A few days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang he had no plans to get involved in this year’s general election as he had in years past, which he reiterated again in a recent letter to the House Judiciary Committee. Even so, election integrity advocates should be slow to breathe a sigh of relief. The election interference issues posed by “Zuckbucks” in 2020 still endure today through the nonprofit organizations Zuckerberg once partnered with. Not only do these threats still endure, but this year, left-leaning organizations may have set their sights on expanding their influence in rural and suburban America — some through grants and some through increased on-the-ground advocacy.
A press release from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), one of the primary organizations Zuckerberg previously helped fund, announced their new “2024 Rural and Nonmetro Election Infrastructure Grant Program” on Aug. 5. This comes after Republican members of the Committee on House Administration criticized election grants as disproportionately helping get-out-the-vote in left-leaning urban areas over rural areas. With this in mind, supporters of CTCL might attempt to argue that this new grant aimed at rural communities is just CTCL’s way of correcting past mistakes, but a holistic view of CTCL’s problematic tactics point to a more partisan motivation for moving beyond urban neighborhoods.
More money for rural counties might sound like a good thing at first, but it’s not if the money is coming from groups
