The namesake of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy is in the news as he attempts to get back $2.5 million of donations he made to post-election investigations of voter fraud.

Dr. Fred Eshelman, founder of companies that invest in private health care and develop new drugs, filed a lawsuit in Texas last week against a group claiming to have investigated potential election fraud following President Donald Trump’s defeat.

True the Vote Inc. is a vote-monitoring organization based in Houston, Texas. In the filing, Eshelman says he reached out to the organization following the Election Day returns on November 3 and committed money on the condition of the donation being used to fund a vote-validation project. The North Carolina resident committed two separate donations of $2 million and $500,000 to go toward the efforts of True the Vote Inc. to “investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election.”

When True the Vote Inc. dropped its four lawsuits filed in battleground states the week after Election Day, Eshelman requested his money be returned due to the defendant’s “delays and inability to make progress on its stated goals meant that it would be unable to execute.” His lawsuit says he emailed the president of the organization numerous times with the request and received little response before threatening litigation.

Following the voluntary dismissal of its complaints, True the Vote wrote on its website that “barriers to advancing our arguments, coupled with constraints on time, made it necessary for us to pursue a different path.” Several federal and state officials said in the wake of the election, in which Democratic candidate Joe Biden defeated Trump, there was no evidence of irregularities in voting.

Eshelman gave $38 million to UNC in 2008 for advancing cancer research and new research projects, earning him the namesake of the School of Pharmacy. In 2014, he pledged $100 million to the school, which led to the creation of the Eshelman Institute for Innovation.

The filing in Eshelman v. True the Vote, Inc. in U.S. District Court can be found here.

Photo via UNC-Chapel Hill.

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