A now-retired elections clerk from Brown County, Wisconsin, says political activists working for a group funded by Mark Zuckerberg “seized control” of the November elections in key cities in the state, including Green Bay, according to a report from Just the News. Career experts found themselves sidelined as these activists made last-minute changes that may have violated state law.
“They had no business doing that,” ex-Brown County clerk Sandy Juno told Just the News.
According to the report, the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) “injected chaos and unnecessary changes to how ballots were counted in Green Bay in November.”
“We need to be really on top of this, because if this is how elections are going to go, we won’t have election integrity,” Juno warned.
The group poured millions of dollars into multiple key Wisconsin Democratic strongholds in the months leading up to last year’s presidential race, ostensibly in an effort to shore up voting systems and infrastructure amid the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic. The organization was ultimately funded with more than a third of a billion dollars by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan; that money was funneled to additional election funding efforts across the country.
Juno claimed that following the infusion of the CTCL cash into Green Bay “the mayor’s office and chief of staff began to take over election functions.”
“And that is not something under state statutes they have the authority to do,” she said, “because under Wisconsin law, municipal clerks, the county clerk and the Wisconsin Elections Commission are the individuals charged with running elections.”
“As we got closer to the November election we found out that this outside group had come in and was basically trying to redo our forms and documents that we use statewide. And these people were from out of state and had no business doing that,” Juno explained.
Emails revealed earlier this year showed efforts by CTCL and other groups to, in part, redesign ballot instructions and other election documents in multiple cities around the state, including Green Bay.
Juno said the state normally has a clear procedure by which such alterations are made.
“As clerks, we meet with our state elections commission at least three times a year,” she told Solomon, “and [we] have continuous and ongoing correspondence with them, so that, you know, the whole state is conducting the elections in harmony.
“When you have an outside group coming in, and all of a sudden trying to dictate how to run an election — and these people were all from out of state. They had no expertise in Wisconsin, for our processes and procedures for conducting an election.”
Juno argued that the management “had an impact on the overall election,” and that the process itself was “very closely monitored by individuals who are normally not running elections.”
Juno said private money “should stay out of the system.”
Related: Audit Everything Until the Stink From Last November Is Gone
This revelation is particularly significant because President Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, and Biden won the state in 2020 by only about 20,000 votes out of 2.24 million votes cast for president. Is it possible that outside groups like CTCL and the chaos they caused had something to do with that? I can’t say for sure, but considering what we’ve learned so far from the audits in Arizona and Georgia a I think it’s a possibility.
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