Peach Tree Times

VoterGA, a statewide voter watchdog group, is pressing members of the Georgia Senate Ethics Committee to amend a recently passed election reform bill, House Bill 1464, to strike a provision in the bill allowing private funds in election management.

Garland Favorito, co-founder of VoterGA, said that the House-approved bill weakens the current law’s near total ban on the use of the money. He’s pushing for an amendment that not only kills the current provision but adds language that shuts out private money all together.

“The law now bans election superintendents and the State Election Board from accepting private funds,” Favorito told Peach Tree Times. “The House bill would allow the funds. We want to go the other way and prohibit elections officials from using indirect money and from accepting any complimentary technical assistance.”

HB 1464 would allow the private money if it's approved by the State Election Board, and only if the board determines that the money “does not offer any partisan advantage.” The board would then be required to “develop processes to ensure the fair and equitable distribution of such funds.”

The Ethics Committee could take the bill up as early as this week.

Last spring the Georgia General Assembly was one of the first states to ban the private funding of elections after news reports that election officials in battleground states leading up to the 2020 general election received millions of dollars from nonprofits flush with funds donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The bulk of the money, research from the Capital Research Center (CRC) shows, was funneled through the nonprofit the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), to election officials in Democratic areas in a get out the vote campaign disguised as an effort to provide safe elections during the pandemic.

In Georgia, Joe Biden voters received $5.06 per capita of the CTCL money, and Donald Trump voters received 98 cents per capita, according to CRC’s research.

CRC also found that CTCL gave grants to 17 of the 31 counties Biden won in Georgia. 

“Together these 17 counties received $42.4 million, or over 94% of all CTCL funds in the Peach State,” the CRC report said. “CTCL gave grants to 26 of the 128 counties Trump won statewide. But these 26 counties only received $2.6 million from CTCL, less than 6% of all grants distributed across Georgia.”

Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia since 1992. Trump and many of his supporters say the former president's defeat was caused by massive voter fraud. Three separate Georgia recounts turned up no such evidence.