North Nevada News

Lyon County, Nevada applied for but was denied a grant from the Chicago-based "Zuckerbucks" non-profit that spent $400 million in 2020 staffing county election offices with Democrat staffers.

That's according to the county's response to a Freedom of Information request by the North Nevada News.

Emails show that Lyon County Clerk Treasurer Staci Lindberg applied for a grant from The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) on Aug. 9. 

Lindberg received a response the same day from the CTCL denying her request.

“Thanks for reaching out about CTCL’s nonpartisan Rural and Nonmetro Election Infrastructure program,” CTL wrote in its email. “For this grant program, CTCL is using the 2023 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to define “rural” and “nonmetro.” Jurisdictions with codes 4-9 on that continuum are considered “rural and nonmetro” for the purposes of this grant program. The 2023 Rural-Urban Continuum Code lists Lyon County, Nevada as a “2,” which unfortunately makes your jurisdiction ineligible to apply.”

The Silver State Times sent a FOIA Request to Lyon County asking for copies of "all email correspondence with the Center for Tech and Civic Life, including all emails from the domain @techandciviclife.org, and any applications filed for grant funding with the Center for Tech and Civic Life."

Applications for grants with CTCL opened on Aug. 2 and were available to eligible election offices in 19 states—Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming—as well as the U.S. territories.

Lyon County's population in 2020 was 59,250, according to U.S. Census data.

Republican Donald J. Trump defeated Democrat Joe Biden in Lyon County in 2020, winning 29,962 votes (63.0 percent) to Biden's 15,439 votes (32.4 percent), with 1,421 voters (3.0 percent) choosing candidates from other parties.

Statewide in Nevada in 2020, Biden received 703,486 votes (50.06 percent) to Trump's 659,890 (47.67 percent). Biden won by a margin of about 33,596 votes.

The Lyon County Board of Commissioners includes Wes Henderson, Scott Keller, Tammy Hendrix, Robert Jacobson, and Dave Hockaday.

CTCL "skewed voter turnout in the 2020 election and may have tipped the presidential election to Joe Biden."

After Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave CTCL $400 million in 2020 to discreetly distribute to willing county election offices, 28 state legislatures banned the practice of taking partisan non-profit funding to run elections.

Zuckerberg's “roughly $400 million in (2020) grants (were) directed almost exclusively to Democrat-leaning districts to fund various election efforts and equipment, perhaps most notably the funding of ballot drop-boxes," according to City Journal.