Mississippi joins states limiting outside election funding

Source: Associated Press

Mississippi joins states limiting outside election funding

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
April 4, 2022

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi is the latest Republican-led state to ban election offices from accepting donations from private groups for voting operations — a movement fueled by conservatives’ suspicion of donations by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2020.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed House Bill 1365 on Friday, and it will become law July 1. It says state or local officials who conduct elections cannot solicit or accept donations from any private group for “voter education, voter outreach or voter registration programs.”

Reeves said in a video posted to Facebook on Monday that he was “deeply disturbed by big tech’s attempt to influence the 2020 elections.”

“Whether it was their attempt to silence conservative voices or suppress information they don’t agree with, California’s technology elites will stop at nothing to push their woke ideology on the American people,” Reeves said. “Our elections cannot be left up to billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, especially when groups like Facebook systematically silence conservative voices on their platforms.”

-snip-

In 2020, the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed grants to 2,500 election offices nationwide. The money was spent in a wide variety of ways — protective gear for poll workers, public education campaigns promoting new methods to vote during the pandemic, and new trucks to haul voting equipment.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-covid-health-voting-elections-3a82cad53577e7b7c1c4f640330b56c4