Virginia bans Zuckerberg Private Grant Funds for State Election Offices

By WMAL.com

On Monday, Governor Youngkin signed into law a bill with bipartisan support that brings and end to election offices in the Commonwealth accepting private grants from organization like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life. The bill came in response to public outrage over Zuckerberg pouring $3.7 million to local election administrators in the 2020 elections to help local official conduct safe elections in the midst of the pandemic.

State Senator Bill Stanley (R-Franklin) county was one of the primary champions of the passage of this legislation, saying regardless the partisan nature of the group financing election offices that outside money should not be funding election efforts in the Commonwealth. “If we’re not able to give them the money they need to conduct a free and fair election, then we’re not doing our jobs correctly,” said Sen. Stanley in a testimony earlier this year.

Governor Glenn Youngkin who signed the bill into law has also been a proponent for election integrity, making it a theme in his 2021 campaign. “Virginia joined more than a dozen states that took strong action to defend the integrity of state and local elections and the governor is proud to have signed this bill,” said Youngkin’s spokesperson Macaulay Porter when discussing the bill.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed nearly $350 million in grants to nearly 2,500 election offices, including 38 right here in Virginia. Democrat-leaning counties got the lion’s share of the grant funding in the 2020 election cycle.