Great Lakes Wire

A complaint to the IRS filed by watchdog group the Center for Renewing America in September alleges that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, unlawfully deducted millions in contributions to three nonprofits that granted to money to state and local election officials.

A second, related complaint charges that the nonprofits, the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), and the National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI) should lose their tax exempt status for engaging in partisan politics.

“The very genesis of the Zuckerbucks program…shows that it violates Section 501(c)(3) because it was designed to benefit the personal financial interests of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan by avoiding any adverse financial consequences of staying out of the 2020 election,” the complaint states. “Specifically, as noted above, the Zuckerbucks program was conceived to offset the supposed damage the couple did to American politics in 2016 by passively allowing Facebook to be used to elect a Republican President.”

Regarding the nonprofits granting the money, the complaint said: “CTCL, NVAHI, and CEIR all place themselves outside the Section 501(c)(3) exemption for educational purposes under the Service’s methodological test. Under Prong 1 of that test, vast sums of money were directed to ‘educating’ voters predominantly in Blue areas without any showing that predominantly Red areas did not need the same protective equipment against COVID or faced other needs such as for privately funded dropboxes and other vote-by-mail or at-home options (even assuming such methodologies were unambiguously good for democracy).”

An ongoing investigation by the Capital Research Center (CRC) shows that little of the Zuckerberg money actually funded safety measures while the bulk of it went for the purchase of drop boxes, and the promotion of mail ballots in Democratic areas as part of a larger get out-the-vote campaign.

“Nearly two years of our research shows that CTCL’s $350 million ‘Zuck Bucks’ scheme massively boosted Democratic turnout in cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta in the 2020 election over counties that voted for President Trump,” CRC’s Hayden Ludwig told Great Lakes Wire. “Selling Zuckerberg’s $350 million grant to CTCL as COVID-19 ‘relief grants’ was a smokescreen for an unprecedented takeover of America’s elections by one billionaire and his professional activist allies. It damaged our country’s credibility, risks foreign intervention in elections, and undermined public confidence in the republic.”

“All of this was done by a tax-exempt nonprofit supposedly engaged in charity, proof that the Left has weaponized America’s generous philanthropic sector for cynical, partisan gain,” he added.

CRC’s research also shows that on a per-capita basis, CTCL’s Zuck Bucks favored the Democratic cities of Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit over counties that supported Trump. In Pennsylvania, CTCL grants in Trump counties averaged $0.60 per capita compared with $2.85 in counties Joe Biden won. In Georgia, the comparison was $1.41 per capita in Trump counties versus $5.33 in Biden counties.

CEIR, CRC says, distributed its grants to secretaries of state to promote mail-in balloting and drop boxes. CRC exposed CEIR’s role in bankrolling in Maryland’s 2020 turnout; the state launched a taxpayer-funded registration effort in Baltimore and the Democratic counties ringing Washington, D.C.

The role of the National Vote at Home Institute in the 2020 elections is less clear.

In the report posted on the CRC website, Ludwig writes that “Vote at Home rocketed to prominence in early 2020 under the leadership of partisan operative Amber McReynolds when it became clear that COVID-19 provided a unique opportunity to effectively transform America’s election into a mail-in fiasco.”

“Unsurprisingly, the group was spawned with funding from the U.S. Postal Service union, which stands to gain from any effort to turn the nation’s mail-delivery service into the Democrats premier ballot-delivery machine.”

Beyond that, little is known about the group’s inner workings prompting the Center for Renewing America to also request that the IRS investigate Vote at Home’s connection to CTCL and CEIR and the Zuckerberg funding.

Since the 2020 elections, many states, and some counties, have restricted or outright banned election officials from receiving private funds. CRC is keeping a running tab on those bans.