About 90% of what Republicans are peddling to promote election “integrity” is borne of either paranoia or sour grapes. Had Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2020 they would have thought everything had worked just fine here.
But they do have one proposal that I like. On the spring ballot is a constitutional amendment that would ban the use of private funds to run elections. Here’s why I think that makes sense.
First, a little background. This is an issue because the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life spent millions of dollars in 2,500 jurisdictions nationally to help run the 2020 elections. Republicans view it as a left-leaning organization, mostly because its primary funder was Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, who gave about $300 million or more to the effort.
Here’s where Republican paranoia comes in. From what I can tell, CTCL is a good, well-meaning outfit. If it leans left, that’s not apparent from looking at its website. Some of what it does is to simply provide information and courses on best practices and the latest technology for local elections officials. But in 2020 it also provided grants to those local governments, with the idea that the pandemic had created special needs. Local officials had to apply for the money, but CTCL turned no one down. In fact, the money went both to places that voted for Biden and for Trump.
But dig a little deeper and the GOP’s paranoia starts to look like a more justified concern. CTCL gave $10 million to about 200 communities in the state. But $8.8 million of that went to Wisconsin’s five largest cities, all of which went for Biden. CTCL may not have planned it that way, but you can see how a reasonable person might conclude that their grants were more helpful to blue places than red ones.
And this points up the problem. What if the money didn’t come from Zuckerberg but from My Pillow guy and election denier Mike Lindell? And what if Lindell actually tried to target that money at Republican bastions? What if 90% of it went to places that voted for Trump? Would we be okay with it in that case?
Also, I don’t think there’s much validity, at least in Wisconsin, to the claim that election offices are being short-changed and need the private money. Madison got $1.5 million from CTCL. It used a little over a million dollars to pay a third party vendor to provide an “end-to-end absentee ballot mailing system” that would perform several tasks including folding and inserting ballots, inserting instruction materials and return envelopes and printing voter information directly on the envelopes, according to a recent story in the Wisconsin State Journal.
That’s nice, but it hardly seems crucial. In fact, it seems like the kind of thing that would have been done just as well in-house if the city didn’t have $1.5 million it had to burn through. Does anybody really think that this Madison City Council and this Mayor are going to underfund elections in a city that is so crucial to delivering votes for Joe Biden and Tammy Baldwin?
There’s also the argument out there that this shouldn’t be a constitutional amendment. While it’s true that Republicans put this on the ballot as such because Gov. Tony Evers vetoed legislation to the same effect, the use of private funds to conduct public elections does seem to me to rise to the level of something that belongs in the constitution. And, anyway, Wisconsinites have amended their constitution 148 times since statehood. It’s not exactly a sacred text.
There is a second constitutional amendment on the ballot that I’m not so sanguine about. It provides that, “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums.” There is already essentially that same provision in the statutes, so nobody seems to be quite sure why the Republicans want to put it in the constitution. This seems unnecessary at best and possibly mischievous.
But without the amendment on private funding there’s no reason why we couldn’t have competing liberal and conservative groups funding election offices in parts of the state that would promise to turn out more of their voters. Let that happen and we really will develop a problem with election integrity.
A version of this piece originally appeared in Isthmus.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
So we can have private money funding candidates, but not the actual election process? In Denver, for example, people get a bunch of material about the candidates and any issues that will appear on the ballots, as well as the ballots, automatically mailed to them at home ahead of the election so that people can be fully informed. What a novel idea. Think if we had enough money we could do the same here?
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Private organizations can and do run get-out-the-vote and voter education efforts all the time. What’s problematic, and I believe unprecedented until CTCL, is private money going to public bodies to actually administer elections. Do you really think that if that money had come from Mike Lidell or the Koch Foundation that that would not have caused consternation among liberals?
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Bothered by money that helps as many people vote as possible in the easiest way possible? Nope. If I were, I’d be as small minded as the people who are trying to limit how people vote because they are afraid of the outcome.
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As a resident of what often feels like Ground Zero for election-related paranoia (aka Racine County), I gotta take issue with your position. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 resulted in unprecedented disruption to our elections infrastructure. I vividly recall the use of National Guard personnel to assist with drive-up, in-person voting in the Spring 2020 election. The sudden reduction of voting places in Milwaukee and elsewhere resulted in a chaotic situation. And, just where in the hell was our Wisconsin State Legislature during all this?? MIA, as I recall.
It’s also instructive to remember that as the 2020 late-summer primaries and the fall general election approached, the Trump Administration was presenting a pretty dire and often confusing picture of public life. Does anybody now remember the US Postal Service being among the institutions that could no longer be counted on to function properly that year?
The CTCL grants, which you correctly reported went to local municipalities of all sizes, helped SAVE the right of Americans to cast ballots – in person or absentee in 2020. Overall voter participation turned out to be better than expected, thanks to $$ for personnel, safety equipment and, yes, ballot drop boxes in some locations. A chunk of that money also went toward a public information campaign to inform my wife and I on where and how we could cast our ballots safely that fall. And yes, post-election audits proved that Wisconsin’s 2020 elections were conducted open and above-board, despite what the conspiracy theorists continually choose to espouse.
The City of Racine received $1.69 million in CTCL assistance. Because some interests would prefer to REDUCE rather than ENHANCE voter participation, a fair bit of that money ended up getting —-ed away. The city acquired and installed several dozen brightly painted drop boxes prior to the 2020 general election. The boxes promptly went into storage, where they remain to this day, following successful legal challenges by opponents. In addition, the city spent six figures to buy and equip a Mobile Elections Unit that went into service in the summer of 2021 (well AFTER the 2020 elections). It, too, was sidelined for good due to multiple legal challenges. (Oh, by the way, the big custom-built RV was never used to “harvest ballots” in the manner of an elections-oriented ice-cream truck, as the conspiracists claimed.)
As a Racine taxpayer, I guess I should be grateful that the private CTCL money, and not my tax dollars, were used towards these intended voter access/participation measures.
So, here’s where I differ with you. The CTCL grants was a well-intentioned program that was born out of the terrible situation caused by a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic that occurred in an election year. It’s not likely that such a scenario will repeat itself – hence no need to change the state constitution. Likewise, our state’s locally-based election administration is pretty well defined in state law. Again, why put it in the constitution?
I’m voting NO on both of the constitutional ballot questions and sincerely hope that a majority of Wisconsin voters will join me.
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