HARRISBURG, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — With bills in the Pennsylvania General Assembly that would ban third-party donations and private money to fund public elections, Republicans are trying to join more than dozen other GOP-led states that have done the same.
State Sen. Lisa Baker is behind the Senate’s version of the bill. “We're dealing with the fundamentals of democracy 101. Who pays for elections, the government or the private sector?” Baker said.
She says she is not trying to imply that the donations, including $350 million from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, distributed by the non-profit Center for Tech and Civic Life, had an impact on the outcome of the election.
However, she said, “If we do not close the door, these contributions will escalate from every direction. Once the precedent becomes accepted, we will be playing a no-limits game.”
She says the federal government dropped the ball in 2020, failing to provide safety measures for voters and poll workers, and elections staff at the height of the pandemic.
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Delaware County Director of Elections Jim Allen said the CTCL money was crucial to allow people to vote safely at the height of the pandemic. He says he can see Baker’s slippery-slope argument, and could understand legislating transparency of grants for elections, but not a flat-out ban.
“To that end, I would think you would want to legislate how you want the transfer payments to occur, not ban private money from coming into government — because government is financed entirely by private money,” Allen said.
Chester County Commissioner Marian Moskowitz agrees on the importance of the 2020 grants, saying her county would have had to come up with nearly $2.5 million dollars to safely run the election if they hadn’t gotten the grant from the non-profit Center for Tech and Civic Life.
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“It would have to come from our general fund, and it would have to come from somewhere. That's a lot of money to just, all of a sudden, have in the midst of a pandemic.”
But she says, stirring up conspiracy theories that CTCL or Zuckerberg bought access to the election is, in her words, nonsense.
“They didn't purchase the equipment. We did,” she said. “They did not tell us what vendor to use. We can't do that. We had to put it out there. So all these things that are just stirring up the pot are just not true.”