In one of the key swing states in the 2024 election, “Zuckerbucks” aren’t going to play a part — thanks to voters fed up with outside interference in their elections.
In a resounding victory during Tuesday night’s primary elections in Wisconsin, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that would ban any private funding of elections or election infrastructure, with the initiative passing by a nearly 9-point margin as of early Wednesday morning tallies.
As The New York Times noted, the amendment was “part of a national backlash to donations that Mark Zuckerberg made to election offices in 2020.
“The amendment was proposed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature,” the paper added.
Goodbye, Zuckerbucks!
Wisconsin has voted YES on Questions 1 & 2.
Our Statement: https://t.co/Y5ROSqyjLZ pic.twitter.com/fSLWaOvwwG
— Wisconsin GOP (@WisGOP) April 3, 2024
In the final run-up to the election, Republicans made a major push to get the initiative approved.
“Secure elections require proper election administration. That’s why I’m encouraging everyone in Wisconsin to vote ‘yes’ on constitutional amendments 1 and 2,” Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said in a video last week, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, appearing alongside Wisconsin GOP Rep. Bryan Steil.
Question 2, which also passed, amended the constitution by requiring that “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendum.”
Will Trump win Wisconsin in 2024?
Former President Donald Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee this year, also urged his followers to “ban Zuckerbucks” in social media posts.
“Zuckerbucks” became a major issue during the 2020 campaign after groups founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured huge amounts of money into swing states — not to directly support candidates, mind you, but to fundamentally change how elections were run.
In Wisconsin, a retired Brown County, Wisconsin, clerk named Sandy Juno told Just the News that a Zuckerberg-backed nonprofit with the nonthreatening name, Center for Tech and Civic Life, barged in and started “sidelining career experts and making last-minute changes that may have violated state law.”
Juno said that once the foundation got its fingers into the election system in Green Bay, Brown County’s largest city, “the mayor’s office and chief of staff began to take over election functions.”
“And that is not something under state statutes they have the authority to do,” she said, “because under Wisconsin law, municipal clerks, the county clerk and the Wisconsin Elections Commission are the individuals charged with running elections.”
Just the News noted that Zuckerberg’s foundation “poured millions of dollars into multiple key Wisconsin Democratic strongholds in the months leading up to last year’s presidential race, ostensibly in an effort to shore up voting systems and infrastructure amid the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic. The organization was ultimately funded with more than a third of a billion dollars by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan; that money was funneled to additional election funding efforts across the country.”
“We need to be really on top of this, because if this is how elections are going to go, we won’t have election integrity,” Juno said.
“What happened during the 2020 election should never be allowed to happen again in Wisconsin. That means permanently ending organizations with outside interests from having a role in the administration of our elections,” said Annette Olson, CEO of conservative public policy group MacIver Impact, which helped bolster efforts to get Question 1 passed, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
“These common sense amendments would ban dark money from playing a role in administering elections, and MacIver Impact is proud to lead statewide efforts to encourage citizens to vote ‘yes.’”
The referendum came after the governor of Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers, vetoed two proposed changes that would have effectively done what the ballot measure did. (He also vetoed similar legislation to Question 2 twice, as well.)
While banning “Zuckerbuck”s in just one state doesn’t eliminate potential worries, keep in mind that Wisconsin is one of the closest swing states in the 2024 presidential election; according to the RealClearPolling aggregate as of Wednesday morning, Trump leads Biden by less than a point, 47.8 percent to 47.2 percent. Trump won the state in 2016 while Biden took it in 2020.
So, it may be a small victory in the scheme of things — but one with huge implications, particularly in what’s shaping up to be the closest election in recent memory. Now, if more states could follow suit, we might have something approaching election integrity this November.
