WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - A nonprofit group, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), that granted millions of dollars to local election officials in battleground states under the pretense of ensuring safe and secure elections may have run afoul of both state laws and IRS rules.
A recently completed investigation by the Capital Research Center (CRC), a Washington-based group that investigates the integrity of nonprofits, showed that CTCL grants to local election officials in Georgia, rather than ensuring a safe election environment for all, actually heavily favored the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The CRC investigation is a follow-up to an earlier one that showed that the affiliations of CTCL’s founders and officers undermine the group's claim of non-partisanship – they are former Barack Obama proteges, or formerly aligned with left wing groups, or both.
The group had plenty of money on hand to influence the Georgia vote for President, and still does; it is involved in the run-offs in the two races for the U.S. Senate. Two months before the Nov. 3 general elections, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan dumped $250 million into CTCL’s bank account. A little over a month later, the pair contributed another $100 million to CTCL.
The trouble is that Georgia, as do many other states, limits or outright bans the use of private money in the administration of elections, and a proven bias in grant funding violates IRS rules that ban nonprofits (501 c3s) from supporting one political candidate over another.
“CTCL’s dealings with local government officials should receive thorough scrutiny from both the IRS and state officials,” Scott Walter, CRC president, told Legal Newsline. “The IRS’s legal line for nonprofits like CTCL when they fund voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts is unclear but can be violated.
"Likewise, state law on private actors funding government offices is complicated but can be violated. A presidential election is too important for the questions raised by CTCL not to be investigated, especially given the extraordinary correlation between where CTCL funded in Georgia and large shifts in voting patterns.”
CRC found that CTCL funded 21% of Trump counties vs. 55% of Biden counties. It also found that nine out of ten of CTCL’s largest known grants in Georgia (the group has been opaque about its grant funding) went to Biden counties.
And CTCL gave grants to nine of the 10 counties with the greatest Democratic shifts in their 2020 voting. Those nine grantees averaged a 13.7% shift blue-ward, and two of those counties (Cobb and Gwinnett) were in the four counties that delivered Biden the most votes.
In a lawsuit challenging the results of the Georgia elections, the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society said that the $6.3 million CTCL granted to the Fulton County (Atlanta) Board of Registration and Elections was illegal. The group argues that only the Georgia Secretary of State can lawfully accept non-taxpayer money for the purpose of conducting elections.
Moreover, the IRS rules restricting the political involvement of nonprofits makes it clear that “organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office….”
On November 20, Georgia certified that Biden won the state with 49.5% of the vote, compared to 49.3% for Trump.
CRC plans investigations into CTCL’s grants in Wisconsin, Michigan and other battleground states.