Zuckerberg and Chan Closed the Door on Election Funding, But the Story Isn't Over

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It’s been some of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s most impactful giving so far. It’s also among their most controversial. 

In the fall of 2020, as local election offices geared up for what was sure to be a turbulent, even scary voting process, they also grappled with a severe lack of resources. The pandemic had hit only six months prior, and some estimates pegged the cost to properly safeguard the election — from COVID risks and less virological ones — at around $4 billion.

Government typically furnishes the vast majority of election infrastructure funding, not private donors. But the CARES Act allotted only $400 million in emergency funds to secure the impending vote, a fraction of what many deemed necessary at the time.

Enter Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. With massive gifts that ended up totaling around $419 million, the philanthropic power couple changed 2020’s election infrastructure landscape. Their mega-gifts turned two little-known nonprofits — the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), and the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) — into nationwide regrantors charged with channeling the money directly to local election offices.

It was an unorthodox and unprecedented display of big-donor heft. It also provoked immediate criticism from voices across the political spectrum, who were rightly concerned that any billionaire — particularly the Facebook one — should be able to funnel money to election administrators, especially in quantities that exceeded federal funding for the same purpose. 

Zuckerberg himself appeared to share some of those concerns at the time, writing, “I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens. I hope that for future elections, the government provides adequate funding.” He characterized the gifts as a COVID relief measure, not as any kind of continuous funding stream.

In the end, the money went out, the election took place, and its infamous aftermath is a matter of historical record. 

According to most credible accounts, CTCL and CEIR’s regranting took place with little trouble and in a nonpartisan manner, as intended. Numerous officials of both parties have spoken about how the grants helped them run safer, more reliable elections. But for devotees of President Donald Trump’s election lies, Zuckerberg and Chan’s donations made for an all-too-convenient punching bag. It’s now pretty much an article of faith among the MAGA crowd that so-called “Zuckerbucks” were a key part of the Democrats’ nefarious plot to steal the election.

In the latest development in this strange saga, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg recently confirmed that no more such giving will be forthcoming this year. Unsurprisingly, most coverage of that statement has focused on the immense fuss conservatives have made, and are still making, over the “Zuckerbuck” menace. 

While we certainly don’t buy right-wing theories about Zuckerberg-orchestrated election rigging, we’ll leave that one for others to slug out. The more substantive (if less lurid) question is, what does this saga tell us about big-donor philanthropy?

Safety in numbers

One way into that question has to do not with Zuck and Chan’s gifts themselves, but with their afterlife at the Center for Tech and Civic Life — an afterlife in which the Facebook royalty play no part. 

Right around the time the Zuckerberg camp made it clear the Facebook founder was out of the election funding game, CTCL Executive Director Tiana Epps-Johnson announced the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a new CTCL offering that promises to identify and resource a “learning cohort” of local election departments interested in “improv[ing] operations, develop[ing] a set of shared standards and values, and obtain[ing] access to best-in-class resources to run successful elections.”

Unlike CTCL’s 2020 windfall, which came from a single uber-wealthy couple, funding for this new alliance is coming from a long list of benefactors. Why? Because it’s one of nine grantees in The Audacious Project’s latest cohort. Formed in 2018, The Audacious Project (TAP) is one of the sector’s biggest collaborative giving vehicles, part of a collaborative funding trend that’s picking up a lot of steam right now.

The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence is a five-year, $80 million project, and as far as we can tell, that price tag will be covered by TAP’s formidable roster of supporters, who include many of today’s leading major donors and their grantmaking organizations, as well as other big-name foundations and sector heavyweights. It’s a tech-heavy group of funders that lean liberal in their grantmaking, though there’s plenty of variation in the kinds of work they support and where it falls on the ideological spectrum. 

Zuckerberg and Chan (and CZI) are not on that list. Those who are include the Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett, the Ballmer Group, Laura and John Arnold, Pivotal Ventures (Melinda French Gates’ funding vehicle), the MacArthur Foundation and the Bridgespan Group. As we reported back when TAP got its start, Bridgespan has been an implementation partner from the get-go, vis-a-vis its longtime interest in “big bets.” TAP is also housed at TED (think TED Talks) and shares in that platform’s ethos, but isn’t governed by TED.

The Audacious Project is one of an ever-expanding list of philanthropic collaboratives (here’s an incomplete list) set up by funders convinced that banding together will help them give more effectively. There’s a good deal of evidence for that, and we’ve been pretty impressed with what collaborative funding’s been accomplishing, with COVID relief and response being one standout area. 

But another big advantage of collaborative funding — one that’s relevant here — is safety in numbers. In an era when solo big bets like Zuckerberg and Chan’s can attract as much condemnation as praise, funding hot-button issues as a group makes a lot of sense. Zuckerberg makes for a convenient big bad; it’ll be a lot harder for right-wing provocateurs to make a case that all of TAP’s funders are Zuck’s heirs in a vast left-wing voting conspiracy. Don’t get me wrong: They’ll try, but it’s a harder narrative to make stick.

Should Zuckerberg and Chan have doubled down?

It’s also worth keeping in mind that CTCL’s new offering is much more along the lines of a traditional, long-timeframe grant challenge than the 2020 funding. Though CTCL is encouraging local election departments to get in touch by May 6 if they’re interested in applying, this is not about getting emergency general support into local hands in time for the midterms. 

That, combined with the smaller overall dollar amount going into this project, means it’ll likely have a far humbler impact on this year’s election proceedings than Zuckerberg and Chan’s unprecedented 2020 commitment. And even though 2020 was a unique year in a lot of ways, a continued stream of reports make a case that the need for election infrastructure funding remains at comparable levels. Meanwhile, the feds still aren’t coming through — Congress allocated a measly $75 million this year.

That raises the question: Did Zuckerberg and Chan do the right thing by pulling back? As questionable as it is to have private billionaires backing the election process, the alternative for many districts may end up being shoddy infrastructure, which does the cause of representative democracy little good. 

It could even be argued that both political camps consider Zuckerberg and Chan’s big bet a success — one, because the grants supported a safe election, and the other because, according to them, “Zuckerbucks” successfully helped elect Biden. I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek there, but the point is that after scores of lackluster “big bets” from philanthropy, no one’s actually calling this one a failure.

Zuckerberg’s insistence that the couple’s donations were limited to 2020 has also done little to placate Republican lawmakers dead-set on banning private election funding in multiple states, moves directly attributable to their base’s fury over Zuckerberg’s donations. It seems we’re headed for a future when laws regarding private election infrastructure funding resemble a strange tapestry — legal in blue states and banned in red ones.

In a perfect world, private funding for election infrastructure wouldn’t be necessary. It already isn’t ideal, but we live in an imperfect world. Until the public sector steps up its game on election funding, there’s still no shortage of need for that private support. And if The Audacious Project’s donor pool is anything to go by, there’s no shortage of big funders who might be game. Just don’t expect them to do what Zuckerberg did and strike out alone. Too risky.