Louisiana’s Ascension Parish stores its voting machines in a warehouse without climate control, says Bridget Hanna, the parish’s elected clerk of court and top elections official. This worries her on days like these, when temperatures routinely hit 100 degrees, compounded by extreme humidity.
Louisiana’s voting machines are from 2006—old enough that when they falter, Hanna says, it’s often impossible to locate replacement parts. That’s a common frustration: aging voting equipment poses a projected multi-billion-dollar concern in the United States, amid a general national crisis of underfunding for local election administration.
“The state is scrambling to make sure they have enough machines for everyone, but we can’t get them anymore,” Hanna, a Republican, told Bolts. “We’re just hanging on.”
Hers is the kind of local election office that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he sought to help in 2020, when he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated some $350 million to a previously obscure nonprofit organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which helps maintain and improve local election procedures and ballot access around the country. The COVID-19 pandemic had just set in, and election administrators, who in many cases already had limited budgets and inadequate staffing, were facing dramatic new challenges: outfitting poll workers with personal protective equipment, establishing drive-through voting, and preparing for much more mail-in voting than usual, to name a few.
An NPR analysis done soon after the election found officials applied for and accepted some amount of CTCL money in more than 2,500 different local jurisdictions, covering every U.S. state except Louisiana, Delaware, and Wyoming. The money was used for a variety of purposes, including ballot processing equipment and improved pay for election workers.
Those early-pandemic days of emergency voting procedures ended long ago, but the CTCL donations set off a wave of political uproar around election funding that is still rippling through state governments, including in Louisiana—even though none of the money even reached election offices there.
Now, after three years and several legislative attempts in Louisiana to kick private money out of elections offices, the state will become the first in the nation to vote on the matter directly. In the Oct. 14 election, Louisianans will see a proposed constitutional amendment, placed on the ballot by the GOP-controlled legislature, that would ban private or foreign money from being used for the purpose of conducting elections.
This proposed ban, Amendment 1, would if passed make Louisiana the 26th state to adopt such restrictions, all directly inspired by what conservatives have demonized as “Zuckerbucks” spent on elections during the onset of the pandemic. The billionaire’s donations have drawn particular ire from conservatives convinced that CTCL boosted Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, and the partisan outrage is clearly reflected in state policies: 23 of the 25 states that already adopted such restrictions voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 or have Republican legislative trifectas, or both.