The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a non-partisan organization backed by Republicans, Democrats, and non-partisan officials, grew rapidly in 2020 in response to an exceptionally challenging U.S. election year when a global pandemic and disinformation campaign threatened people’s ability to participate in the democratic process. In response, our country’s state and local election officials alongside pro-democracy organizations including foundations, corporations, and nonprofits came together to overcome these challenges. As a result, 2020 was the most secure election in U.S. history and voter turnout soared.

CTCL played a critical role in deploying various strategies to support election officials and the voting public in 2020. In addition to providing timely and relevant online training as well as accurate and trustworthy information to millions of voters, CTCL distributed nearly $350 million in grants to local election departments to administer safe elections.

CTCL announced the COVID-19 Response Grant program in September 2020. All U.S. local election offices responsible for administering election activities covered by the grant program were eligible to apply for funds. Once applicants were verified as legitimate, they were approved for grant funds which had to be used exclusively for the public purpose of planning and operationalizing safe and secure election administration.

Grants were distributed to nearly 2,500 U.S. election departments spanning 47 states. The minimum CTCL COVID-19 Response Grant amount was $5,000, which was awarded to smaller localities across the country. The largest grant was awarded to New York City, totaling just over $19 million. Over half of all grants nationwide went to election departments that serve fewer than 25,000 registered voters. The grant program was optional, so the list of grantees is a reflection of those election departments that decided to opt-in. Additionally, some jurisdictions may have returned some or all of their grants as unspent.

Since the founding of CTCL we’ve championed small and rural election departments. This is evident in the costs of our training and tools, how we share and gather information about election administration, and the election office success stories we amplify. The COVID-19 Response Grant program significantly expanded our reach in 2020, especially to the most populous election jurisdictions in the country. In addition to these new relationships, the rapid expansion also brought praise, criticism, and national media attention to CTCL. So, whether you’ve been following CTCL’s work since the beginning or you’re just learning about us because of the COVID-19 Response Grant program, we want to use this new national spotlight to share more about what we do and how we do it.

In a hyper-political environment it can be easy to only see the world through a partisan lens, but CTCL makes decisions about what work we do (and don’t do) based on our vision, mission, and core values. Let’s start there.

Fact 1. CTCL’s vision

CTCL envisions:

• High-performing election offices
• Increased public confidence and trust in elections
• A more resilient and adaptive election system
• A more reflective and inclusive population of voters who have the information they need to participate in our democracy
• Healthier, more prosperous, and resilient communities as a result of being civically engaged

Fact 2. CTCL’s mission

CTCL connects Americans with the information they need to become and remain civically engaged, and ensures that our elections are more inclusive and secure.

Fact 3. CTCL’s core values

• Determination: We meet challenges head on and complete work with excellence.
• Inclusion: We work actively to ensure a variety of perspectives are reflected in our staff, our partners, and the people we serve.
• Curiosity: We approach our work eager to learn.
• Collaboration: We accomplish our goals by bringing people together and making the most of the abilities of our team members and partners.
• Reflectiveness: We rigorously evaluate our work, and adapt how we do things in response to feedback.

Fact 4. CTCL’s key areas of work

CTCL improves civic participation through two areas of work:

• Government Services: CTCL delivers training, promotes industry shared practices, curates affordable technology, and supports policy implementation to ensure U.S. elections are more professional, inclusive, and secure.
• Civic Data: CTCL increases opportunities for eligible voters to engage with local government by transforming disparate civic information into standardized civic data that is open source and made available for free, either via direct consumption or APIs. This allows civic organizations, technology companies and platforms, and anyone who wants to help drive civic participation to build tools and resources to inform voters.

Fact 5. CTCL’s 990s

CTCL is a publicly supported 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. CTCL has made all 2020 COVID-19 Response Grant amounts public in our annual 990 filings. CTCL’s 990 that covers activity from Feb. 1, 2020 to Jan. 31, 2021 can be found here.

Fact 6. CTCL’s grantees

All U.S. local election offices responsible for administering election activities covered by the grant program were eligible to apply for funds, and every eligible local election office that applied was awarded funds. Once applicants were verified as legitimate, they were approved for grant funds which had to be used exclusively for the public purpose of planning and operationalizing safe and secure election administration.

Grants were distributed to nearly 2,500 U.S. election departments spanning 47 states. Over half of all grants nationwide went to election departments that serve fewer than 25,000 registered voters. The grant program was optional, so the list of grantees is a reflection of those election departments that decided to opt in.

Fact 7. Frivolous lawsuits against CTCL’s grants program

As part of a disinformation campaign to undermine voter confidence, more than a dozen frivolous lawsuits were filed to smear the CTCL COVID-19 Response Grants program. Every judge — conservative, liberal, and two Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices — who heard these challenges rejected them, with one judge issuing a strongly-worded opinion that in one case labeled these challenges a “conspiracy theory.”

In the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter ordered sanctions against a pair of attorneys who filed a frivolous challenge to the grant program, stating their lawsuit “is one enormous conspiracy theory.” The court ordered the attorneys to pay the defense counsel’s legal fees. In the opinion, the judge noted:

• “In short, this was no slip-and-fall at the local grocery store. Albeit disorganized and fantastical, the complaint’s allegations are extraordinarily serious and, if accepted as true by large numbers of people, are the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”
• “The lawsuit put into or repeated into the public record highly inflammatory and damaging allegations that could have put individuals’ safety in danger. Doing so without a valid legal basis or serious independent personal investigation into the facts was the height of recklessness.”
• “Plaintiffs’ counsel insisted at oral argument that they genuinely believe the factual allegations and legal contentions in the complaint, but ‘belief’ alone cannot form the foundation for a lawsuit. An ‘empty-head’ but ‘pure-heart’ is no justification for patently frivolous arguments or factual assertions.”

The Texas Voters Alliance v. Dallas County, No. 4:20-cv-00775 was filed in Federal District Court in the Eastern District of Texas. The Judge (who noted at the hearing that he was a Republican) denied the plaintiffs’ request for relief because they lacked standing and failed to prove any harm from the grant program. The Court’s opinion includes:

• “Here, the CTCL grants encourage every voter to participate, not solely the ones with which Plaintiffs agree. This widespread encouragement furthers CTCL’s intended purpose to facilitate a safe and efficient voting experience in a pandemic. CTCL does not favor or disfavor any demographic group of voters; every single county in Texas could have applied and received a minimum of $5,000. Indeed, 117 counties did just that. As such, Plaintiffs do not claim any irreparable harm.”
• “Plaintiffs’ assertions are like throwing a breadcrumb trail on a windy, north Texas afternoon.”
• “The Court sees no way to differentiate the supposedly partisan hand sanitizer from the impartial.”

In Federal District Court, for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, the Penn. Voters Alliance v. Centre Cnty., No. 4:20-cv-01761 was filed and dismissed. The Court stated:

• “CTCL provides grant funds to any local election office that applies, and the final grant is calculated using nonpartisan criteria. CTCL reports that over 1,100 local election administrators across the country have applied for CTCL grants, including eighteen counties within Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Department of State. Of these eighteen counties, eleven voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, ‘and five did so by more than a two-to-one margin.’”
• “Plaintiffs make sweeping constitutional claims. But there is less to this case than meets the eye. That is because, despite their assertions, Plaintiffs cannot satisfy the threshold standing requirement of Article III. The Court thus concludes that it cannot reach the merits of Plaintiffs’ motion because they lack standing.”

In the summer of 2022, a unanimous, bipartisan vote by the Federal Election Commission rejected fantastical claims about the grants program. The regulator rejected those claims in 6-0 votes — a rare show of unanimity by the commissioners, who are split evenly by party.

While challenges have all been soundly rejected, they have not been without impact. These frivolous legal challenges meant that some jurisdictions left funds on the table. Jurisdictions in Louisiana alone turned their back on $7.8 million in election funding, even as some parishes were struggling to run elections in the wake of Hurricane Laura, a Category 4 hurricane with winds that exceeded more than 150 mph.

Fact 8. CTCL’s approach to election grantmaking during the COVID-19 pandemic

Election administration is different from community to community, and what election departments needed to make ends meet in 2020 reflected those local differences.

Ultimately the COVID-19 Response Grant program came into place because Congress did not fully fund local election departments during the pandemic. The goal of the program was to ensure election officials had the resources they needed to conduct safe, secure elections for their community.

There were no partisan questions in the grant applications. CTCL COVID-19 Response grant funding decisions were not made on a partisan basis, and as demonstrated by the jurisdictions across the political spectrum that received money, partisan considerations played no role in the availability or awarding of funding. Needs differed vastly from election department to election department based on both how jurisdictions changed their voting program during the pandemic and also their previous funding levels, and CTCL COVID-19 Response grants were available to meet those needs wherever they existed.

Fact 9. CTCL’s position on equitable election funding

Regardless of the COVID-19 pandemic, election administration in the United States provides radically different levels of service to different voters depending solely on where they live. An election department in an impoverished jurisdiction—funded by that impoverished jurisdiction’s tax revenue—will usually have fewer voting locations, worse communication to voters, and fewer staff members.

CTCL believes that election administration should be fully funded by federal, state, and local governments across the country, and that the quality of election administration each voter receives should not depend on the tax base or size of their county.

Fact 10. CTCL’s work to secure government funding for election administration

Private philanthropy helped alleviate an emergency in 2020, and in “normal years” it can help election offices build capacity, streamline processes, and make capital investments. But private philanthropy is no substitute for predictable government funding at the local, state, and federal level.

That’s why in May 2021 CTCL launched the Election Infrastructure Initiative, a campaign to secure adequate government funding for election offices. As Congress considered an infrastructure bill in 2021, we urged them to make investments of $20 billion over 10 years in modern and secure election infrastructure. We used the lessons we learned from grantmaking — funds should go directly to local offices, and flexible funding should let election administrators decide what their office needs most.

In early September 2021, 14 Secretaries of State from across the country issued a letter renewing their request for Congress to allocate $20 billion in funding to local and state election administrators for secure election infrastructure over the next 10 years. The letters come after Congress declined to allocate funding for local and state election officials in the budget resolution, and as threats against election workers continue to increase.

CTCL will continue to make the case for predictable government funding through the Election Infrastructure Initiative. We’re committed to securing adequate support for election administration in every jurisdiction across the country, whether it’s a rural township with 600 voters or a city with 6 million.