Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Facebook’s voter information center was planned as a nonpartisan push to register voters, but it ran into unexpected trouble from Republicans. A new report from BuzzFeed News reveals that six Republican secretaries of state contacted CEO Mark Zuckerberg in September to ask him to discontinue the project.
“While such goals may be laudable on their face, the reality is that the administration of elections is best left to the states,” read the letter, obtained by Common Cause through a public records request. “The Voting Information Center is redundant and duplicative of what we, as chief election officials, have been doing for decades.”
The letter was sent directly to Zuckerberg from the secretaries of state of Alabama, Idaho, Kentucky,…