Old Dominion News

The Virginia General Assembly is days away from sending Gov. Glenn Youngkin legislation that would ban private money in the administration of elections, according to analyst Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and a former Virginia attorney general.

“Best guess is that the earliest final vote in the House could be Friday more likely Monday, and the Senate could be any day,” Cuccinelli told Old Dominion News.

Youngkin, a Republican, is expected to sign the bill into law.

Virginia would follow 10 other states that have moved to ban the practice after the 2020 general election, where hundreds of millions of dollars of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s money poured into the offices of local election officials in battleground states in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

Most of the money was funneled through the nonprofit, Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a group of former Democratic operatives with a stated mission of encouraging safe election practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. The group, critics charge, focused on election officials in Democratic areas, requiring them to follow a set of guidelines in exchange for the “Zuckerbucks.” Mail ballots and drop boxes, for instance, were encouraged.

“It would be superb to see Virginia join the other 10 states that have banned private money in the execution of elections, something government is supposed to do neutrally and by itself,” Cuccinelli said. “Such a so-called Zuckerbucks ban would raise confidence in the fairness and neutrality of Virginia elections.”

Over the past 14 months, Capital Research Center (CRC) has tracked the flow of Zuckerbucks into election officials’ offices.

“We’ve traced CTCL’s rivers of cash to battleground states such as Georgia ($45 million), Texas ($39 million), and Pennsylvania ($25 million),” CRC investigators wrote. “Across the board CTCL grants favored big, Democratic cities on a per capita basis. In Georgia, for example, Zuck Bucks averaged $1.41 per head in Trump counties and a whopping $5.33 in Biden counties.”

On Jan. 25 CRC President Scott Walter testified before Virginia’s Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections prior to the committee taking up Senate Bill 80, which would ban the private funding.

“I want you, our democratically elected officials, to regulate Virginia’s elections, not megadonors from either party,” Walter told committee members. “Neither donors nor ‘nonpartisan’ nonprofits can be trusted to keep their thumbs off the scale when they have millions in their hands. While one party benefited dramatically in 2020, next time the other party’s donors may pull the same trick. All of us should want to avoid that.”

The committee approved the legislation with no negative votes.