A bevy of emails obtained by The Federalist reveal how Coconino County officials have been violating the spirit of Arizona law by colluding with a coalition of left-wing nonprofits tasked with influencing election operations in key battleground states ahead of the 2024 election.
Last year, Coconino County — a Democrat stronghold that delivered Joe Biden a margin of 17,646 votes in 2020, greater than the margin of votes by which Biden won the state — became one of several localities to join the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The Honest Elections Project describes the “Alliance” as an $80 million venture launched in 2022 by left-wing nonprofits to “systematically influence every aspect of election administration” and advance Democrat-backed voting policies in local election offices. Several of the organizations participating in the project include the Center for Civic Design, The Elections Group, and the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the latter of which interfered in the 2020 election to the benefit of Democrats.
During the 2020 contest, CTCL and the Center for Election Innovation and Research collectively received hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. These “Zuckbucks” were poured into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsupervised election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes. To make matters worse, the grants were heavily skewed towards Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.
With Arizona and 26 other states having passed measures restricting the use of private money in elections in the years since, CTCL and other left-wing nonprofits devised the Alliance as a way to skirt these “Zuckbucks” bans. In a 2023 report, the Honest Elections Project and John Locke Foundation revealed how the Alliance seeks to provide election offices with “scholarships” to cover membership costs, which can then be “converted into ‘credits’ that member offices can use to buy services from CTCL and other Alliance partners.”