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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RECORD

Saturday, November 2, 2024

OC elections among many that received Zuckerberg grant money in 2020 for voter drop boxes

Campaigns & Elections

Orange County (OC) is among the jurisdictions that opted to accept grant money from a community group that received its funding from Mark Zuckerberg in the 2020 election.

“That money was offered to counties with no strings attached,” said OC Registrar of Voters Bob Page. “It was essentially to assist counties with the administration of the November 2020 general election.”

The nonprofit, Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), received $350 million from a Zuckerberg foundation that was disbursed to some 2,500 jurisdictions nationwide, according to media reports.

“We were awarded the money and provided the check, and then after the election, we just basically accounted for how we spent it but that money did not influence how the county operated the election. It was just additional funds we had to be able to conduct it," Page said.

As previously reported, the funding was earmarked to establish additional polling locations, ballot-drop boxes and to teach voter education.

However, OC did not do anything new in 2020 that it hadn’t already planned on doing to protect the safety of voters during the pandemic under the Voter's Choice Act, according to Page.

“Part of that requirement is that we have at least one Dropbox in the county for every 15,000 voters,” Page told the Southern California Record. “So, the county actually installed drop boxes ahead of getting that money from that group.”

The Voters’ Choice Act of 2016 was optional and allowed counties to implement absentee voting before the state codified it.

“We started with 121 drop boxes and we just added one for this election,” Page said. “We had 120 in the last election, but for every election, we evaluate the number of registered voters that we expect we will have 88 days before the election and then make sure that we have a sufficient number of vote centers and a sufficient number of drop boxes.”

OC has a total of 2,179 precincts, according to OC data, and the general public can track residents who are checking in at vote centers on the website www.OCvote.gov/streetindex.

“Because we use Electronic Voter Roster now, we are constantly updating on our website a list of voters who've checked in to vote at the vote center,” Page said.

The Registrar's office is on target to hire some 1,000 workers to be customer service representatives at the vote centers for November's mid-term elections.

"We have actually been trending a little bit better than the primary election," Page added. "We have done a little bit more advertising and outreach to encourage people to sign up to be hired so we think we've made a dent with some of the outreach we've done. We're confident we're going to have probably more than the number we're trying to hit."

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