PHILADELPHIA – A nonprofit group that claims to promote the implementation of safe and secure election voting procedures has just donated a $10 million grant to the City of Philadelphia – while critics say the organization is in fact a partisan political group comprised of Democratic operatives trying to swing the Presidential election in November.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) has awarded $10,016,074 to Philadelphia to conduct a number of election-related voting initiatives, including:
• To open 800 polling places throughout the city;
• Provide an additional 15 election offices to receive mail-in ballots from voters in person;
• Install 15 secure, 24-hour drop boxes monitored by video surveillance where voters can submit mail-in ballots;
• Give election poll workers an extra $100 in coronavirus hazard pay on Election Day and;
• Purchase voting equipment to more speedily process mail-in ballots.
The City applied for the grant on Aug. 7, before receiving notification from CTCL that its application had been approved on Aug. 21.
“The City of Philadelphia faces significant challenges in executing the Nov. 3, 2020 general election. As the June 2 primary revealed, in November the city will essentially have to run two elections, at the same time, on an unprecedented scale: one via absentee and mail-in ballots; and a second at in-person polling places. The number of total ballots cast is expected to be between 730,000 and 800,000, potentially split between the two modes of voting, which will each entail special challenges,” Deputy Commissioner Nick Custodio said in the grant application.
“The investments outlined above will allow the City of Philadelphia to reduce the risk of exposure to coronavirus for Philadelphia voters, election staff and poll workers; identify best practices; innovate to efficiently and effectively educate our residents about how to exercise their right to vote; be intentional and strategic in reaching our historically-disenfranchised residents and communities; and, above all, ensure the right to vote in a diversity of communities throughout the City of Philadelphia.”
On Tuesday, CTCL announced that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have committed $250 million to their organization to promote “safe and reliable voting in states and localities” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, critics contend that CTCL is actually a group of Democratic operatives seeking to maximize the use of mail-in ballots and tip the voting scales toward Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Scott Walter, president of the Washington-based Capital Research Center (CRC), says the group’s focus is on those urban areas where President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by narrow margins.
CTCL has spent in excess of $6 million in the highly-contested state of Wisconsin.
However, according to Walter, Wisconsin voters are unaware of CTCL’s true mission, since local news reports describing the group’s activities there do not mention its backing or leadership.
An Aug. 18 story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for instance, reports a $2.1 million grant from CTCL for 15 lockboxes for deposit of early ballots to be stationed around the city, and “hazard pay” for poll workers, and little else.
“Can you imagine if the Charles Koch Foundation were to become involved with election officials? It would be front page news in the New York Times,” Walter said.
Walter said the CRC is also investigating CTCL’s involvement with election officials in other battleground states, including the legality of it in certain jurisdictions.
From 2012 to 2015, CTCL’s founder, Tiana Epps-Johnson, served as the election administration director of the New Organizing Institute, a Democratic grassroots election training group.
Tammy Patrick, a CTCL board member, also acted as a senior advisor to the elections program at Pierre Omidyar‘s Democracy Fund. In 2016 Omidyar, founder of eBay, donated $100,000 to an anti-Trump PAC.
CTCL supporters include the Skoll Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund.
National Public Radio recently reported that “extraordinarily high number of ballots – more than 550,000 – have been rejected in this year’s presidential primaries.”
“That's far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time,” the report said.
In 2005, the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and Jim Baker, a top Republican official under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, in one of its conclusions noted: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
From the Pennsylvania Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com