BREAKING: Zuck Bucks Live Again in Nevada, Just in Time to Help Kamala’s Failing Campaign

Once again, Democrats are showing why our country must ban private funding for elections—and they’re using a Republican clerk to prove it

The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL)—the infamous group behind the 2020 “Zuck bucks” wave of private election grants that boosted Democratic turnout in key states—is at it again, this time with a new grant in Nevada, according to documents obtained by the Coalition Opposing Government Secrecy (COGS), a St. Louis-based government transparency watchdog.

This time, however, it was made possible by a Republican clerk known for castigating her constituents as lying “Kool-Aid drinkers.”

On Aug. 19, CTCL awarded $50,000 to Douglas County, Nevada, for “planning and operationalizing reliable and secure election administration . . . in 2024.” In return, CTCL’s grant application requires Douglas County to surrender information on its election operations, including a post-election report due by Jan. 31, 2025.

This language mirrors grants provided to thousands of county election offices in 2020 from CTCL, which received $350 million from billionaire mega-donor Mark Zuckerberg ostensibly to “fortify” the election amidst COVID-19. In fact, it helped juice Democratic turnout in key swing states, enough to oust President Trump from the White House, as analysis (including my own in early 2021) has demonstrated over and again.

Ironically, Zuckerberg himself recently apologized to Congress for the Zuck bucks stunt in a public letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R), much to the Left’s chagrin, in which he admitted that the CTCL grants were “designed to be non-partisan—spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities” but that “analyses I’ve seen show[ed] otherwise” and “benefited one party over the other.”

In 2020, CTCL gave $2.7 million in two grants to the counties surrounding Las Vegas and Reno, the only two counties that broke for Biden that year. Douglas County (pop. 50,000), in contrast, voted by 30 points in Trump’s favor in 2020.

Emails show that Douglas County Clerk-Treasurer Amy Burgans initiated the request at an unknown date. Her office also corresponded with Tiana Epps-Johnson, a CTCL founder and Obama Foundation fellow who previously worked for a Democratic digital organizing group hailed by the Washington Post as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.”

CTCL grant letter to Douglas County, Nevada (Aug. 19, 2024). Obtained via public record request.

From Douglas County’s grant proposal:

Briefly describe how you anticipate using the grant funds: As a rural County with limited funding a grant award will help us fill the gaps to purchase needed items for security. Being pro-active to mitigate any possible threat we would like to purchase transport carts for mail ballots and bullet proof glass for our election public counter. We are also in need for [sic] tables and shelving systems for our processing facility as well as tables for our vote centers. We are extremely grateful for any funding to help us maintain fair and safe elections for Douglas County.

The extra cost of mail-in ballots may be attributed to a 2021 law created by Nevada Democrats, who legislated all-mail elections in the state, requiring dramatic overhauls to how Nevadans cast their ballots. But paying for that overhaul is the responsibility of governments, not private donors. In March 2023, Burgans solicited extra funding for elections from the Nevada legislature in order to cover the state’s automatic voter registration system established by Democrats in 2021; the CTCL grant would suggest the county didn’t receive extra funding.

Douglas County grant application to CTCL. Obtained via public record request.

What's With the Bulletproof Glass?

Asking CTCL to pay for bulletproof glass may seem out of left field, but there’s more to the story—and Amy Burgans—than meets the eye.

In June 2024, the New York Times highlighted Burgans in an article titled, “A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies” for labeling election integrity advocates “Kool-Aid drinkers” spreading “disinformation and lies,” including “more than half” of the people living in Douglas County:

She [Burgans] estimated that more than half of the 50,000 people in Douglas County belonged to that category. They believed that elections were rigged and that Biden had been fraudulently elected — and for a while Burgans had thought that, too. She had been working in an administrative job for the county during the 2020 election, and she listened to her family members spread conspiracy theories about Dominion machines and read a friend’s false Facebook posts about the thousands of dead people voting in Nevada.

Amy BurgansA month later, Britain’sTimes hailed Burgans as a model for responding to “death threats, harassment, and other abuse” from Trump supporters after she “stockpiled personal protective equipment to keep election workers safe from ballots spiked with drugs,” including fentanyl.“It’s going to be a rough year,” Burgans told the Times, warning that “social media and the misinformation or misguided ideas of how someone could interfere with an election” necessitates “heightened security.”

The fentanyl reference is an allusion to a Nov. 2023 incident when law enforcement discovered fentanyl-laced letters intended for election officials across at least 5 states—something partisans on the Left were quick to blame, wholly without evidence, on bitter, far-right Republican voters.

In reality, the letters displayed far-left symbols, including an LGBTQ “pride” flag, the Antifa Three Arrows symbol, and an inverted pentagram, which typically depicts Satanism. The letter also read:

END ELECTIONS NOW

STOP GIVING POWER TO THE RIGHT THAT THEY DON’T HAVE

WE ARE IN CHARGE NOW AND THERE IS NO MORE NEED FOR THEM

(COMMENTARY: Fentanyl Letters Prove “Mainstream Media” Has a Political Axe to Grind)

The "fentanyl letter" from November 2023The Death Threats Hoax

More broadly, the fentanyl letters scandal was part of a ploy ginned up by Democrats in early 2021 to claim violent Republican voters pose a physical threat to election workers and an existential threat to democracy.

The Election Center, the nation’s largest training group for voter registrars and other election administrators, began pushing this narrative in December 2022—almost immediately after its politically neutral executive director was replaced by two left-wing partisans: Tammy Patrick, adviser to Democratic mega-donor Pierre Omidyar, and Joe Gloria, ex-registrar of voters for Nevada’s famously crooked Clark County (Las Vegas).

In September 2023, the Election Center awarded Burgans with its “highest professional achievement for election officials” with praise from Gloria, making her the only sitting elected clerk in Nevada to hold the award.

Notably, the threat to election worker narrative was generated largely to combat criticism of the 2020 Zuck bucks scheme, which was so controversial that 28 states banned it—including Democrat-run Virginia and Pennsylvania. Wisconsin voters banned it in April after Democrat Gov. Tony Evers vetoed two bills prohibiting Zuck bucks.

Yet national Democrats have continued to oppose national bans, despite the very real danger of funding from Iranian, Russian, or Chinese actors through tax-exempt nonprofits like CTCL.

One of the top spreaders of this hoax is Issue One, which publishes reports on conservatives threatening election workers with substantial funding from Jonathan Soros (son of George), the Arabella Advisors “dark money” network, and Center for American Progress.

In May 2024, Issue One published a glowing, 2,000-word interview with Burgans as a Republican “face of democracy” heroically facing down the demons in her own party. Asked what she thought “isn’t widely understood enough,” Burgans said:

It is really all of elections. I wish everyone had a knowledge base about what we actually do instead of the stories that are being told. Two of the biggest pieces of election misinformation that I try to be as vocal as I can about in my community are about mail ballots and the safety and security of the equipment we use.

Burgans couldn't be reached for comment.

Credit: Issue One(READ MORE: The Election Center Takeover by Left-Wing Partisans)