A voter drops their ballot off in a secure drop box at Larcom City Hall in Ann Arbor on Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021.Jacob Hamilton | The Ann Arbor News
Attorneys for the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office on Dec. 17 asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit alleging millions in private donations to local election clerks, much of it from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, damaged the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and violated the law.
The lawsuit is one of the last remaining Michigan lawsuits among a plethora filled after former President Donald Trump lost the election that many supporters called fraudulent, although there is no evidence to support that claim.
The 2020 election did give rise to something that’s never been seen before in Michigan: private grant money being injected into local election operations.
Up until 2020, election operations have always been funded by government budgets or grants.
But in the 2020 cycle, unknown millions in private grant money from a Chicago-based nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life was doled out directly to township and village election clerks to spend on a wide variety of apolitical election needs.
The nonprofit received nearly $400 million in donations from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, which was spent on nearly 2,500 elections across the nation.
“Clerks are the heroes of our democracy, yet funding for them is unequal and unpredictable, resulting in many clerks applying for and relying on grants, volunteers, donations, etc. each election cycle,” SOS spokeswoman Tracy Wimmer said. “We have and will continue to advocate at the state and federal levels for the government to provide stable funding to our clerks, and those who claim to support election integrity should do the same, because well-funded clerks have more capacity to carry out professional elections.”
Wimmer said she couldn’t comment on the lawsuit, but said: “As we’ve seen many times over the past year, lawsuits are often used as (public relations) tools to undermine faith in elections so that they will be easier to overturn in the future. All clerks are officials of local government, and they make public exactly what donations they receive and how those funds are spent.”
Michigan communities received 474 grants, far more than any other state in the nation, according to the recipient list on the nonprofit’s website. The state with the next highest number of awardees was Massachusetts with 266. Nearly 2,500 grants were issued nationwide, which means nearly 20% of all grants made their way to Michigan.
In some cases, the grant funds more than doubled the previously budgeted amounts for elections.
The money paid for apolitical needs: safety equipment, ballot drop boxes, surveillance cameras to watch drop boxes, high-speed absentee ballot tabulators, absentee ballot prepaid postage and mailing costs and voter outreach, but mostly for temporary staff, poll workers, recruiting, training and hazard pay, according to election clerks who spoke with MLive.
The grants were intended to bolster election funding amid the coronavirus pandemic that presented unexpected costs and workload for local clerks.
Related: Coronavirus created ‘perfect storm’ that rained private money on Michigan election administration
Some voters in Livingston, Macomb and Oakland counties, however, believe the grants were partisan. They filed a lawsuit against Benson in October of 2020 and filed an updated complaint on Sept. 29.
“During the 2020 general election, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson allowed private, progressive organizations to orchestrate a targeted get-out-the-vote effort through state actors, overseeing the payment of tens of millions of private funds to local Michigan election jurisdictions in predominantly Democrat precincts,” the amended complaint said. “Under Secretary Benson, Michigan election officials in predominantly Democrat jurisdictions thus received infusions of private funds that were earmarked specifically for, inter alia, printing and distributing absentee and mail-in ballots and adding remote, unattended drop-boxes for mail-in and absentee ballots.
The lawsuit alleges the funds were distributed disproportionately to Democrat-leaning communities. It cites a total of at least $5.9 million awarded to Wayne County and Detroit, $3.5 million; Flint, $467,625; Ann Arbor, $417,000; Lansing, $443,000; Muskegon, $433,589; Saginaw, $402,878; Kalamazoo, 218,869; East Lansing, $8,500.
An MLive investigation into the grant funds revealed they were distributed widely to both Republican and Democrat-leaning communities, but it’s impossible to perform a full analysis, since the Center for Tech and Civic Life didn’t reveal the local grant amounts and the totals weren’t tabulated by state officials.
MLive found no evidence that Benson’s office specifically encouraged Democrat-leaning communities to apply for the grants. Her office did notify all clerks in the state that the grant funds existed and provided information on how to apply.
The spending choices varied greatly.
Hamtramck bought sneeze guards for $1,298; Muskegon spent $20,000 on a trailer to deliver absentee ballots to neighborhoods and $50,000 on a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaign; Pontiac spent $100,000 on hazard pay, poll workers and temporary staff for the office to extend its hours; Oakland County spent over $120,000 on a marketing campaign with mailers, digital billboards, online and radio spots focused on educating voters and recruiting poll workers; Flint spent $100,000 on a high-speed absentee ballot counting machine; and Lansing spent $53,000 on ballot dropboxes and surveillance cameras.
Related: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and wife spent millions helping Michigan hold elections
The lawsuit takes specific aim at ballot boxes, which are regulated by law in Michigan.
“Because state law provides for public provision of ballot containers, buying ballot boxes with private money is illegal,” the lawsuit said. “This is especially so when privately funded ballot boxes do not comply with Michigan’s requirements for securing ballots.”
MLive’s investigation revealed dropboxes, referred to as “Zuckerberg boxes” in the lawsuit, were purchased by some communities but weren’t the largest expenditure.
Lansing bought 12 dropboxes with private grant funds; Pontiac, 7; Ann Arbor, 5; Flint, 2; and Muskegon, 2.
In a list of 11 election costs recipients told the Center for Tech and Civic Life they planned to spend the money on, dropboxes landed seventh.
“The use of remote unattended ballot dropboxes may result in the rejection of lawfully cast ballots by Michigan voters or in ballots being cast by individuals or organizations not legally entitled to cast a ballot,” the lawsuit said.
In their request for a summary judgement, lawyers for the Attorney General’s Office, who are representing the SOS, said the Legislature established requirements for dropboxes in a law passed on Oct. 6, 2020, but included an exemption for any installed prior to Oct. 1.
“If an absent voter ballot drop box was ordered, but not installed in, a city or township before October 1, 2020, the clerk of that city or township must make every reasonable effort to have that absent voter ballot drop box comply with the requirements,” the law said. It’s not clear if any dropboxes were ordered using Center for Tech and Civic Life grant funds after the law took effect.
SOS attorneys argue that the complaint attempts to apply laws surrounding “ballot containers,” used to maintain and transport completed ballots, to “ballot boxes,” used to receive absentee ballots.
The law doesn’t “prohibit local officials from providing drop boxes or other necessary materials — such as pens or privacy screens,” the SOS filing said. “Such a result would be absurd, and unsupported by any language in the statute.”
Attorneys for the SOS said $10,000 was spent to compile 4,000 pages of discovery documents submitted for the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges the Center for Tech and Civic life, despite its non-partisan claims, is in fact a progressive organization focused on increasing liberal voter turnout. Three of its founders previously worked for the New Organizing Institute, described as the “left’s think tank for campaign know how,” by the Washington Post, the lawsuit said.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life “is not a ‘nonpartisan’ organization interested in increasing participation in elections generally,” the complaint said. “Rather (the Center for Tech and Civic Life) is an activist organization, managed and operated by former Democratic party operatives that promote the election of Democrat candidates, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, among other activities by funding ‘get-out-the-vote’ efforts through money paid to election officials in Democrat precincts.”
The Center for Tech and Civic Life on its website names among its “key funders and partners”: Facebook, Google, the Democracy Fund, created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Rock the Vote, the Knight Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
While some clerks MLive spoke with about the private Center for Tech and Civic Life grants said it raised ethical questions for them, most praised the money as necessary during a year with record absentee voting and turnout, unique circumstances presented by the worldwide coronavirus pandemic and a lack of state funds to offset new costs.
Absentee voting results were a main focus of election result critics in 2020. Late into election night, Trump appeared to be beating Biden nationally, but that changed as absentee ballots, the majority from large, left-leaning communities -- like Detroit -- were tabulated.
Conspiracy theorists alleged many of the absentee ballots that helped President Joe Biden clinch the election were fraudulent. No significant proof of absentee ballot fraud has been exposed.
It’s not clear when Court of Claims Judge Christopher Murray, who’s presiding over the lawsuit, might rule on the SOS motion for a summary judgement and dismissal.
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