Opinion | Banning Zuckerbucks Isn’t About Trump

Louisiana is the latest state to restrict private funding for elections, after voters on Saturday backed a constitutional amendment, 73% to 27%. Grants to election administrators are often referred to as Zuckerbucks, after the millions that Facebook impresario Mark Zuckerberg poured into the pandemic voting of 2020. To Donald Trump, it was a case of election rigging.

But it’s unlikely that Mr. Zuckerberg’s money mattered to the outcome, and a new academic study circulating among election analysts argues exactly that. “While counties that favor Democrats were much more likely to apply for a grant, we find that the grants did not have a noticeable effect on the presidential election,” write Apoorva Lal and Daniel Thompson, the latter of whom is a political-science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.