Tomorrow, the House & Governmental Affairs Committee will hear HB311, a bill by Rep. Blake Miguez to prohibit the use of “Zuckerbucks” by Louisiana election officials. Rep. Miguez has introduced similar legislation thrice before, in 2020 and 2021, when it was vetoed by Governor John Bel Edwards, and last year, when it was mysteriously allowed to die in the Senate when the session ended.

This year’s bill aims to place the prohibition of Zuckerbucks into the Louisiana Constitution, hence it will require a two-thirds vote by both houses of the legislature instead of a mere majority. It must then pass by a majority vote of the people, but if it passes (and surveys suggest it will easily pass with a large majority), it cannot be vetoed by our leftist governor.

But for those of you who may still be wondering, what are Zuckerbucks, and why should we care about this issue at a time when our country appears to be in a continuing  existential crisis under the Biden administration? Well, you should be very concerned about this issue, because it is the principal threat to the free and fair elections on which our rights have depended since the founding of our republic!

Zuckerbucks are privately donated dollars contributed by left-wing billionaires to election officials and/or their favored non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), which are private non-profit contractors. In 2020, these donations were ostensibly made to help the poor, sick, and disabled get to the polls or otherwise vote. At least that was what we were told in the run-up to the 2020 “COVID” presidential election. Actually, the money was almost entirely spent on Democrat get-out-the-vote schemes, and this money (ultimately amounting to approximately four hundred million dollars) quite likely tipped the scales against Republicans in that critical election. Let me explain how this all came to pass.

It is September 2020, and a presidential election is looming as a worldwide pandemic sweeps the nation. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announce that they will donate two hundred and fifty million dollars to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a left wing non-profit advocacy group founded in Chicago in 2012. CTCL’s founders have very close ties to the Democratic Party, and the organization has a history of promoting election practices which strongly favor Democrat voter turnout. However, the public is only told that the CTCL will make grants of this money to local election officials or their pet non-profit organizations to help deal with the pandemic’s effects on the upcoming election.

The grant money begins flying out the door, but only to select local election officials and/or their pet NGO’s in areas approved by CTCL operatives. Just a few weeks later, the Zuckerbergs donate an additional one hundred million dollars to the same organization, an amount which will later increase to a total of about four hundred million dollars. The Zuckerbergs state at the time that they are donating this money “… to local election jurisdictions across the country to help ensure that they have the staffing, training, and equipment necessary so that this November every eligible voter can participate in a safe and timely way and have their vote counted.”

In other words, the whole scheme was marketed as private funding to help public election officials conduct a fair and safe presidential election in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sounds well intentioned, doesn’t it? But I must note at this point that the CTCL had no expertise whatsoever in epidemiology (the branch of public health medicine which deals with pandemics), or pandemic control or mitigation measures. Nor did it have any expertise in the use or distribution of personal protection equipment such as masks, face shields or plastic germ barriers.

As you may have guessed by now, precious little of this huge sum of money was actually spent on personal protection equipment. Instead, several thousand election jurisdictions, most of them heavily Democratic, received the money under the so-called CTCL COVID-19 RESPONSE PROGRAM. The money was then used to conduct highly partisan get-out-the-vote efforts. Democrat political machines used it to hire and train huge voter turnout-out staffs, set up vote harvesting grifts, create and distribute vast quantities of partisan print and social media, establish drive-by voting sites, and place ballot drop-off boxes in heavily Democrat areas, etc., etc.

Forty-eight states ultimately received grants from CTCL. Fortunately, Louisiana only received two such grants totaling several hundred thousand dollars, before the program was halted by court order. (By way of comparison, New York City alone received nineteen million dollars!) For greatly limiting the damage done to Louisiana’s elections, we owe a debt of gratitude to two men: Attorney General Jeff Landry and Representative Blake Miguez.

You see, when it was learned that mostly Democrat election officials had been contacted by CTCL operatives and that grants totaling nearly eight million dollars were being considered for Louisiana, Rep. Miguez filed and the legislature then passed his bill (HB51) to make the practice permanently illegal. Of course, Governor John Bel Edwards later vetoed this bill after the session ended, and Attorney General Landry then filed suit to stop the grant money from being doled out. If it wasn’t readily apparent to some Louisiana Republicans, these two gentlemen had correctly foreseen that private financial aid to select polling districts would corrupt the entire election process, which is exactly what would happen across the country in the 2020 presidential election.

Although the Attorney General’s suit was initially dismissed by a trial court judge, this did not occur until October, 2020, by which time early voting had already begun and the CTCL had moved on to more corruptible pastures in other states. The trial court’s decision was eventually overruled when Attorney General Landry successfully appealed the decision, but this complex case is still wending its way through the court system as I write this article years later. The point is that his timely action in filing suit months before the 2020 election stopped the disbursement of almost all Zuckerbucks in Louisiana. Most other states were not so lucky.

In 2021, Rep. Miguez again filed his bill (then renumbered as HB20), which again passed both houses of the legislature. True to form, John Bel Edwards once again vetoed it, even though by then he had full knowledge of the damaging impact which Zuckerbucks had had on the 2020 presidential election. Unfortunately, the 2021 veto override session failed, leaving us back where we were until 2022, when Rep. Miguez filed HB811. For some mysterious reason, the Louisiana Senate allowed the 2022 legislative session to expire without taking up the bill, even though it had easily passed the House weeks earlier.

Before discussing the current status of this year’s anti-Zuckerbucks bill, let us briefly move on to the the national level in order to examine just how important to the health of the American republic the problem we are here discussing actually is. Well, Joe Biden “won” the following states by very slim vote margins: Georgia (16 electoral votes) was decided by 11,779 votes; Arizona (11 electoral votes) was decided by 10,457 votes; Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) was decided by 20,682 votes; Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) was decided by 80,555 votes; Nevada (6 electoral votes) was decided by 33,596 votes. Those states collectively held 63 electoral votes, and several other states were also fairly close calls. Biden received 306 electoral votes and Trump received 232. 270 electoral votes were needed to win, so a flip of only 38 electoral votes would have changed the outcome of the election.

Consider that a change of just three or four of the five states mentioned above, involving a minuscule number of the more than one hundred and fifty-five million total votes cast, would have given President Trump the victory in 2020, and you begin to see the enormity of this issue. I think it is fair to say that the Zuckerbergs’ hundreds of millions of dollars, along with additional sums contributed by other left-wing billionaires, very likely altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election! It turns out that the left-wing media probably didn’t even need to suppress the New York Post’s story about the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which so clearly portrayed the entire Biden family as a bunch of on-the-take hustlers. (I guess the media did that just for insurance.)

And think what a difference that wayward election result has made to our country since the Democrats took over the government: The out-of-control crime, steeply rising inflation, woke insanity, loss of control of our southern border, loss of basic freedoms, multiple foreign policy failures, and rapidly nearing national bankruptcy – none of this would have happened under a Republican administration!

The threat posed by the continued use of private funding in our public elections is the gravest danger which the American republic faces, bar none. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and the Ayatollah combined do not threaten our nation as seriously as a loss of confidence in our elections would within a matter of days or weeks. What must we do to avoid this problem in the future?

Unfortunately, nothing can likely be accomplished at the national level with this president and Democrat control of the Senate, but there is something we can do right here in Louisiana, right now. And for that we can once again thank Rep. Blake Miguez. His bill (HB311) will place a constitutional prohibition on the use of Zuckerbucks in Louisiana elections. The bill will come up in the House & Governmental Affairs Committee tomorrow, and it needs the full support of ALL Republican legislators. Twenty-four states have already prohibited the use of Zuckerbucks in their elections. But for a failure of legislative will, Louisiana would have been the twenty-fifth state. Fortunately, there is still time to fix this problem before this year’s gubernatorial election and next year’s presidential election.

Every Louisiana citizen, regardless of ideological persuasion, who is concerned about free and fair elections in Louisiana, should contact his or her legislator right away and express support for Rep. Miguez’ HB311.

 

LOUIS GURVICH, Chairman
Republican Party of Louisiana