Peach Tree Times

An elections group headed by a longtime operative in progressive political causes reportedly granted millions of dollars to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, overseer of elections in the state, in the leadup to the November 2020 elections.

According to a report by the Post Millennial, the founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), David Becker, granted the secretary of state $5.6 million of the reported $67 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to his group. 

Another nonprofit group that received $350 million in Zuckerberg money, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), is likewise headed by progressive political operatives, Legal Newsline reports.

CEIR told the Post Millennial that Raffensperger used the donated money in both the November general election, and the two January U.S. Senate runoff elections to encourage voters to apply for a ballot online.

The money was also used "to counteract disinformation, issuing public service announcements warning voters of disinformation and encouraging them to report fraud to the secretary of state information hotline.”

Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), which investigates nonprofits suspected of engaging in political activities, told the Peach Tree Times that it’s “hilariously ironic” that Becker is supporting anti-disinformation efforts.

“His disinformation starts with his own resume,” Walter said. “He's trying to pretend he never worked at one of the ugliest smear operations in the nonprofit world, the so-called People for the American Way (PFAW), whose misdeeds are so notorious they brought into existence the term ‘Borking’ [the 1987 targeting of former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork] to describe an outrageous, and successful, character assassination.”

For an earlier story published in Legal Newsline, Becker credited his not listing his tenure with PFAW on his LinkedIn profile, where there is a three-year gap in work activity between 2005 and 2008, to not using LinkedIn that much.

Becker, moreover, was a key figure in the formation of the Hub Project, which the New York Times describes as a child of one of Swiss billionaire Hans Wyss’ charitable organizations, the Wyss Foundation, "partly to shape media coverage to help Democratic causes."

Becker’s name shows up on the list of advisers in the project's development plan, written by the Civitas Public Affairs Group. Other Civitas clients include the pro-gun safety Brady Campaign and get-out-the-vote group led by a long time Democratic operative called Voter Participation Center.  

The New York Times report says The Hub Project’s activities include organizing paid advertising campaigns that criticized Republican congressional candidates in 2018, as well as a series of marches in 2017 that called on then-President Donald Trump to release his tax returns. As The Hub Project’s website notes, it also developed a podcast last year, “Made to Fail,” hosted by the former Obama administration official and current CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams, that was critical of conservative policies.

Research by Hayden Ludwig of CRC alleges that ties between the Hub Project and the Wyss Foundation are intentionally hidden. The Civitas report recommends that the Hub Project distance itself from the foundation to avoid entanglements with the IRS as it intervenes in elections.

“Note that the Hub was a partisan fake news operation, kept hidden from the public and financed by a foreign billionaire," Walter wrote in an email. "Wyss is apparently not a citizen, and has bragged that he does not even have a green card. If he's not a citizen, that's amazing because he's reportedly contributed to U.S. political campaigns. In short,  Becker’s input helped to mastermind a project that involved foreign influence in American elections via ‘fake news.’ Last I checked that’s one of the highest sins in the media universe if you’re not a left-winger or Democrat.”

The influence of the millions of dollars in private money pouring in through CEIR, CTCL and other nonprofits, critics charge, was most heavily seen in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states during the November presidential election.