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."
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