Daily Kos: Conspiracy theorists push Louisiana referendum to ban private election funding
Jeff Singer | Monday, August 28, 2023 at 1:49:34p CDT
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is one of the many Republicans to throw out baseless allegations about the 2020 election.
Louisiana will become the first state in the nation to let voters weigh in on a proposal to ban private funding for elections this fall, an effort that comes after years of conservative conspiracy theories about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's role in the 2020 presidential election. No one has released any polls of the Oct. 14 contest over Amendment 1, which will take place the same day that the Pelican State holds its all-party primary for governor, but a prominent local voting rights advocate tells Bolts' Alex Burness he's pessimistic about opponents' chances.
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced in October 2020 that they would donate $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit that provides grants to cash-strapped election officials at a time when the pandemic resulted in a massive increase of mail-in voting; other organizations, including Google and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, also made large contributions. "Honestly, I don't know what we would have done without it," one local elections administrator in Pennsylvania told NPR. "This grant really was a lifesaver in allowing us to do more, efficiently and expeditiously."
But while CTCL's grants, as Burness writes, went to 47 states, Louisiana was not one of them, even though Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin at first encouraged parish clerks to apply. (Parishes are the state's equivalent of counties.) But Attorney General Jeff Landry, a far-right Republican who is now the frontrunner to succeed termed-out Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, responded by telling clerks that state law forbade them from taking outside money, even though there was no such law on the books. Landry went on to file a lawsuit baselessly alleging that CTCL was trying to send the money to certain areas of the state as part of "an inherently insidious and corrupting effect."
The head of the state's association of election clerks, Debbie Hudnall, told the Louisiana Illuminator in response that there was no sign at all that CTCL had any partisan agenda. Hudnall, though, said that Landry's team said he'd sue any clerk who tried to obtain funding, an account the attorney general's office denied. Landry nevertheless succeeded: Louisiana, along with Delaware and Wyoming, was one of just three states that did not receive any funds from the nonprofit.
Following Donald Trump's defeat that fall, Big Lie spreaders responded by throwing out evidence-free accusations that the money from Zuckerberg was used to advance an imagined pro-Joe Biden conspiracy. The Anti-Defamation League warned that such rhetoric was an antisemitic dog whistle insinuating that "rich Jews are controlling levers of power." (Zuckerberg is Jewish.) But Republicans in Louisiana were eager to join in. "The use of private money to finance public elections, or 'Zuckerbucks,' is the gravest danger that our nation faces, bar none," wrote state GOP chair Louis Gurvich last year. "Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-in, and the Ayatollah combined do not threaten our republic as severely as does the loss of confidence in the fairness of our elections."
Legislatures in 25 states have now passed laws to restrict or ban private money from being used for elections, but Edwards has used his veto pen to prevent Louisiana from becoming the 26th for now. However, while GOP legislators haven't been able to muster up quite enough support to override the governor, who has blasted their efforts as an "unnecessary political ploy," they enlisted the help of 10 House Democrats in June to place their new plan on the ballot as Amendment 1. Unlike the bills Edwards blocked, though, the amendment also says it would ban election funding from "foreign government[s]," text critics argue was inserted to raise the specter of another nonexistent threat.
Burness writes that there's been no well-funded campaign to promote or defeat the proposal, though Peter Robins-Brown of the nonprofit Louisiana Progress believes it's sure to pass. Burness summarized Robins-Brown's fears, writing that "without context, many people of varying political stripes will likely be persuaded by the argument that a private or foreign interest shouldn't be sending Louisiana money to perform basic governmental operations."
Robins-Brown also said that Amendment 1 wouldn't fix any actual problems plaguing Louisiana's under-funded elections. "If you’re going to do this, you also need to make sure that election administration is fully funded, and that’s where I think there’s the element of potential bad faith here," he told Burness. "You’re going after this one piece of the larger puzzle without addressing the underlying problem, which is underfunding of election administration."
That problem, though, isn't being addressed in the state. "The state is scrambling to make sure they have enough machines for everyone, but we can’t get them anymore," said Bridget Hanna, the Republican clerk of reliably red Ascension Parish, who told Burness her equipment is now nearly two decades old. "We’re just hanging on."