Speaking at Monday’s event, Ms. Epps-Johnson said the grants distributed by the center in 2020 have helped fill a significant resource gap for those overseeing elections in the United States. A New England town, she said without specifying, was able to replace early 1900s tuning equipment held together with duct tape.
“The United States’ electoral infrastructure is crumbling,” said Ms. Epps-Johnson.
In addition to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan will donate $69.6 million to the Center for Election Innovation & Research in 2020. At the time, that nonprofit said the top election officials in 23 states had applied for grants.
Republicans have been relentless in their criticism of the social media mogul and his donations.
While campaigning for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday in Perrysburg, Ohio, JD Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” who has undergone a conversion to Trumpism, continued to accuse Mr Zuckerberg of tipping the 2020 election to Mr Biden.
Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist, hasn’t exactly renounced the help of big technology. He considers Peter Thiel, an outgoing board member of Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, and a major donor to Mr. Trump, to be one of the top fundraisers. Mr. Thiel has also supported Blake Masters, a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona.
In an op-ed for The New York Post last October, Mr. Vance and Mr. Masters called for the curbing of Facebook’s influence, writing that Mr. Zuckerberg had spent half a billion dollars “buying the presidency for Joe Biden.” .
In Colorado, Tina Peters, the top voter for secretary of state at the Republican Party meeting last weekend, has strongly criticized Zuckerberg, even after her arrest this year on charges of breaching election security. Ms. Peters, the Mesa County clerk, faces several felony charges amid allegations that she allowed an unauthorized person to copy the voting machine’s hard drive.
