Why Does the Media Ignore the Left's Election Meddling?

For the legacy media, it’s all about Trump—all day, every day

News coverage of the firestorm surrounding the 2020 election results focused nearly exclusively on Donald Trump’s claims of cheating, and his bitterness and intemperance for claiming it. Leading up to the 2024 presidential elections the media has the same one-side focus but with a different bent: the claim is that conservatives are working with the Republican Party in a cloak-and-dagger operation to challenge the November results should Trump lose. 

From a recent New York Times report:

The campaign involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee. Many of the key players were active in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“The legal campaign,” the story continued, “which has come into focus as Republicans prepare to nominate Mr. Trump at their convention next week, has been quietly playing out in courts, statehouses and county boards for months, and is concentrated in critical battlegrounds.”

That’s not it at all, actually.

The funding and the “activist groups” were put into play when a post- election analysis by the Capital Research Center (CRC), and other government watchdog groups, uncovered outright violations of election laws, and a gaming of our voting system by the left, which exploited government-mandated restrictions under COVID as a blind to secure Joe Biden’s win in 2020.

Georgia, through its 2021 Election Integrity Act, was one of the early successes of that effort. The voting reform law was so successful, in fact, that the 2022 elections in the Peach State boasted the largest turnout ever across all demographics with nary a complaint from Georgia voters. Coverage of the unprecedented turnout would have been an appropriate follow-up for a media that delighted in trumpeting Joe Biden’s absurd characterization of Georgia’s election reform law as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” The media also made a big deal, albeit for all the wrong reasons, of Major League Baseball (MLB) moving its All-Star game from Atlanta that year.

But after the 2022 elections, not even the hint of we-got-it-wrong and we’re sorry from the media, Biden or MLB. 

Some of the commonsense reforms in Georgia, as in other states, include voter ID requirements, getting non-citizens off the voter rolls, limiting the influence of foreign and dark money in campaigns—as well as making the public aware of that influence—and perhaps most consequential of all, getting private money out of election administration.

The influx of private money into the offices of local election officials, principally from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—hence the name “Zuck bucks”—helped Biden precisely in those areas where he needed it most.

Government restrictions during COVID gave the “progressives” a clever, sinister path to influence election results in heavily Democratic areas in key blue states—areas that failed to show up for Hillary Clinton 4 years before putting Trump in the White House. Nonprofits rich with Zuck bucks with nice, civic-sounding names and even nicer-sounding professed intentions pumped money into election offices under the auspices of promoting and providing for safe voting practices.

(WATCH: Will Zuck Bucks 2.0 Meddle in the 2024 Election for Democrats?)

But the two main beneficiaries of the Zuckerberg millions, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), were actually started by and manned by far-left political operatives. At the head of the CTCL was Tiana Epps-Johnson, an Obama protégé, and at CEIR, David Becker, a castoff from the Clinton Justice Department. At the Justice Department, Becker earned a reputation as a “hard-core leftist” who “couldn’t stand conservatives,” according to a former colleague.

A tiny percentage of the $420 million in Zuck bucks funneled into the nonprofits went towards protective equipment and safe voting practices.

The money, rather, funded a get-out-the-vote campaign driven primarily by encouraging mail ballots whose use by local and state officials in blue states was expanded often with little or no restrictions or oversight. The best illustration of this was in Wisconsin where five cities and Democratic strongholds, Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine, adopted the Safe Voting Plan. CTCL poured money into the election offices in these cities.

According to a December 2022 CRC report the totals were:

• Milwaukee: $2,154,500
• Madison: $1,271,788
• Green Bay: $1,093,400
• Kenosha: $862,779
• Racine: $942,100

“Over $1.8 million was spent on extra poll workers,” the report by Hayden Ludwig, then CRC’s Senior Investigative Researcher, said. “Another $1 million funded ‘voter education and outreach efforts’ to contact new and existing voters. But the biggest chunk of money, $2,572,839 according to CTCL’s announcement, went to support early in-person voting and vote by mail.’”

Predominantly Republican areas received a small fraction of the Zuck bucks.

The scheme paid off perfectly.  Biden won the Wisconsin by just over 20,000 votes. In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin by 24,000 votes.

The infiltration of the local election offices by the Left became so acute that according to Erick Kaardal, special counsel for the election integrity-focused Amistad Project, that the city of Green Bay virtually handed “over the keys to the counting room to Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, a representative of the leftist National Vote at Home Institute (NVHI) and a long-time Democratic Party operative.”

(RELATED: Will Green Bay Hire This Far Left Group to Consult on Election Integrity?)

In April, Wisconsin banned private money from election administration, joining 27 other states to limit or outright ban it. And in April 2022, Zuckerberg announced he will no longer be in the business of funding elections.

That hasn’t stopped the Left.

A report 2022 report by the election integrity watchdog Public Interest Legal Foundation said the CTCL won’t be deterred by a lack of Zuckerberg grants.

“In fact, the CTCL is expanding,” the report said. “They are launching a new venture called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, which promises an $80 million grant fund for local election officials to tap for aid. This represents only a shallow representation of the parallel ecosystem of left-leaning nonprofits standing ready to financially support and augment government administration of elections.”

What conservatives are fighting for are fair elections, not rigged ones.

(READ MORE: Wisconsin Voters Deal Devastating Blow to Zuck Bucks Elites—Here’s What That Means)

Whit Kennedy has covered politics for thirty years for an array of conservative publications. He is originally from the Philadelphia area