The Patriot Post® · Republicans Aim to Stop Big Tech Electioneering
In the 2020 election, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured millions of dollars into the election in an effort to promote leftist candidates and political causes. Specifically, as David Horowitz and John Perazzo explained following their investigation into Zuckerberg’s influence operation, the social media tycoon spent over $350 million in efforts to “suspend existing election laws in order to promote universal mail-in voting,” “eliminate or weaken signature-matching requirements and ballot-receipt deadlines for mail-in votes,” “enable the proliferation of unmonitored ballot drop boxes,” and “create unprecedented opportunities for illegal ballot harvesting,” among other measures.
Representative Ted Budd (R-NC) recently introduced the Promoting Free and Fair Elections Act, legislation that would ban the cooperation of federal government agencies with private groups in promoting election interests. In other words, it would make “Zuckerbucks” and any similar cooperative agreement between private organizations and government agencies illegal.
According to recent polling, a majority of Americans — some 82% — would support such an effort to get this type of influence peddling out of elections. In fact, even 80% of Democrats oppose this sort of election funding.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden and Democrat lawmakers have been attempting to do the exact opposite. HR 1, ironically dubbed the For the People Act, would expand such private election funding as well as give the federal government centralized control over all states’ elections. Despite the failure of Democrats to get HR 1 passed, Biden has still sought to push forward with aspects of the plan via an executive order that a White House fact sheet says “called for each agency to submit to Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice a strategic plan outlining the ways that the agency can promote nonpartisan voter registration and voter participation.”
Congressman Budd observed: “Biden’s executive order empowering every federal agency to engage in electioneering on the taxpayers’ dime raises serious ethical and legal concerns. This sweeping directive is inherently partisan and directed primarily at groups expected to vote for one party over another.”
If passed into law, Budd’s legislation would ban taxpayer funding from going to third-party voter registration groups. As New York Republican Congresswoman Claudia Tenney contends: “Biden has no business turning federal agencies into partisan voting operations for Democrats. It’s unconstitutional and would further undermine confidence in the integrity of our elections.”
States are and need to remain responsible for their own elections, and that includes preventing Big Tech from seeking to on the one hand suppress information from conservatives and on the other hand juicing the campaign efforts and reach of leftist politicians. Social media has become the de facto public square and, as such, Big Tech should be effectively prevented from censoring any speech on these platforms.