donations from the group, headed by former Democratic operatives, heavily favored counties with strong Democratic voter-registration numbers.
The officials reportedly received the money in exchange for following a list of instructions surrounding the elections process. In one case involving Green Bay, Wisconsin, “left-leaning political advisors and lawyers [were] involved in deciding Green Bay's internal counting-room policy,” according to a complaint brought by an elections watchdog group, The Amistad Project.
Broad & Liberty noted that in Pennsylvania, Democratic “Chester County received $6.73 per registered voter via CTCL, while the largest grant to a Republican-leaning county was $1.73 per registered voter.”
CTCL has been on the radar of the Capital Research Center (CRC) since before the 2020 elections. CRC investigates tax-exempt groups suspected of engaging in political activity – a violation of IRS rules.
“The partisanship here (that a Democrat lawmaker was given notice of the CTCL grants and the involvement of Dem operatives in facilitating the grants) is totally consistent with what we've seen across the board,” CRC President Scott Walter told North Delco News in an email interview.
Walter said that he also agrees with Broad & Liberty’s assessment that the CTCL grants on a per-capita basis heavily favored Democratic counties over rural Republican ones.
“In PA, CTCL-funded counties that Trump won received an average of $0.57 per capita; CTCL-funded counties that Biden won received $3.11 on average,” Walter wrote. “Turnout rose higher in CTCL-funded counties that Biden won (23%) than Trump won (18%).”
Named in Broad & Liberty's report is Kevin Mack of Deliver Strategies, whose bio says he “most recently served as Lead Strategist for The Voter Project in Pennsylvania.”
Walter described The Voter Project as a front for the Keystone Research Center (KRC), which CRC profiled on its InfluenceWatch site.
“KRC is a labor-aligned (c)(3); it shares SEIU's $15/hr min wage goal (more than double PA's current $7.25/hr),” Walter wrote. “Director Stephen Herzenberg is an ex-Clinton admin staffer who assisted chief negotiator of the labor-side agreement of NAFTA. Vice president Bill Dando is legislative director of AFSCME Council 13, a KRC donor.”
Election reform legislation recently introduced in the Pennsylvania House requires election officials accepting private funds to disburse the money equally on a per-capita basis, or not accept it at all.
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