Peach Tree Times

The mainstream media has either ignored the Citizens United Productions film Rigged: The Zuckerberg-Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump, or predictably belittled its significance.

What it can’t do is dispute the facts in it, says Scott Walter, the president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), a Washington D.C.- based non-profit watch dog group that provided much of the documentation behind the claims in the 40-minute film.

“It’s a superb movie,” Walter told the Peach Tree Times. “It’s really keen on accuracy and not about crude partisanship that the left and right can engage in. They (the producers) documented everything.”

Scott Walter | capitalresearch.org

CRC has truckloads of background information supporting the film’s claims that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan effectively privatized the 2020 presidential elections by funneling $400 million through two non-profits, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), to local and state election officials. CRC research shows that the “Zuck Bucks” granted by the groups -- both headed by former Democratic operatives -- was a get out the vote effort for Joe Biden masquerading as a way to secure safe elections during the pandemic. Little of the money was spent on safety equipment, the research shows. Most of it went to expanding unsecure election practices, including mail ballots and drop boxes, to drive out the vote. 

The money made a marked difference in the outcome of the election.

According to “Rigged,” approximately 2,500 grants were awarded across the country by the CTCL. The group tried to defend its funding distribution by saying more Trump jurisdictions received grants than did Biden jurisdictions. The film shows that the claim is misleading. Of the roughly 160 individual grants of $400,000 or more (totaling some $270 million), 92 percent of those funds were sent to jurisdictions carried by Joe Biden in 2020.

In the critical battleground state of Georgia, for example, CTCL and CEIR distributed $50 million worth of grants to local Georgia election jurisdictions. Analysis showed that 94 percent of the CTCL funds were directed to jurisdictions carried by Biden.

CRC began looking into Zuck Bucks in the months leading up to the 2020 elections. Walter said they were alerted to what was going on when CTCL announced that five Wisconsin cities, all Democratically run, were eligible for the money under a safe voting plan. A separate investigation by The Amistad Project into one of those cities, Green Bay, showed that as part of the plan the keys to the (ballot) counting room were effectively given to Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, “a representative of the leftist National Vote at Home Institute (NVHI) and a long-time Democratic Party operative.”

Yet, Walter said the media has rarely delved into the substance of the story, preferring to categorize all claims of election irregularities as “baseless, giving them an out for making no distinction between claims supported by no documentation and those supported by massive documentation.”

News coverage would be relentless if the players in the story were flipped to the other side, he said.

“Imagine if Charles Koch (conservative billionaire philanthropist) donated millions of dollars to non-profit groups run by former proteges of Karl Rove, who then granted the money to election officials,” Walter said. “There wouldn’t be enough electrons for CNN to voice its outrage.”

Walter says that more evidence that Zuck Bucks funded a Democratic operation lies in the fact that state-level measures banning local and state election officials from accepting private money were vetoed six times by five governors, all Democrats. (Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers vetoed two bills banning the funds.)

And even though Zuck Bucks were a big boost to Joe Biden, the money did little to help the Democrats take control of state legislatures or gain U.S. House seats – in fact, the Democrats lost control of two legislative chambers and 13 House seats.

“It shows the Zuckerberg money was concentrated in heavily Democratic areas where they wanted to run up the votes for Biden,” he said. “They already control the legislative and congressional seats in those places.”

Walter said that no billionaire, on the left or right, should have control over the management of future elections.

“If there were no fraudulent votes and no ballot miscounts, the fact that a billionaire privatized the elections is still a scandal,” he said.

Zuckerberg recently announced that he and Chan will no longer be funding election management.