In the last few days, a debate has jump-started regarding grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) following reporting from Wisconsin Spotlight on questionable activities in Green Bay. CTCL is a foundation heavily funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It describes its mission as “ensur(ing) elections are secure, voters have confidence in election outcomes, and democracy thrives as civic engagement grows.” However, it has come under criticism for making donations to left-leaning areas more than others.
A few weeks ago, a group of lawmakers spearheaded by Senator Duey Stroebel and Representative Adam Neylon introduced legislation that specifies that any third party election grants must be administered through the state and distributed equally to municipalities on a per-capita basis. An important underlying question in this debate is whether these grants actually have an impact on election results. Here, I attempt to answer that question.
The CTCL website provides a list of all the grant requestors by state, including those for Wisconsin. A small number of municipalities that share a name (such as Wisconsin’s four Springfields) don’t provide enough detail for us to determine which one received the grant. Consequently, we are left with 212 municipalities throughout the state requested some amount of funding from the CTCL, from amounts as low as $5,000 to multiple millions. WILL is currently evaluating each of these grants for a deeper dive later this spring, but we already have the data to look at the impact of these grants and their impact on election results.