By Ryan Teague Beckwith | Bloomberg
When the coronavirus pandemic began in the midst of the 2020 presidential campaign season, elections officials across the U.S. faced the massive expense of buying everything from face masks for poll workers to ballot counting machines to handle a surge in vote by mail.
Congress provided only a fraction of the money needed, and recession-struck states had little left in their coffers. Elections officials found help from an unlikely source: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta Platforms Inc, who gave out more than $400 million in grants so states could buy the equipment needed for a unique election process.
That money has now become a target. Republicans in at least 28 states that sought and received Zuckerberg’s grants in the depths of the pandemic have now passed or are working on bills that would ban future private grants to elections officials, sometimes claiming that Zuckerberg’s donations helped sway the election for President Joe Biden.
Twenty-eight of those states had asked for and received Zuckerberg-funded grants.
The bills are part of a broader push in Republican-led states to tighten elections laws in light of former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud. The ban sponsors, backed by the conservative group Heritage Action, say they are worried about private influence on the most democratic of government functions — providing the infrastructure for people to vote.
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