The Sconi

This week, Walworth County became the first Wisconsin county to ban election officials from accepting private money to help underwrite the management of elections. The 11-member Board of Supervisors approved the ordinance unanimously with no debate on April 21.

Ron Heuer, president of the Wisconsin Voters Alliance (WVA), who has been pressing local governments to ban the money, says others are lining up.

“The governor vetoed legislation that would have banned the practice,” Heuer told The Sconi. “And a Senate resolution making a constitutional change to ban it has to go through a voter referendum and be approved by the legislature again. That leaves the fall elections vulnerable.”

Last July, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, vetoed Republican-backed legislation banning state and local election officials from accepting the private funds. At the end of regular session this year, Republican lawmakers approved Senate Joint Resolution 101, which would amend the state Constitution to ban the money. But before becoming law, the resolution must be approved by the voters in the fall, and then meet with legislative approval against next session.

Hundreds of millions in private money, provided by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, flowed through two nonprofits, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), to election officials in battleground states in the 2020 presidential election. An ongoing investigation by the Capital Research Center shows that the money, while presented as a way to secure safe elections during the pandemic, predominately supported officials in Democratic areas in a get-out-the-vote effort.

A week ago, Zuckerberg and Chan announced they would no longer be funding election management, and CTCL, their principal beneficiary, announced a new effort, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. It’s a five-year $80 million nonpartisan effort, the group said.

“The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence is bringing together world-class partners so that local election officials no longer have to go it alone,” Tiana Epps-Johnson, CTCL’s executive director, said in a statement announcing the group’s new direction. Epps-Johnson is a Democratic activist and was an inaugural class member of Barack Obama's Obama Foundation.

Heuer said he was skeptical that the group would change its strategy.

“We definitely need to keep an eye on them,” he said. “One thing they learned in 2020 is how to get the vote out. Now they can come at it with more of a rifle rather than a shotgun approach.”