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‘Zuckerbucks’: 2020 election conspiracy theories return to Missouri and Arizona

Here’s a quick preview!

It turns out that right-wing activists have learned the same lesson as Hollywood: Everyone loves a sequel.

You may remember the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life from the so-called “Zuckerbucks” controversy during the 2020 election. That was when a couple of nonprofits including the Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed hundreds of millions of dollars that had been donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, as no-strings-attached grants to local election officials. Despite no evidence of partisanship (and lots of people checked), right-wing activists and critics labeled the funding a political act aimed at boosting turnout of Democratic voters.

CTCL now has a new program, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. It’s a group of 15 counties, all of whom submitted applications, who work together to share best practices and create things such as a voluntary set of standards for recruitment, training, management, and retention of poll workers, a major concern for election officials around the country.