[ricefield]

> During the 2020 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out likely Democratic voters.

> The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.

Encouraging people to vote is buying elections now? What in the world?

[chuckee]

Per the article, the funds spent weren't on ads, but on funding until-now exclusively government-funded election infrastructure and workers. And that this private funding favored Democrat counties in an attempt to skew the vote, by making it easier to vote in Democrat counties, or to have election officials disproportionately encourage voters in Democrat counties (I'm not familiar with the details of how US elections work, so I'm not confident about this, but that's the impression I got). If so, that's more than just "encouraging people to vote" - selectively overfunding elections in certain counties has just as much a biasing effect as underfunding them in others. I'm sure if the story was that Republicans slashed election budgets in Democrat areas, you'd agree that was unfair, no?

One might argue that this funding merely countered Republican efforts at voter suppression, and brought the elections closer to "fair" than they would be without it. The article doesn't say what the total spending per voter (government + private) was per likely Republican/Democrat voter, so this is possible. Though private funding of elections is worrisome regardless.

[musicale]

As noted in Time's February cover story, the Democratic party clearly outflanked its opposition in 2020.

"That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures."

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

[AndrewDucker]

The answer there would be to make it easier to vote other places too. I'm all for the government doing that...