Democrats Can’t Shut Down Election Concerns So Easily This Time

Media are openly preparing to slander anything former President Donald Trump says about irregularities in the 2024 election with the asinine smear of “election denial.” But if the 2024 election is anything like the 2020 election, Democrat partisans are trying to tilt the scales in their favor.

Demanding that Trump and his supporters renounce all claims that the 2020 election was somehow “rigged” or “stolen” has become a de rigeur “gotcha” tactic for corporate media figures grilling Trump and his supporters.

For example, J.D. Vance’s superlative performance in the vice presidential debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was harshly criticized because of his “damning non-answer” to the “gotcha” question, posed during the debate’s final minutes by Walz: “Did he (Donald Trump) lose the 2020 election?” As Vox put it, it was “The only moment in the debate that really mattered.”

More recently, Vance was badgered by The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro in a long-form interview on Oct. 12, when she posed the question five times: “Senator, yes or no. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?” Vance’s refusal to answer the question to the media’s satisfaction has subsequently generated even more consternation, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, for example, recently fretted that “J.D. Vance’s Election Denialism is Deepening.”

Rigged Election

The problem is that Trump may not have lost a free and fair election in 2020. Many believe that he lost a “rigged” election that was manipulated by censorship, lawfare, and voting irregularities to virtually guarantee that he would lose. How would the voters’ will have played out in an unbiased election system, operating according to established election laws?

The problem is analogous to the infamous 1972 Olympic Gold Medal basketball game between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., which is widely believed to have been “stolen” from the U.S. team as a result of “rigged” officiating during the game’s final minute. As a result, the U.S. team refused to concede that they lost the game and refused to accept the silver medal. But the U.S. team did, in fact, “lose” the 1972 Olympic final basketball game as it was actually recorded by history.

Under what many believe to be similar circumstances, Trump and J.D. Vance have been unwilling to concede an election that was conducted under unprecedented stresses during the pandemic, in an atmosphere of all-out lawfare attacks on basic election laws and norms, in which outside interference may have biased the result. History, however, records Joe Biden as the winner.

The question that is difficult to answer is what exactly does a “rigged” election look like? Is it vans full of counterfeit mail-in ballots pulling up behind election offices in the dead of night, or the manipulation of voting machines by shadowy actors working behind the scenes to shift votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden? There have been many such claims, but no solid evidence to prove them.

But there is one glaring, systematic irregularity in the 2020 election that has been well-documented. There is the now infamous Center for Tech and Civic Life (“ZuckBucks”) and the unprecedented role that CTCL played in tipping the election toward Biden.

CTCL’s Role

Beginning in early 2020, a formerly obscure Chicago nonprofit organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), quietly began to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars of Big Tech money into key election offices in order to incentivize them to act in ways that would ensure a Biden victory.

What followed was a privately funded “shadow campaign” for Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system itself. Through the injection of more than $330 million of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s money, laundered through CTCL, the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices in key areas of swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

It is important to bear in mind that big CTCL money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, lobbying, or other costs that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections.

It had to do with targeting key election offices in the swing states with multimillion-dollar grants that were to be used to promote mass mail-in voting, to support large-scale ballot harvesting efforts, and to launch intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and surgically targeted, get-out-the-vote efforts in areas that were heavy with Democratic voters.

The money went mainly for mail-in voting equipment, ballot dropboxes, increased staffing of election offices with partisan activists, and precision targeted communication by election officials with likely Democratic voters within the largest, most concentrated pool of potential Democratic voters in the entire southern tier of U.S. states.

Closely Fought Georgia as an Example

Georgia was the top recipient of CTCL funding nationwide in 2020. Here is a breakdown of the numbers for CTCL’s election efforts in eight metro Atlanta counties in 2020 (using proprietary data; our primary sources are the U.S. Census, MIT, and CTCL.):

• CTCL investment was $45 million in Georgia, $41 million of which went to eight counties (Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Forsyth, Fulton, and Gwinnett) in the Atlanta metro area.

• The average size of CTCL grants in the eight Atlanta metro counties was a staggering $4.96 million, which translated into an astonishing average level of per capita CTCL spending in these counties of $8.75 for every person (not registered voter).

• The eight CTCL grant counties in the Atlanta metro area contain only 43 percent of Georgia’s population, but received 84 percent of total CTCL spending.

• The average rate of increase in Biden votes in these counties compared to 2016 was 43.8 percent, which was more than double the average statewide increase of 20 percent in Biden votes. Such an enormous increase in turnout across a large, diverse population such as the eight Atlanta Metro counties in a single election cycle would be extraordinary under normal circumstances.

• The increase in Trump’s votes in these eight greater Atlanta counties was only 15.5 percent, which is about what one would expect given the rate of population growth.

• In the eight greater Atlanta counties, approximately 78 percent of this huge increase in turnout on average went to Biden.

• All of the Atlanta CTCL counties swung heavily Democratic in 2020, most notably Cobb County (shift D + 15), Gwinnett County (shift D + 12), Clayton County (shift D + 12), Douglas County (shift D +15), and even the heavily Republican northwest Atlanta counties of Cherokee and Forsyth (shift D +12 and shift D + 14, respectively). Georgia’s overall partisan shift was D + 5.1 in 2020. Shifts of this magnitude over one election cycle in a populous, diverse area are highly unlikely unless some outside force is operating.

• Biden’s margin over Trump increased by 250,939 votes in these eight counties out of 443,207 additional votes, in a state that Biden won by about 12,000 votes. Adjusting for population growth and an average increase in turnout of 9.1 percent, a basic estimate of the number of additional Biden votes that can be attributed to CTCL involvement in Georgia’s 2020 election is 188,204 votes (75 percent of 250,939). This mostly offset Trump’s Georgia margin over Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of 246,287 votes in 2016, which is what it was designed to do.

A Rigged Election

Trump lost the 2020 election in the CTCL-financed metro Atlanta counties, where his approximately 235,000-vote margin throughout Georgia’s other 151 counties was erased. CTCL’s $41 million investment there enabled partisan Democrat and Never-Trump election officials to conduct the election of their dreams, and their dreams were focused on defeating Trump.

Even The New York Times noted that the astonishing pro-Democrat partisan shift in the Atlanta metro counties “would have stunned [Democrat] party officials not that long ago.”

Would the Atlanta metro area have shifted so hard toward Democrats in the absence of CTCL involvement?

That’s extremely unlikely, especially when one considers the focused, targeted nature of such a novel, gargantuan undertaking. As The New York Times gushed shortly after the election:

Over all, Mr. Biden ran well ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing in well-educated, wealthy and increasingly diverse precincts around Atlanta, while making relatively few gains elsewhere in the state. Just a few decades ago, the ring of suburbs surrounding Atlanta would have counted as some of the most reliably Republican parts of the state.

Was the election “free and fair?” Emphatically not. To give some idea, consider that in order to provide the same level of per-capita private funding ($8.75) throughout all of Georgia to enable Republican election officials to also conduct the “election of their dreams,” CTCL would have had to pour an additional $50.3 million into the state. That such an imbalance existed does not seem “fair” by any standard.

A “rigged” election is one which has been manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest means to ensure a specific candidate wins. CTCL’s involvement in Georgia’s 2020 election certainly meets that definition.

William Doyle, Ph.D., is research director at The Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections. Previously, he was associate professor and chair in the department of economics at the University of Dallas. He can be contacted at [email protected].