UP Gazette

Mackinac County officials confirmed they have had no communication with the Chicago-based “Zucker-Bucks” non-profit that spent $400 million in 2020 staffing county election offices with Democrat staffers.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) has raised capital and is providing financial support to election offices in Georgia and Wisconsin to facilitate the processing of mail-in and absentee ballots. Although news stories have appeared in the local press about these arrangements, these stories give very little information about the actual nature of the arrangements between CTCL and local election agencies.

Applications for grants opened on Aug. 2 and are available to eligible election offices in 19 states—Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming—as well as the U.S. territories.

UP Gazette sent a Freedom of Information request to Mackinac County asking for copies of "all email correspondence with the Center for Tech and Civic Life, including all emails from the domain @techandciviclife.org, and any applications filed for grant funding with the Center for Tech and Civic Life."

Mackinac County Clerk Hillary Vowell responded by email stating that "Mackinac County has not has any correspondence with the Center for Tech and Civic Life.  We have not conducted any business with them at all."

Mackinac County's population in 2020 was 10,959, according to U.S. Census data.

Republican Donald J. Trump defeated Democrat Joe Biden in Mackinac County in 2020 with 4,576 votes (61.4 percent) to Biden's 2,552 votes (34.2 percent), with 276 voters (3.7 percent) choosing candidates from other parties.

Statewide in Michigan in 2020, Biden received 2,804,040 votes (50.6 percent) to Trump's 2,649,852 votes (47.8 percent), a difference of about 154,000 votes.

CTCL "skewed voter turnout in the 2020 election and may have tipped the presidential election to Joe Biden"

After Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave CTCL $400 million in 2020 to discreetly distribute to willing county election offices, 28 state legislatures banned the practice of taking partisan non-profit funding to run elections.

Zuckerberg's “roughly $400 million in (2020) grants (were) directed almost exclusively to Democrat-leaning districts to fund various election efforts and equipment, perhaps most notably the funding of ballot drop-boxes," according to City Journal.

In Wisconsin, where CTCL-paid Democrat staff ran election day operations at one of the state's largest counties, the state as well as twelve individual Wisconsin counties—Walworth, Ozaukee, Kenosha, Winnebago, Iowa, Lafayette, Washington, Kewaunee, Oneida, and Barron—passed laws banning the practice of private organizations running public elections, according to the Capital Research Center.

“Private financing of government election offices under the guise of COVID-19 relief skewed voter turnout in the 2020 election and may have tipped the presidential election to Joe Biden,” wrote the Capital Research Center, which has tracked subsequent state and local bans of the practice. “Despite its claims that the grants were strictly for COVID-19 relief, not partisan advantage, the data show otherwise.”

According to Legal Newsline, Chicago-based CTCL was founded in 2012 by Democrat and “LGBT” activists Epps-Johnson and her wife, Whitney May. 

Epps-Johnson and May worked together at the New Organizing Institute, a Democratic grassroots election training group, from 2012-2015. 

A native of Pike County, KY, May worked for the Durham County Board of Elections in North Carolina from 2007 to 2012. Epps-Johnson is a native of Angels Camp, CA and graduated from Bret Harte High School in 2004 before attending Stanford University. In 2018, she was named an Obama Foundation fellow.