Winston: Attack on CTCL is a whole lot of noise with nearly zero substance

Submitted by Andrew Winston, D12

In response to the LTE from Scott Water, No Private Funding for Public Elections Jan 17, 2023:

An NPR report (Private funding saved the 2020 election. Now, some GOP-led states are banning it March 31, 2022) on the matter describes how the CTCL money was distributed in 2020. More went, naturally, to cities, which had bigger budgets and bigger gaps in infrastructure. Cities lean Democrat, so that’s true. But every district that requested money got money. And none of that data indicates bias. If they all got money like this proposed grant — i.e., with no strings attached — than there’s no influence or ownership of the election from CTCL

Here’s the relevant section from the NPR report:

Republicans have also accused the CTCL of political bias, because significantly more of the donation money was allocated to districts won by Joe Biden than by former President Donald Trump.But in many cases, those jurisdictions were cities with large populations that were also scrambling more frantically to ramp up their vote-by-mail operations, since it became clear early in the year that more Democrats than Republicans would want to vote by mail. Trump’s misinformation campaign against mail voting tainted the practice for many GOP voters.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life gave grant funding to every election jurisdiction that applied for it.

“We invited every single election department in the entire country to apply for grant funding if they needed it,” said Tiana Epps-Johnson, the executive director of the Center for Tech and Civic Life. “Ultimately, we received about 2,500 applications from election departments across 49 states and awarded funding to all of them.”

An analysis of three swing states after the election by APM Reports also found no consistent difference in turnout rates among counties that received grants versus those that didn’t
.”

This attack on CTCL is a whole lot of noise with nearly zero substance.

Andrew Winston, D12