Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are donating US$300 million to voting efforts

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg attend the 2020 Breakthrough Prize Red Carpet at NASA Ames Research Center on November 03, 2019 in Mountain View, California. (Ian Tuttle/Getty Images/Breakthrough Prize)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating US$300 million toward enhancing access to voting in the United States.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life and The Center for Election & Innovation Research, organizations focused on improving the voting process, said in a statement Tuesday that the donation will "promote safe and reliable voting in states and localities during the COVID-19 pandemic."

"Many counties and states are strapped financially and working to determine how to staff and fund operations that will allow for ballots to be cast and counted in a timely way," Chan and Zuckerberg said in a statement. "These donations will help to provide local and state officials across the country with the resources, training and infrastructure necessary to ensure that every voter who intends to cast a ballot is able to, and ultimately, to preserve integrity of our elections."

Facebook has been criticized for failing to rein in misinformation about the election and voting on its platform. The company has also been pilloried for its policy of allowing politicians to run false ads. Zuckerberg has strenuously defended his company's stance and argued last fall that banning political ads would not be a good idea.

In May, President Donald Trump posted misleading information about mail-in voting on Facebook, and the social network said it planned to take no action on the posts. Twitter, by contrast, flagged several of Trump's tweets about mail-in voting as potentially misleading -- a first for the company.

"We don't believe that it's an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician's speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny," Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom and now a Facebook vice president, wrote in a blog post last year.

Trump's efforts to discredit mail-in voting is something Facebook is "particularly focused on," Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, told CNN.

For example, Facebook pledged to take new steps to clearly identify state-run media for users and to better protect the accounts of political candidates and officials as part of a broader effort to prevent its platform from being abused to interfere with the 2020 US elections.

In January, Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth wrote that the Trump campaign's use of Facebook's advertising tools were responsible for Trump's win in the 2016 presidential election. The company's political advertising platform, he added, "very well may lead to the same result" this year.

The donation

The Center for Tech and Civic Life will use the money to "re-grant funds to local election jurisdictions across the country to help ensure that they have the staffing, training, and equipment necessary" to ensure that voters can participate in the election in a "safe and timely way," according to the press release.

The Center for Election Innovation & Research will use the money to "assist state and local election officials to ensure elections are secure, voters have confidence in election outcomes, and democracy thrives as civic engagement grows," according to the press release.

"This donation will greatly assist election officials as they seek to inform voters about their voting options and any changes, educate them about how they can successfully ensure their ballot is received and counted, and bolster transparency and legitimacy," David Becker, executive director of The Center for Election Innovation & Research, said.

$250 million of the donation will go to The Center for Tech and Civic Life and $50 million of the donation will go to The Center for Election & Innovation Research.