North Michigan News

Iosco County officials confirmed they have not applied for grant funding from the Chicago-based “Zucker-Bucks” non-profit that spent $400 million in 2020 staffing county election offices with Democrat staffers.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) has raised capital and is providing financial support to election offices in Georgia and Wisconsin to facilitate the processing of mail-in and absentee ballots. Although news stories have appeared in the local press about these arrangements, these stories give very little information about the actual nature of the arrangements between CTCL and local election agencies.

Applications for grants opened on Aug. 2 and are available to eligible election offices in 19 states—Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming—as well as the U.S. territories.

North Michigan News sent a Freedom of Information request to Iosco County asking for copies of "all email correspondence with the Center for Tech and Civic Life, including all emails from the domain @techandciviclife.org, and any applications filed for grant funding with the Center for Tech and Civic Life."

Iosco County Clerk Nancy J. Huebel responded by email, sending copies of emails received from CTCL representatives in 2022 and 2020 asking for a list of candidates participating in the Iosco County general election for the respective years. The county complied with the CTCL's requests and sent the organization a list of candidates for 2022 and 2020, but has since had no contact with the organization.

Iosco County's population in 2020 was 25,237, according to U.S. Census data.

Republican Donald J. Trump defeated Democrat Joe Biden in Iosco County in 2020 with 12,329 votes (64.4 percent) to Biden's 6,348 votes (33.1 percent), with 474 voters (2.5 percent) choosing candidates from other parties.

Statewide in Michigan in 2020, Biden received 2,804,040 votes (50.6 percent) to Trump's 2,649,852 votes (47.8 percent), a difference of about 154,000 votes.

CTCL "skewed voter turnout in the 2020 election and may have tipped the presidential election to Joe Biden"

After Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave CTCL $400 million in 2020 to discreetly distribute to willing county election offices, 28 state legislatures banned the practice of taking partisan non-profit funding to run elections.

Zuckerberg's “roughly $400 million in (2020) grants (were) directed almost exclusively to Democrat-leaning districts to fund various election efforts and equipment, perhaps most notably the funding of ballot drop-boxes," according to City Journal.

In Wisconsin, where CTCL-paid Democrat staff ran election day operations at one of the state's largest counties, the state as well as twelve individual Wisconsin counties—Walworth, Ozaukee, Kenosha, Winnebago, Iowa, Lafayette, Washington, Kewaunee, Oneida, and Barron—passed laws banning the practice of private organizations running public elections, according to the Capital Research Center.

“Private financing of government election offices under the guise of COVID-19 relief skewed voter turnout in the 2020 election and may have tipped the presidential election to Joe Biden,” wrote the Capital Research Center, which has tracked subsequent state and local bans of the practice. “Despite its claims that the grants were strictly for COVID-19 relief, not partisan advantage, the data show otherwise.”

According to Legal Newsline, Chicago-based CTCL was founded in 2012 by Democrat and “LGBT” activists Epps-Johnson and her wife, Whitney May. 

Epps-Johnson and May worked together at the New Organizing Institute, a Democratic grassroots election training group, from 2012-2015. 

A native of Pike County, KY, May worked for the Durham County Board of Elections in North Carolina from 2007 to 2012. Epps-Johnson is a native of Angels Camp, CA and graduated from Bret Harte High School in 2004 before attending Stanford University. In 2018, she was named an Obama Foundation fellow.