Anatomy Of A WND Election Lie

For years, WorldNetDaily has been falsely claiming that money donated by Mark Zuckerberg to help run the 2020 election was used to "recruit Joe Biden voters."

By Terry Krepel
Posted 7/29/2024

For instance, WND editor Joseph Farah asserted in a September 2021 column that "Facebook’s leftist Mark Zuckerberg handed out some $350 million to mostly leftist local and state election officials for them to run their 2020 operations, raising the question of undue influence." Bob Unruh very similarly claimed in a October 2021 article that "leftist Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook wealth turned over some $350 million to mostly leftist election officials to help them 'run' their operations."

Unruh followed up in another October 2021 article:

An analysis of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin is focusing on the facts that election laws were changed – illegally – during the voting process and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turned over millions of dollars to election officials – outside the legally recognized campaign-donation processes.

And whether those actions had an impact of Joe Biden’s narrow margin of victory.

[...]

Then, too, the state’s metro areas of Madison, Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay benefited from more than $6 million in donations directly to their election coordinators and judges from money given by Zuckerberg to his Center for Tech and Civic Life, which handed out the cash.

The process “allowed a single billionaire to route his money outside the normal campaign finance system to election referees,” Just the News reported.

Further, the money came with strings, such as the requirement to do voter registration drives “among specific minority groups that tend to vote Democrat,” the report said.

Unruh offered no evidence from those officials that voter registration drives specifically targeted Democrats. Spending of the money in Madison, for example, targeted Hispanic voters and those of the Hmong community, but one official pointed out that  it was ignorant to assume all voters of a particular ethnic background would vote one way or another.” Further, more Republican-controlled counties applied for and got money from the foundation, though more money went to Democratic-controlled counties. Unruh didn’t explain why it’s a bad thing for more people to be involved in the election process.

Another October 2021 article by Unruh hyped a report by a partisan group attacking the Zuckerberg money:

Research reveals that Mark Zuckerberg handed over a total of $419.5 million to the Center for Technology and Civil Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research leading up to the 2020 presidential election, and the two groups used it to buy Democrat votes.

Essentially.

[...]

With that money, a person could purchase 137,540,983 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Or 276,550 new Ferrari F8 Tributos, or 278 homes in San Francisco.

Or one presidential election.

The warning comes from William Doyle, a principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, who explained his findings in a report at The Federalist.

He said Zuckerberg’s money was used “to turn out likely Democratic voters.”

Not through traditional political spending, but through a “targeted, private takeover of government election operations by nominally non-partisan – but demonstrably ideological – non-profit organizations.”

But there are flaws in Doyle’s conclusions, as Yahoo News writer Jon Ward pointed out:

Doyle’s op-ed complains that more of Zuckerberg and Chan’s money went to large cities than to rural areas, where Republicans tend to be much stronger.

But that’s not de facto evidence of partisan intent. Highly populated localities need more resources to run an election where there are far more voters.

A more substantive complaint is that in metro areas of swing states, more Democratic-leaning portions of those regions got Zuckerberg funding while more moderate metro areas, with higher numbers of Republican voters, did not. Doyle alleges this happened in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where of the four major counties, the two that Biden won — Dallas and Tarrant counties — got Zuckerberg grants through CTCL, and the two that Trump won — Denton and Collin counties — did not.

But CTCL has said it gave grants to any counties that requested them. And in addition, the two big Dallas-Fort Worth counties that Trump won — and that did not get Zuckerberg funding — nonetheless saw a bigger increase in voter turnout than the two counties that did get the money from Zuckerberg and Chan.

Despite all of those clear flaws in the report, Unruh copied-and-pasted into a November 2021 article the claim that "And research revealed that Mark Zuckerberg handed over a total of $419.5 million to the Center for Technology and Civil Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research leading up to the 2020 presidential election, and the two groups used it to buy Democrat votes. Essentially." He also wrote in a January 2022 article that "an analysis confirmed that the $420 million that leftist Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed out to mostly local election officials often with instructions to recruit Democrat voters changed enough results to turn the White House over to Biden."

An April 2022 article by Art Moore touted an anti-Zuckerberg propaganda film:

A spokesman for Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “neither new nor newsworthy” an upcoming documentary by conservative activist David Bossie that charges the Facebook founder’s $400 million to to fund election operations was intentionally channeled largely to three key swing states in an effort to defeat Donald Trump.

Bossie’s Citizens United Productions is the producer of “Rigged: The Zuckerberg-Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump,” which will debut next Tuesday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. After the debut, it will be available for streaming at Rigged2020.com.

The documentary contends the Zuckerberg money persuaded governmental entities to adopt policies that compromise vote integrity, including mail-in ballots and increasing the number of ballot drop boxes. The $400 million was distributed through the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research in Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.

But Bloomberg pointed out that the film’s purpose is to serve as right-wing propaganda, however shoddy, to advance Trump’s bogus stolen-election narrative:

The film, which premiered at Mar a Lago earlier this month and stars the former president, isn’t so much a movie as an expression of right-wing paranoia. But even so, Rigged, and the swirl of attention around it, is worth talking about for what it says about the ability of Zuckerberg, and his company, Meta, to navigate a political environment that seems more hostile than ever to big tech companies.

It probably doesn’t spoil things to say that Rigged, which you can stream for $4.99, doesn’t make a persuasive case that the election was stolen by Zuckerberg or anyone else. Its central claim–that more pandemic aide went to election boards in Democratic-leaning cities than to Republican-leaning ones–could be explained by the fact that left-leaning cities were generally harder hit by Covid in 2020. What the film actually does is attempt to backfill the claim that Trump was somehow actually got more votes in 2020 than he was given credit for.

Nevertheless, a column later that month by Tamar Alexia Fleischman gushed over the film in an interview with Bossie:

Though leftist media have said snarky things about “Rigged,” it seems that they never saw it. The 40-minute film doesn’t make outlandish or unfounded claims. Rather, it puts visuals to the uncontested fact that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated over $400 million to “help” certain localities run the 2020 election and heighten voter turnout. They made no effort to conceal these donations; rather, they were quite boastful.

[...]

I pointed out that New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, etc. – supposedly representing America’s elite, educated class – only had the most superficial, facile and lowbrow comments about his film, mostly involving what wine was served. I further noted that these magazines anxiously employ investigative reporters to cover the deaths of fashionable socialites, but utilize cut-and-paste techniques regarding the crux of our democracy.

Bossie agreed. “Right. That goes to the Big Lie. If they give any credence to the fact that there may be facts to support (that there were problems with the election), that’s everything to them. That’s why they have to be so superficial.”

Fleischman concluded by gushing: “Thank you, David Bossie, for your generous time. We look forward to your future projects!”

Bogus Wisconsin report

When a Republican-generated report in Wisconsin issued in 2022 called for overturning the 2020 presidential election because of the Zuckerberg money, Unruh gushed over it in a March 2022 article:

It’s already been confirmed by a study that Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to donate some $420 million to various leftist elections officials across America to “help” them accommodate COVID during the 2020 president race essentially “bought” the vote for Joe Biden.

Now a report from the Office of Special Counsel in the state of Wisconsin has determined that those actions also violated the state’s bribery statutes.

Margot Cleveland at the Federalist has posted an explanation of the stunning verdict.

In Wisconsin, Zuckerberg’s money, some $9 million, went “solely to five Democratic strongholds” and the special counsel’s report to the Wisconsin Assembly said those actions violated the ban on bribes.

[...]

The report, 136 pages, said it was not challenging the certification of the 2020 results in Wisconsin, one of several battleground states that went narrowly for Joe Biden. Its goal, instead, is to recommend ways to avoid another election that results from criminal activity.

Unruh is lying. The author of the report, Michael Gableman, argued in a hearing discussing the report that the Wisconsin legislature “ought to take a very hard look at the option of decertification of the 2020 Wisconsin presidential election,” and the report itself offered instructions on how it thinks that can be done.

Unruh then highlighted the report’s key claim that money went to the apparently horrible offense to encouraging people to vote:

The Federalist reported, “According to the report, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg providing financing that allowed the Center for Tech and Civic Life to offer nearly $9 million in ‘Zuck Bucks’ to Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay counties. In exchange, the ‘Zuckerberg 5,’ as the report called the counties, in effect, operated Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts. Those grant funds then paid for illegal drop boxes to be placed in Democratic voting strongholds.”

But as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted, the report’s idea that it’s somehow “cheating” or even illegal to encourage people to vote — particularly if those people voted for a candidate opposed by the report’s author — is dumb:

Well, if you want to increase turnout among less frequent voters, you’re going to target groups that turn out less often, which, given the change from 2012 to 2016, means focusing on counties that have more non-White voters to turnout. In Wisconsin, that means counties such as Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Dane, Sawyer, Brown, Ashland and Rock. Each of those counties has a non-White population that makes up at least a fifth of the population. Understandably, then, an effort to bolster election access in Wisconsin focused on the cities of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay — in Milwaukee, Dane, Racine, Kenosha and Brown counties.

Would increasing turnout among low-propensity voters in those places probably increase the number of Biden voters? Yes. Is that cheating? Of course not. These efforts aren’t suppression of White turnout or giving non-White voters some sort of unfair leg up. Instead, they’re efforts to reduce the barriers that cause poorer, non-White citizens to vote less often.

That’s not how Gableman frames the efforts. His report is blatantly obvious in its efforts to imply wrongdoing. ... The “Zuckerberg 5” sounds like a domestic terror cell from the 1960s, which is the goal. 

Bump went on to note that Gableman portrayed efforts to increase turnout as an inherently partisan Democratic effort, even though turnout for Trump increased as well, and that turnout for Democrats was up nationally, not just in Wisconsin. Bump also pointed out that Gableman’s effort to portray money to municipalities to help increase turnout as “bribery” has already been rejected as a valid legal theory. Bump concluded:

Here again, nearly 500 days after the 2020 election, we see a familiar pattern play out. Republican elected officials want to make Trump supporters happy by treating their unfounded claims of fraud as serious rather than actually confronting those claims. They hire an investigator who is starting from the conclusion that votes were stolen, here. Then the investigation serves as a giant, costly smoke machine so that the investigator can tell the legislators and Republican voters that, while you can’t see it, somewhere in that cloud is a raging fire.

In this case, that fire consists of trying to increase voting among those who have historically faced institutional difficulties in doing so. If that’s cheating, then so is offering SAT tutoring to students in disadvantaged school districts. Sorry if that expands the pool of Harvard applicants your kid is competing against.

Unlike Unruh, a Newsmax article by Brian Freeman on the report admitted that Gableman wants to overturn the election, and he also included comments from the Democratic head of the Wisconsin Election Commission, which Gableman wants to eliminate, calling the report “full in crazy conspiracy theory.”

But WND doesn't care about facts when there's a right-wing narrative to perpetuate, so it continued to push that highly dubious Zuckerbucks story. As part of WND's 2022 midterm election coverage, Unruh claimed that "Mark Zuckerberg handed out, through foundations, $400 million plus," which "likely changed the election winner from President Trump to Joe Biden."

A November 2022 article by Joe Kovacs referenced "Mark Zuckerberg’s distribution of $400 million plus, through foundations, to various local election officials. They often used it to recruit voters from Democrat districts, perhaps explaining why Biden got so many millions more votes than the very popular Barack Obama had years earlier." Kovacs didn’t explain why it was somehow illegal or undesirable to encourage people to vote, especially when Zuckerberg’s money was available to any election official who wanted it.

Unruh tried to lock in the bogus narrative in a February 2023 article:

Critics of President Trump’s claims about election fraud say his arguments repeatedly have lost in courts – often to decisions by Democrat-appointed judges.

But what is known about the 2020 election is that Mark Zuckerberg handed out, through foundations, hundreds of millions of dollars that local election officials often used to influence the result by recruiting voters from Democrat precincts.

Columnist Wayne Allyn Root got in on the act in a March 2023 column, demanding that Zuckerberg be among a slew of people who should be indicted as revenge for Donald Trump's indictment for his alleged crimes: "Indict Mark Zuckerberg for using $400 million of “Zuckerbucks” to rig and steal the 2020 election." Root identified no specific crime Zuckerberg allegedly committed.

Unruh added another bogus claim to his conspiracy-mongering in an April 2023 article:

But the facts remain that a Media Research Center poll after the 2020 election revealed that Joe Biden almost undoubtedly would have lost key swing states – and the election, had social and legacy media not interfered in the election by suppressing damaging, but accurate, reporting about the Biden family’s international business schemes.

Further, there was the undue influence on election results from the $400 million plus that Mark Zuckerberg handed out through foundations to local election officials, who often used the windfall to recruit voters from Democrat districts.

Almost certainly without those factors, which came from outside America’s election process, the U.S. would be in the middle of President Trump’s second term now.

Unruh censored the fact that Zuckerberg foundation grants were available to any election official who wanted it and much of it was used to help defray added expenses of holding an election during a pandemic. Also, there is nothing sinister or evil about encouraging people to vote, and the MRC’s election-fraud conspiracy theory is based on polls it bought from Trump’s campaign pollster and the polling firm founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.

In yet another rehashing of his pet election fraud conspiracy theories in a May 2023 column, Farah huffed: "Do you recall Zuckerbucks?" We do, which means we know that any election office could have gotten that money if they had simply requested it, it's not illegal to want more people to vote, and Farah is lying by suggesting “Zuckerbucks” were an attempt to steal the election.

An anonymously written July 2023 article peddling a "Thou Shalt Not Steal Elections" bumper sticker made this claim:

Whether it was “stealing” or not during the 2020 election can be left to semantics.

But the facts are that Mark Zuckerberg handed out some $400-plus million like candy to local elections officials who often used it to recruit voters specifically from Democrat districts.

An anonymously written Aug. 2 article played whataboutism to distract from a recently released indictment against Trump:

President Donald Trump is facing his latest court case, from prosecutor Jack Smith, over what he said and did to challenge the 2020 presidential election count – the one influenced by the FBI’s decision to falsely tell media organizations to suppress details about the Biden clan’s international business schemes because it was Russian disinformation.

The same election that was influenced by Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to hand out some $400 million plus to local elections officials, who often used it to recruit voters in Democrat districts.

Unruh repeated his faulty talking point again in an Aug. 24 article about "Mark Zuckerberg’s $400 million handout to election officials who often used it to recruit leftist voters." He parroted it once more in a Sept. 4 article: "what is known is that the election was under undue influence from the $400 million plus that Mark Zuckerberg handed out to election officials who often used it to recruit voters from Democrat districts." Unruh even worked it into a defense of the Capitol riot in an Oct. 18 article:

After all, more than a thousand people, protesting at the time what they considered to be a stolen election, were arrested, often at the point of a SWAT team gun in a raid, and jailed, sometimes for years, before they were given a trial, and THEN sentenced to more jail for the Jan. 6, 2021, protest-turned riot.

And since then, there has been significant documentation of the bias in that election, including Mark Zuckerberg’s $400 million plus handed out to recruit voters from Democrat districts to help Joe Biden.

Unruh included the Zuckerberg narrative among a litany of other right-wing election conspiracies in a Nov. 2 article -- and added a new lie in the process:

There were a multitude of concerns about ballot harvesting, ballot box stuffing and worse. But the issue remained fogged because many jurisdictions actually changed their voting procedures and processes because of COVID-19, leaving the accountability for such behavior uncertain.

What is certain about the undue influences on the 2020 president was that Mark Zuckerberg handed out some $400-plus million that was used by the election officials often to recruit voters from Democrat districts in an agenda to help Joe Biden. That actually prompted many jurisdictions to ban the use of such outside money in that manner.

Unruh has never provided evidence that there was ever an "agenda" to use the money to help Biden. Still, Unruh embellished things further in a Dec. 12 article, claiming that the money "often used that extraordinary funding to recruit Joe Biden voters." Unruh offered no evidence that any of that money was specifically used to “recruit Joe Biden voters,” let alone much of it, as he claims. He tweaked the lie further in a Jan. 4 article claiming that the money went to "various elections officials who largely used it to recruit fans of Joe Biden." Unruh made a similar statement in a Jan. 19 article.

Expanding the lie

Unruh continued to ignore the facts and hammer the narrative:

• “While Americans were listening to the political candidates and making up their minds about voting in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook worked with a couple of foundations to hand out $400 million plus. It was a cash influence on the nation’s elections that never before had happened, and it went mostly to leftist elections officials who used it to recruit Joe Biden voters.” — Jan. 31
• "Of course, those Americans now know the other side of the Democrats’ messaging. They know that Mark Zuckerberg handed out $400 million plus to various elections officials who used it mostly to recruit Joe Biden supporters." -- Feb. 23
• “The facts are that the election results are suspect, as Mark Zuckerberg handed out $400 million plus to various elections officials to influence the results. They used the money largely to recruit Biden supporters.” — Feb. 29
• “Of course, evidence of blatant 2020 election rigging is everywhere: Mark Zuckerberg handed out $400 million to elections officials who mostly used it to recruit Democrat voters, in an influence operation never seen before in American elections.” — March 11
• “Warner also noted the $400 million plus handed out by Mark Zuckerberg to elections officials who often used it to recruit Biden supporters.” -- March 12

Unruh started a March 13 article this way:

During the 2020 election it was Zuckerbucks that were used to influence the outcome of the presidential race.

More than $400 million that Mark Zuckerberg handed out to elections officials, who often used that cash windfall to recruit Joe Biden voters.

Never before had American elections been subjected to such an influence operation, and significantly, those Zuckerbucks flowed into bank accounts outside of the ordinary processes through which American elections and campaigns are funded.

This claim came in the context of Mississippi officials bizarrely claiming that it’s “election interference” to encourage people to vote, claiming that a federal program to encourage people to vote “creates numerous opportunities for ineligible prisoners to be registered to vote in Mississippi.” Unruh didn’t mention that this comes in the wake of a federal court striking down the state’s arbitrary lifetime ban on voting by people convicted of certain felonies, though the state is doing little to help eligible voters gain their rights back.

Unruh repeated the “Zuckerbucks” lie again in a March 15 article:

During the 2020 presidential race, Mark Zuckerberg handed out, through organizations like the partisan-founded Center for Tech and Civic Life, some $400 million that essentially was used by many local elections officials to recruit Joe Biden voters.

Never before in American elections had such a richly funded influence operation been conducted, and some states reacted by banning the injection of private money into those public election processes.

But a report compiled by The Federalist shows that CTCL still is trying to influence election results, only in a different way.

Again, Unruh has never provided evidence that any Zuckerberg money was specifically used “to recruit Joe Biden voters.” In fact, any election office could have received the money — intended to help run an election during a pandemic when local jurisdictions failed to offer all the funding needed — and, indeed, more Republican-dominated jurisdictions than Democratic-dominated ones accepted the money. And despite Unruh’s implications, it’s not against the law to encourage people to vote. Unruh went on to write: "The Zuckerbuck election influence operation is considered by many, along with the FBI’s interference, to have turned the results in 2020 from President Trump to Joe Biden."

That dishonesty continued in a March 25 article by Unruh:

Officials in the city of Milwaukee have decided to grab $1 million Zuckerbucks just as voters in the state of Wisconsin are considering whether to make that move a violation of the state constitution.

Zuckerbucks are a reference to the $400 million plus handed out by Mark Zuckerberg during the 2020 election. It was turned over to elections officials – outside of any election reporting system – and they often used it to recruit Democrat voters.

It is thought to be one of two significant vote influence operations that affected the 2020 results, the other being the FBI’s interference when it told media corporations to suppress accurate reporting about Biden family scandals documented in a computer abandoned by Hunter Biden.

[...]

In 2020, out of the $10 million in Zuckerbucks given to Wisconsin cities, $8.5 million went to five Democrat cities.

Unruh censored the fact that any jurisdiction that wanted the money could have gotten it, and that it’s not illegal or deceptive to encourage people to vote.