Sunshine Sentinel

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that restricting Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s inordinate influence in elections, and other recently enacted election law reforms, will increase the security in the elections in a state that already “does a great job.”

“Pre- and post-election audits happen automatically,” DeSantis, a Republican, said at a news conference in response to a reporters’ questions about elections. “We made reforms in 2000 (after the vote count debacle in the presidential elections), and in 2018 when you had all these late votes coming in. That was a disaster.”

“Going forward,” he added, “we recently did a great election package that includes requiring voter ID both for in-person and absentee ballots, banning of ballot harvesting (third-party collection of mail ballots), and we banned Zuckerbucks. Zuckerberg spent over $400 million through these quote nonprofits to quote help with election administration but required certain things to be done like ballot harvesting and targeting partisan votes. That is totally unacceptable. Elections need to be administered by offices not by private tech moguls commandeering election equipment.”

Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan funneled more than $400 million through the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research. These groups present themselves as nonpartisan good government groups but are run by former Democratic and progressive operatives orchestrating a get out the vote campaign for the Democratic Party, according to Legal Newsline. The Capital Research Center, a proponent of limited government, published exhaustive reports on the make-up of the organizations and their influence over election officials in the 2020 general election.

Center for Tech and Civic Life founder Tiana Epps Johnson, for instance, was from 2012-15 the election administration director of the New Organizing Institute, a Democratic grassroots election training group.

On the center’s board is Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser to the elections program at Pierre Omidyar‘s Democracy Fund. In 2016 Omidyar, founder of e-Bay, donated $100,000 to an anti-Trump political action committee.

The center's backers include the Skoll Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund.

The New York Post also recently published a lengthy article describing how working in battleground states, the groups turned the tide for Democrat President Joe Biden in last November’s presidential election.

Other states, including Texas and Georgia, have likewise banned local election officials from accepting private money to underwrite the cost of elections.

DeSantis acknowledged that Center for Tech and Civil Life and Center for Election Innovation and Research did not put as much money into Florida as they did Texas, Pennsylvania and some other battleground states. Miami-Dade County reported it received no money from Center for Tech and Civil Life.