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JUST THE NEWS: Bossie releases ‘Zuckerbucks’ film, as over 40k shown to have bypassed Wisc. voter ID rules in 2020

A total of 40,856 voters registered as “indefinitely confined” for the 2020 election in Wisconsin and did not provide photo ID. Ahead of Tuesday’s local elections in the state, that number was 32,857.

With pro-Trump activist and political filmmaker David Bossie premiering a new documentary on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago about the influence of “Zuckerbucks” in swaying the 2020 election in battleground states like Wisconsin, an election integrity watchdog group has documented that more than 40,000 absentee ballots in that state were cast in 2020 without providing ID by voters self-identifying as “indefinitely confined.”

In “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump,” Bossie, president of conservative nonprofit Citizens United, explores how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg injected nearly $400 million into the 2020 presidential election through two left-leaning voter turnout nonprofits — the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) — “with most of the funds funneled to government elections offices in critically important jurisdictions for Joe Biden — to finance get-out-the-vote efforts aimed at defeating” Trump, according press materials for the film.

On Monday, elections watchdog group Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) posted records obtained via the Wisconsin Elections Commission documenting the number of voters who circumvented state voter ID requirements in 2020 by claiming “indefinitely confined” status during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The dataset revealed “40,856 registrants who voted in the 2020 General Election with an Indefinitely Confined status and according to WEC, had not provided ID prior to doing so,” VRF reported.

Joe Biden defeated Trump in Wisconsin by a margin of 20,608 votes, out of 3,297,352 total votes cast, according to Ballotpedia.

In late March 2020, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC), citing the COVID-19 pandemic, provided guidance that voters who self-identified as “indefinitely confined” could receive a ballot without providing ID. Instead of using an ID to verify a voter’s identity, the only requirement was the signature of a witness verifying that the voter filled out the absentee ballot and that the name and address were correct.

Wisconsin was one of the battleground states that received Zuckerbucks, with the cities of Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine receiving a total of $6.3 million in CTCL grants.

Under the Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan submitted by the five cities to CTCL with the signed grant agreement, Green Bay proposed to spend $45,000 to employ “voter navigators,” who would “help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots and comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures.”

In December 2020, after the Wisconsin Republican Party brought a lawsuit against the Dane County clerk, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the exsitence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state’s declared public health emergency were insufficient to classify voters as “indefintely confined” and exempt from voter ID rules on that basis. Only those voters whose “own age, physical illness or infirmity” makes them homebound could declare themselves “indefinitely confined” and bypass a state requirement for photo ID, the court determined.

As Wisconsin residents voted on Tuesday in local elections, 32,857 of the 40,856 voters who registered as “indefinitely confined” and voted without providing ID in the 2020 election remained “in an Active status,” according to VRF, while 7,999 of them are now inactive. Many of the inactive voters are listed as deceased, moved, or inaccessible via mail.

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Citizens United Foundation