A conservative activist group has filed a complaint with the IRS asking the agency to deny personal tax exemptions for Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, arising from the couple’s funding of grant programs to help municipalities pay for the 2020 general election.
In a second complaint, the Center for Renewing America (CRA) requested the removal of tax exemptions for three Zuckerberg-supported nonprofits: the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and the National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI).
The complaints allege that the Zuckerbergs and the three organizations pumped almost $500 million into the 2020 election process in an effort to influence the outcome in favor of candidate Joe Biden and other Democrats.
CTCL alone distributed nearly $350 million in grants to local election departments with a stated mission of helping them conduct safe elections during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
CTCL brushed off similar allegations from conservative groups in December 2021 as “disinformation,” stating in its final report on the 2020 COVID-19 response grant program that “partisan considerations played no role in the availability or awarding of funding.”
The report states that nearly 2,500 election departments spread over 49 states received grants ranging from $5,000 to $19 million.
For years, conservatives have accused the Zuckerbergs and the three organizations of directing millions of dollars in grant funding to Democrat-leaning localities.
They allege that most of the money was spent on voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in the large cities of several swing states instead of on public health.
Statistics published by CTCL show that the city of Detroit, a Democrat stronghold, received more than $3.5 million in grant money in the runup to the 2020 presidential election, while most Republican-dominated jurisdictions received $5,000 grants or nothing at all.
Data from CTCL’s report demonstrates that in Michigan, the top nine Democrat strongholds of Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Lansing, Saginaw, Ann Arbor, Muskegon, Kalamazoo, and Benton Harbor received a combined $6.4 million in CTCL grant funding, representing 86 percent of the $7.4 million in grants distributed in Michigan.
The CTCL report explained this and similar situations in other states by saying, “As their program needs changed during the pandemic, many larger urban areas, for example, required capital-intense investments to count a large volume of absentee and mail ballots in a short period of time.”
Zuckerberg couldn’t be reached for comment. Representatives for CTCL, CEIR, and NVAHI didn’t respond by press time to a request from The Epoch Times for comment.
