Bipartisan Ohio group shoots down Trump claims about Zuckerberg aid

Ohio’s bipartisan election officials organization shot down a favorite critique by former president Donald Trump of the 2020 election as part of a response Sunday to a pair of congressional committees probing voting disinformation in four states.

Multiple times – including during an April rally at the Delaware County fairgrounds — the former president has insisted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shouldn’t have been allowed to donate millions to bolster elections systems in areas struggling to find resources to oversee the November 2020 vote. In October, Trump call the aid “criminal.”

Because of such concerns, a GOP provision in last year’s state budget bill banned those types of public-private partnerships in future Ohio elections. Gov. Mike DeWine signed the measure, versions of which more than a dozen other states have passed.

Trump, along with many Republican supporters, claims that the Zuckerberg aid was tilted heavily toward Democratic areas, and thus took its place beside his false claims about fraud that resulted in the 2020 election being stolen from him.

Ohio’s GOP Senate nominee, J.D. Vance, asserted in an October op-ed he co-wrote in the New York Post that Zuckerberg’s money was used to “buy the presidency for Joe Biden.”

But Brian Sleeth, Warren County elections director since 2009 who currently is president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, said such claims don’t hold water in the Buckeye State.

“While we are aware that 66 county boards of elections accepted grant money in the 2020 election cycle, acceptance of the grants was affirmed by the local bipartisan boards of elections. Therefore, it is hard to conceive that the grants were accepted to gain undue partisan advantage or tilt election outcomes towards one party or the other,” he said in a four-page letter to leaders of the U.S. House Administration Committee and the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

Franklin County, carried by Joe Biden, received about $980,000, which was used for advertising, early voting poll locations, additional cleaning materials and related items. Licking County, carried by Trump, used about $77,000 for new electronic poll books that elections workers used to check in voters at the polls, PolitiFact found.

Zuckerberg, CEO of what’s now called Meta, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated more than $350 million through a Chicago nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, to help local elections officials get

through a general election amid a pandemic and record absentee voting, after federal officials declined to allocate additional funds.

Aaron Ockerman, longtime executive director of the nonprofit association, said Zuckerberg did not specify exactly how the money could be spent.

“One of the appealing things about the grants was how little strings were attached. Basically, local boards of elections had discretion to spend the money to help get them through the election,” Ockerman said.

Separately, Secretary of State Frank LaRose accepted more than $1 million from the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington D.C., nonprofit that received about $70 million in what are now widely dubbed by critics as “Zuckerbucks.”

Zuckerberg announced last month that no future election grants would be forthcoming.

Sleeth said he was unable to respond to several of the committees’ questions because his organization did not compile information on such things as threats on elections workers or individual examples of election misinformation.

The April 20 congressional inquiry sought information “relating to your organization’s efforts to counter lies and conspiracy theories and protect the integrity of federal elections in your state.” It was signed by U.S. Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Zoe Lofgren, D-California, chairperson of the Committee on House Administration, with copies to the top GOP members.

“Ohio has taken several steps that restrict Americans’ right to vote in upcoming elections and to have their votes counted fairly and accurately,” the letter said.

Specifically citing the Ohio ban approved in House Bill 110, the state budget, the missive added that “The committees are particularly concerned by reports over the past year that some state officials have relied on false, debunked election conspiracy theories to enact new laws and take other steps that could undermine future elections.”

Letters also were sent to Arizona, Florida and Texas.