engelbrecht true vote bak

this is main 2 primary 5 24 tArget poll officials rnc civil society

7 22 bak

see main

merri ok

see voter fraud/suppression

see GOP STEAL ELECTION GEORGIA

SEE QANON GREG PHILLIPS FEMA 2000 MULES

SEE KONNECH VOTE MACH DEATH THREat jail

SEE CLETA BOPP

see big lie

see election integrity BS cleta

SEE NEW BLACK PANTHERS

rww Tags: Catherine Engelbrecht

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i thot no left , asymmetry but we have stacey abrams org to stop vote suppress, but TTV is std part of RWI to re-deploy every 4 yrs? TP origin?

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RWW

• David Gilbert @ Wired: Waffle House Teleporter Gregg Phillips Is Still on the Trump Administration’s Payroll

In June, a FEMA official infamous for claiming to have teleported to a Waffle House was reportedly ousted. He’s still employed by the government, though—and meeting with a Trump fixer.

Gregg Phillips, an election denier who once claimed he teleported to a Waffle House, says he is still working in the Trump administration, after he was reportedly removed from his influential role overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency response efforts in June.

While it remains unclear what Phillips has been working on in the administration since stepping away as head of the Office of Response and Recovery, on Sunday he wrote on Truth Social, “I have been in the admin since last year. I’ll be leaving soon to rejoin the fight.”

One day later, he was pictured at a Department of Justice building alongside Ed Martin, the former US pardon attorney who President Donald Trump last week announced would be departing the administration to “fight legal battles for the upcoming midterm election.”

WIRED's Walking Tour of President Trump’s Renovated Washington, DC

“Enjoyed the visit with our friend Ed Martin today in DC,” Phillips wrote on Truth Social. “Haters are gonna hate this.”

Martin and the Department of Justice did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment about Phillips’ role in the administration. Phillips declined to comment.

A FEMA spokesperson directed WIRED to a statement it issued in June saying Phillips was “taking leave for personal reasons.” When asked if Phillips was still employed by the agency and still on leave, the agency didn’t respond.

Phillips is on administrative leave, according to the White House, which also confirmed that Martin is still working in the administration until September 4. Federal employees on administrative leave are entitled to full pay and benefits.

Phillips has long promoted baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud, claiming in 2016 that more than 3 million noncitizens voted in the presidential election, robbing Trump of winning the popular vote. Days after taking office in 2017, Trump promoted Phillips’ false claims. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Phillips gained further notoriety when the group he was involved with, True the Vote, provided the data that underpinned the debunked film 2000 Mules, which falsely alleged that a network of individuals was paid to illegally collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes.

A 2022 investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that True the Vote has raised millions of dollars from donors by repeatedly promising to uncover evidence of election fraud but has failed to do so. Much of that money, CIR reported, went to companies controlled by Phillips and in loans to True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht.

Phillips was appointed last December to head up FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery despite having no past experience working in emergency response. In June, following his departure, the agency thanked Phillips for his “service, dedication, and leadership,” adding that “he has played a pivotal role in stabilizing the Office of Response and Recovery and advancing key reforms to strengthen our mission delivery.”

Three sources at FEMA, who were granted anonymity due to fears of recrimination by the administration, tell WIRED that Phillips has not been seen at FEMA’s headquarters since June.

When Phillips posted on Truth Social this week about his decision to “rejoin the fight” he was once again discussing “illegals on the voter rolls” and the work he and Engelbrecht had done almost a decade ago to address the perceived issue—which is so rare that even a third-party analysis of a database maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation shows it contains fewer than 100 examples. When asked if Phillips’ comment meant he would be working with True the Vote again, Engelbrecht said, “I’m sure Gregg will be involved in a number of projects in the future, and we at TTV think very highly of him, but in an effort to set the record straight, he is not part of the True the Vote team. He previously assisted TTV as a contractor on research projects from 2020–2023.”

When asked about Phillips’ role as a board member of True the Vote, as revealed by the CIR report, Engelbrecht did not respond.

WIRED recently revealed that ahead of the midterms, True the Vote will release another documentary, entitled Trapped, which again makes allegations about widespread and systemic voter fraud.

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7 16 26 big speech

englebrecht mtg wh

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'My cyber guys looked at it': Mike Lindell won't quit conspiracy theory after Trump boost

WIKI

True the Vote

An investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Phillips and the Texas-based nonprofit organization True the Vote engaged in questionable transactions that involving more than $1 million sent to its founders, and a longtime romantic affair between the founder Catherine Engelbrecht and Phillips.^[47][19]

On August 17, 2012, True the Vote sent $5,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which is illegal because a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit may not contribute to any political party or candidates.^[48]

In 2014, True the Vote paid $25,000 to American Solutions for Winning the Future for a “donor list rental.”^[49][50] Phillips was the director of American Solutions for Winning the Future.^[49][51][52]

In 2015, True the Vote gave $30,000 to a company called Define Idea Inc. for “IT support services.”^[49][53] Phillips was also a director of Define Idea Inc.^[49][54]

True the Vote gave a retainer of half a million dollars to James Bopp’s law firm to lead the prosecution of cases related to 2020 election fraud claims, however, Bopp only filed four of seven lawsuits committed to Fred Eshelman in exchange for his $2.5 million donation. Then, less than a week after filing, they voluntarily dismissed the suits claiming that they were saving the client money; Bopp kept the money and True the Vote kept the remaining $2 million.^[55]

Of the $2 million left over from Eshelman's donation, $750,000 went to OPSEC Group LLC, a new company created by Phillips and based out of Alabama, purportedly to do voter analysis.^[47][56] The contract with OPSEC did not appear to be disclosed in the 2020 tax return True The Vote provided to Reveal.^[47][57] Specifically, on November 9, 2020, OPSEC Group submitted a bill for $350,000 to True the Vote for “Validate the Vote”, and again billed another $700,000 on December 7 for a project called Eyes on Georgia, according to court records.^[47]

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MMA

On far-right US podcasts, South Koreans push baseless claims of election fraud

Claims of election fraud were a key reason for South Korea’s then-president to declare martial law in December

Written by Alex Kaplan

Published 06/02/25

Far-right podcasters and streamers in the United States have hosted right-wing South Korean figures to share baseless claims that the country’s recent elections were overwhelmed by fraud.

The appearances have come since South Korea’s then-president briefly declared martial law in December, citing supposed election fraud as one of the justifications for the move.

• On December 3, 2024, then-South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced that he was imposing martial law, deploying troops to the country’s election commission and accusing his opposition of “trying to overthrow the free democracy.” South Korean officials have since rebutted claims of election fraud, and Yoon has been impeached and removed from office, but South Korean right-wing YouTubers are reportedly helping fuel the claims. Some South Korean supporters of Yoon have invoked phrases used in the United States in support of President Donald Trump, including “Stop the Steal,” the slogan used to push false claims of election fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Media Matters has found that far-right media figures in the United States, including some who pushed U.S. election misinformation, have hosted right-wing South Korean personalities to push false claims about the country’s elections and justifications for Yoon’s use of martial law.

• ## Catherine Engelbrecht and South Korean graduate student falsely claimed the US and South Korea elections were stolen

• On December 9, 2024, days after the martial law declaration, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the right-wing organization True the Vote — known for pushing election denial — hosted a South Korean graduate student named Yechan Bae on her podcast.

During the appearance, Engelbrecht said Yechan had seen “many similarities in what was happening in South Korea and in the United States relative to the elections,” adding that “their elections run on the same cycle.”

Before introducing Yechan, Engelbrecht called South Korea’s elections “chapter and verse of what happened here in 2020,” and said that “people didn’t appreciate … that martial law was declared to sequester the corrupt congress and to seize property at their election commission.”

Yechan claimed that the “same enemy rigged our — stole our elections in South Korea and the United States too.”

He also said he thinks Yoon declared martial law because “the whole legal system in this country is totally corrupted” and it “denied the election was fraud,” adding, “He didn’t try to get rid of democracy in this country.”

In response, Engelbrecht suggested that Yoon’s declaration of martial law was part of his “efforts to establish the election integrity necessary” and “the goal was to try and see for themselves what had really transpired in previous elections.”

Video

Citation

From the December 9, 2024, edition of True the Vote's Onward, streamed on Locals

• ## On Headmaster’s Homeroom, South Korean Alfred Kim said his “election integrity” group is “similar to” the Proud Boys

• In May, after Yoon was removed from office, Kim Jeong-hyun (who goes by Alfred Kim in his American appearances) appeared on the right-wing Rumble podcast Headmaster’s Homeroom. On-screen text identified him as the “founder of White Skull Squad,” which Agence France-Presse has described as a “far-right youth group” whose name is a reference to “a unit that cracked down on pro-democracy protesters in the 1980s and 1990s.”

During the appearance, Kim said his organization is “similar to” the violent American far-right extremist group the Proud Boys and “stood up for election integrity.”

“There has to be some case, right, that authorities … make it clear that there was a fraud election, right?” he said. “But that never happened in South Korea. So my question is, so what … do we do? Like, what do we do when the higher hierarchy, like, high-rank authority, becomes corrupted?”

He also compared the situation in South Korea to “the January 6 when, you know, the fraud election cartel still, you know, stole the election, and Trump just has to, you know, step down” because “RINOs … turned out to be a betrayer.”

Video

Citation

From the May 17, 2025, edition of Headmaster's Homeroom, streamed on Rumble

• The host, who goes by “Lady Hamilton,” said Kim’s story of election fraud and “hacking” “sounds familiar” and that it’s “not the first time we've heard stories about election fraud and trying to be able to choose our president.”

“That just alarms me,” she said. “I mean, how did the people react? I mean, I guess you don’t have a choice, but that’s going to awaken a lot of people when you put down something like martial law.”

• ## On a Proud Boys-affiliated podcast, Kim urged Trump to investigate Korea’s election commission

• Days later, Kim went on a Proud Boys-affiliated podcast and pushed the same claims. He told host Barry Ramey and network co-founder Enrique Tarrio, the group's former chairman, that “we have to forbid this election machine, electronic machine, worldwide. We have to stop it, and I believe Donald J. Trump can do it, right away,” urging the Trump administration to investigate Korea’s election commission.

He added that it “is so crucial that, you know, President Trump and MAGA patriots are on our side.” He also said that he is planning to “establish White Skull Squad in the states.”

Video

Citation

From the May 21, 2025, edition of The American Rising, streamed on Rumble

• Ramey and Tarrio appeared to express sympathy for Kim. Ramey told him that he was “extremely brave and courageous” and noted that he “tried to spearhead the people understanding that there was some fraud in the election” in South Korea, and Tarrio said that “it is pretty insightful here talking to you that, you know, this … is a global problem.”

//

1. ### How True the Vote cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers to target an election software company and serve as a pipeline to law enforcement

09/15/22 2:04 PM EDT

2. ### As Proud Boys are convicted for seditious conspiracy, right-wing media rush to defend them and downplay January 6

05/09/23 11:44 AM EDT

3. ### On Infowars, newly freed Enrique Tarrio calls for retribution: “The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars."

01/21/25

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RSS

Election denial groups and right-wing media figures are talking about their election interference plans as voting begins

Election denial groups have publicly talked about their plans to challenge voter rolls, monitor ballot drop boxes, and recruit and train poll workers to be a “spy in the camp” on Election Day

Written by Payton Armstrong

Research contributions from Media Matters Staff

Published 10/31/24

Election denial groups and some right-wing media figures have been discussing their plans to interfere in the 2024 voting process, building on previous efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and interfere with the 2022 midterm election.

Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, election denial groups and right-wing media figures have discussed their plans to challenge citizens’ right to vote, vowed to monitor drop boxes, claimed to be recruiting and training poll workers, launched apps to track supposed fraud on Election Day, and encouraged activists to monitor for noncitizen voting.

In the 2022 midterm elections, right-wing media supported election denial groups recruiting poll workers and poll watchers and asking for volunteers to monitor ballot drop boxes. These efforts had seemingly grown out of conspiracy theories from former President Donald Trump and right-wing media that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud and had been stolen, culminating in a violent attempt to overturn the election by storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

As voting begins for the 2024 election, “election officials across the country are ramping up their security measures at polling places,” as reported by NBC News, including “beefing up law enforcement presence to donning bulletproof vests to deploying drones for surveillance amid an increasingly hostile environment.”

Right-wing groups and media figures are encouraging challenges to voter rolls, including asking supporters to flag “suspicious voter[s]” with “Hispanic-sounding last names”

• • Election denial group True the Vote has urged followers to submit voter-eligibility complaints by using an app, resulting in thousands of challenges to voter registrations.True the Vote is run by Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips, who regularly promote the group’s activities in right-wing media. CNN reported: “One of the main drivers of the fruitless challenges is a conservative Texas-based nonprofit group called True the Vote, an election-monitoring organization that has long peddled debunked voter-fraud theories. The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has called on followers to help clean voter rolls by using an app called IV3 that enables users to research voter data and submit voter-eligibility challenges to local election offices.” CNN, [7/29/24; Media Matters, 1/26/23]

• • Cleta Mitchell — who leads the Election Integrity Network and has appeared frequently in right-wing media to promote the group and its activities, and fearmonger about noncitizen voting — was reportedly involved in helping the development of EagleAI for mass voter challenges in various states.As reported by Documented, “Eagle AI draws from public data sources like voter files and newspaper obituaries to build a dashboard for activists to conduct their own ‘list maintenance’ and generate potentially thousands of challenges to voter eligibility with a few clicks.” Documented, [8/17/23; Media Matters, 6/14/24, 10/2/24]

• • Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, a coalition of election-denying activists, has reportedly been recruiting people at the state level to “target the registrations of potentially left-leaning voters.”The New Republic reported that the coalition “recruits activists at the state level and trains them to target the registrations of potentially left-leaning voters in an effort to tilt the balance of the electorate toward conservative-leaning voters.” The New Republic, [10/16/24]

• • In the last several months, the Ohio chapter of Election Integrity Network has reportedly “mounted a statewide effort to kick thousands of registered voters off the rolls in the runup to the 2024 election.”According to local reporting, at least 13 counties “have received thousands of voter registration challenges, the vast majority of which have been rejected” and that “most of those challenges, the officials say, come from locals identifying themselves as members of the Election Integrity Network.” Cleveland.com, [9/25/24]

• • On CBS News, the head of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network encouraged people to flag “Hispanic-sounding last names” for potential voter roll challenges. In an interview with the network, James Womack, head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, discussed creating a “list of suspicious voters” who may be on the voter rolls in North Carolina. CBS also aired a clip of a video in which Womack also said, “If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered and they’re missing information … and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they've got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter.” Media Matters, [10/22/24; CBS News, 10/21/24]

• • On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, the founder of Fight Voter Fraud, Linda Szynkowicz, offered the MAGA audience voter data for mass eligibility challenges in Georgia. “Go to our website, download the request data so you can have a list of people in your county that we believe should not be voting in your county, and you can actually hang on to those,” she said, adding, “Do your due diligence. We’ll even teach you how to do it.” Media Matters, [10/7/24]

• ## Right-wing groups and media figures have been recruiting and training poll workers and observers

• • Election Integrity Network claims to have recruited tens of thousands of “election integrity patriots” and holds regular online coordinating calls. The Guardian, [10/21/24]

• • Right-wing group Judicial Watch announced that “as part of its ongoing election integrity efforts, its trained observers will monitor polling sites in Wisconsin on November 5.”Judicial Watch President and podcast host Tom Fitton was quoted in the press release saying, “Judicial Watch’s teams will monitor the election in Wisconsin to expose and deter any fraud.” Per Democracy Docket, Judicial Watch is “a right-wing legal group that’s constantly filing all manner of litigation against the government — Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, challenges to immigration policy, attempts to thwart environmental actions and any other issue that riles up Republicans. ‘Judicial Watch’s strategy is simple: Carpet-bomb the federal courts with Freedom of Information Act lawsuits,’ the New York Times wrote of the organization in a 2016 profile.” Judicial Watch, [10/22/24; Democracy Docket, 6/11/24]

* Tea Party Patriots, which sponsored Trump’s January 6 rally, is apparently doing “poll watcher trainings specifically in Georgia” in collaboration with Election Integrity Network.On *War Room*, election denial figure and Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin claimed her group is also partnering with Turning Point Action and America First Works on door knocking efforts. Martin also described the groups’ efforts in Georgia in a separate interview, saying they are “making sure that poll watchers are recruited and trained.” Media Matters, [9/9/24, 1/30/24]

• • Right-wing group VoterGA — co-founded by Garland Favorito, who has fundraised for his election denial organization during appearances on a far-right show — collaborated with the Election Integrity Network on poll-watcher training.CNN reported that “VoterGA, a nonprofit led by a computer consultant-turned-activist named Garland Favorito who has a long history of promoting debunked conspiracy theories, has made inroads with some election officials.” In a phone interview with CNN, “Favorito argued that he and his group are fighting for election integrity and that some state and local officials have sought to cover-up elections malfeasance in Georgia. As an example, he cited his inability to review ballots from the 2020 election,” ignoring that state law requires for the ballots to be sealed after the elections. CNN, [10/9/24; Media Matters, 6/14/23]

• • On the Christian nationalist program FlashPoint, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump recruited poll watchers and promoted the RNC’s new “election integrity division” to “ensure that there is no funny business” in the election.During the appearance, Trump said that the RNC is working to stop “3:00 a.m. dumps” and “ballots in suitcases that miraculously appear places,” and she called on the audience to “volunteer to be part of our team, ballot harvest with us where it's legal, you know, be a poll watcher, be a poll worker.” Media Matters, [5/30/24]

• • Christian nationalist “prophet” and podcast host Lance Wallnau has been traveling the country on his “Courage Tour” recruiting conservative Christians as poll workers to be a “spy in the camp” on Election Day.During Wallnau’s tour — which recently got a boost from Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) — attendees were directed to a group called Lion of Judah, which ProPublica reported “offers a free course titled ‘Fight the Fraud,’ with modules detailing poll workers’ basic duties and helping people find their local elections offices so they can apply as well as email templates to streamline the process.” Notably, Wallnau has already declared that “there will be cheating” in the 2024 election. ProPublica, [10/16/24; Media Matters, 9/27/24]

• • A Turning Point Action member used QAnon supporter Melody Jennings’ podcast to recruit poll workers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.The member, Brett Galaszewski, urged Jennings’ audience to become poll workers and get involved with the Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Republican Party’s “Election Integrity Committee.” Jennings is an election denier who participated in election denial efforts during the 2022 elections by coordinating attempts to intimidate voters at ballot drop boxes. Jennings even took credit for armed men who staked out drop boxes in Arizona. Media Matters, [11/15/23; The New York Times, 11/1/22]

• • Right-wing “Stop the Steal” activist Scott Presler, who has previously pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, called on Donald Trump Jr.'s Rumble podcast audience to become poll workers and to investigate county voter rolls in Pennsylvania.Media Matters, [9/5/24, 1/30/23]

• ## True the Vote is planning to monitor ballot drop boxes for supposed fraud, including partnering with Steven Crowder and “working with sheriffs”

• • True the Vote claims to be planning to monitor ballot drop boxes in Michigan and Wisconsin with “24/7 streaming video” that will be “available for anyone.” On War Room, founder Catherine Engelbrecht declared, “This cycle, we do intend to have eyes on those drop boxes with surveillance footage.” Media Matters, [9/5/24]

• • True the Vote also claims it “is reaching out to sheriffs across the country” to monitor ballot drop boxes.In different media interviews, Engelbrecht claimed to be working with “three very influential sheriffs” in Wisconsin and said the organization is offering local sheriffs “camera equipment” to monitor drop boxes and, in exchange, the public can livestream the footage to “see for themselves what’s happening.” Media Matters, [8/6/24]

• • YouTuber Steven Crowder is apparently “partnering” with True the Vote for “the scoop” from the group’s drop box monitoring.True the Vote claims it has been “setting up teams and schedules for drop boxes” to monitor “with a little handheld camera” in multiple states and says Crowder is “opening up” the organization’s efforts “to a whole new crowd.” Media Matters, [10/19/24]

• ## Right-wing groups have launched apps, hotlines, and websites for people to report supposed voter fraud and issues at the polls on Election Day

• • True the Vote launched a new app for users “to quickly report problems at the polls” and “document and report instances of suspected election fraud” to funnel to local law enforcement.True the Vote claims to be “working with sheriffs” in Wisconsin and plans to funnel reports of supposed “problems at the polls” from users of its new app. Media Matters, [9/12/24, 9/20/24, 8/6/24]

• • Election denial group The America Project launched an app “for people to hop on and report different things that they see that they know are illegal,” as described by the group’s Director of Rights & Freedoms, Amanda Freytes.The America Project was founded by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who following the 2020 election, became one of the country’s biggest election denial funders. Twitter/X, [10/5/24; Media Matters, 1/26/23]

• • Right-wing group United Sovereign Americans launched a new “election complaint” webpage, where people can submit supposed voter fraud to authorities.Founder Marly Hornik has promoted the webpage on War Room. CNN, [10/23/24; Democracy Docket, 5/29/24]

• • Judicial Watch announced it “will run an Internet hotline for voters in all states to report suspicions of election and voter fraud.”The hotline’s poster asks people to send Judicial Watch a detailed email “if you witness any suspicious activity at your polling place, have issues with your voting machine, or witness voter fraud or intimidation.” Judicial Watch, accessed [10/23/24, 10/23/24]

* YouTuber Steven Crowder touted a plan to have “boots on the ground” on Election Day because “this already is election theft,” saying there will be a “live electoral integrity map” where his audience can “see any shenanigans going on” in real time.Crowder claimed there will be “investigative journalism units and team leaders, managers in every major swing city.” Crowder also said that he would be “partnering” with True the Vote for “Election Night,” and claimed that they “will have tens of thousands of volunteers” combined “watching hundreds of key polling locations and ballot drop boxes around the country.” Media Matters, [9/23/24; Truth Social, 10/28/24]

• ## Right-wing figures are also encouraging people to monitor for noncitizens voting, or registering to vote

• • During a so-called election integrity call, election denier Cleta Mitchell called on MAGA activists to watch their local Department of Motor Vehicles for noncitizen voter registration and distribute her group’s materials on the ground.Mitchell said: “There are things you can do in your local communities. Watching at your DMVs, watching - going to your election board, asking your local election officials what are you doing to ensure that noncitizen are not getting registered to vote and getting — we've got sample resolutions. We've got signs, you can download and leaflets you could hand out.” Media Matters, [10/8/24]

• • On a Rumble live stream, Election Integrity Network leader Kerry Toloczko said that “we don't want noncitizen voting,” and she offered materials for right-wing activists who are planning to monitor for noncitizen voting at the local level.Toloczko, who has also appeared on Newsmax to push baseless claims of noncitizen voting, said that their activists are “everywhere” trying to “suppress the people who are trying to vote unlawfully,” asserting, “We have activists, grassroots activists, so we're handing these [signs] out in churches, in parking lots, in voting centers.” Media Matters, [10/17/24, 10/18/24]

• • Wisconsin-based talk radio host Vicki McKenna urged her listeners to go to polling locations and “stand with very large signs that say in Spanish, ‘Noncitizens are not permitted to vote in the state of Wisconsin.’” McKenna warned of noncitizens voting and complained that “they don’t want you in the field. They don’t want you participating. They don’t want you observing elections.” 1310 WIBA,*The Vicki McKenna Show*, [10/18/24]

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MMA 9 24

1. ### On a Rumble show, True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips describes his new PAC, its “sophisticated data system,” and the “fun election integrity-related things” it's going to do

09/20/24

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mma 9 24

Election denial organization True the Vote says it is “working with sheriffs” and plans to funnel them reports of supposed “problems at the polls” from users of its new app

09/12/24

Election denial organization True the Vote says it is “working with sheriffs” and plans to funnel them reports of supposed “problems at the polls” from users of its new app

During recent media interviews, True the Vote's founder claimed the group is trying to work with sheriffs to monitor ballot drop boxes during the 2024 election

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 09/12/24

Election denial organization True the Vote has launched a new app ahead of the 2024 election for users “to quickly report problems at the polls" and “document and report instances of suspected election fraud.” Wired's David Gilbert described the app as a “one-stop shop for all your election conspiracy needs, featuring a scrollable feed of the latest voting-related alerts, the ability to report your own claims, and even, apparently, a 24/7 hotline.”

During a September 12 stream on social media, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht claimed that users can “put in a problem” into the app, and “if it is something that's going down at the polls” then True the Vote might “contact the county and let them know,” or “engage law enforcement,” including sheriffs they are apparently “working with.”

Engelbrecht has also said during recent media appearances that True the Vote is aiming to work with sheriffs during the 2024 election to monitor ballot drop boxes, with the group apparently reaching out to sheriffs to try to give them “camera equipment” — which sheriffs can use for such monitoring and True the Vote can also use for “24/7 streaming video … for anyone who wants to see it.”

As Media Matters previously explained:

True the Vote was founded in 2009 — following the election of former President Barack Obama — by then-tea party activist Catherine Engelbrecht with the goal of pushing for voter ID laws and purging voter rolls. Engelbrecht, whom “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander has called “the godmother of the election integrity movement,” and her business partner, Gregg Phillips, a Republican operative and former Mississippi official, have repeatedly pushed false election-related claims since at least 2016. Phillips claimed without evidence that millions of illegal votes had been cast in the 2016 presidential election, and both Engelbrecht and Phillips were listed as executive producers for and starred in 2000 Mules, a widely debunked 2022 film that claims to show evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

You can read more about how True the Vote has cultivated relationships with supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory here.

Video

CitationFrom a September 12, 2024, stream on Locals

CATHERINE ENGELBRECHT (TRUE THE VOTE FOUNDER): VoteAlert is specifically for election-related matters. So once we start, you know, gaining momentum, which is going to be here in just the next few weeks, things are gonna just tick up, up, up, up, up, we will start doing daily reports. And with those daily reports, we will tell you the lay of the land inside of VoteAlert, what we're seeing, what we're hearing, how many things have come in, from where, the types of issues. This is — again, just an added layer of intentional, being very intentional about creating transparency around the process so that if there are problems, we can deal with them decisively and quickly.

Let's talk about that for a second. What does it mean when you put in a problem? What do we do on the other side other than just read it and say, you know, “Yes or no?” If it's a question that we can answer, we're going to answer it. If it's a question that needs resolution and we can't answer it, we will tell you where to go, or we will reach out on your behalf and try to get that answer for you. If it is something that's going down at the polls, where there are problems at the polls at that moment, we will, depending upon the circumstance, contact the county and let them know of reports that we are receiving. If it has, if it's a few steps further out than that and we need to engage law enforcement, we are working with sheriffs who will be able — and not nationwide, but regionally, to take a look and help with the dispatch on those.

It is not a perfect process, but it is a very intentional circuitry behind the scenes of making sure that things that don't — that are reported just don't get reported into the wind, but that they are going towards resolution and the follow-up. So that, again, it's just — it's the goal here is to have a community of, you know, problem, solution, confidence building.

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mma 9 24

election denier group True the Vote is planning to monitor ballot drop boxes with “24/7 streaming video” that will be “available for anyone”

Founder Catherine Engelbrecht: “This cycle, we do intend to have eyes on those drop boxes with surveillance footage”

Written by Alex Kaplan

Published 09/05/24

On Steve Bannon’s War Room, Catherine Engelbrecht — founder of the election denial organization True the Vote — claimed that the organization “intend[s]” to have “surveillance footage” for monitoring ballot drop boxes in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, making it “available for anyone who wants to see it 24/7.”

Back in 2022, Engelbrecht and True the Vote claimed that drop boxes were used for fraud in the 2020 presidential election in their debunked film 2000 Mules, which was created with Dinesh D’Souza and distributed by Salem Media. Salem later apologized for and retracted the film after settling a lawsuit a Georgia voter filed against the company, True the Vote, and D’Souza.

True the Vote has pushed election conspiracy theories for years, even partnering with QAnon figures to target an election software company.

In July, Engelbrecht seemingly revealed that True the Vote is aiming to monitor drop boxes during the 2024 election, claiming during media appearances that the group was reaching out to sheriffs to do so, including giving them “camera equipment.”

Then, during the September 4 episode of War Room, Engelbrecht reiterated the apparent plans to monitor drop boxes this election cycle, while emphasizing that her organization is aiming to provide “24/7 streaming video … for anyone who wants to see it.”

She also credited the organization’s “work that ultimately led to 2000 Mules” for revealing that “drop boxes were not being monitored, even though states like Wisconsin, like Michigan assured their population that they were.”

Video file

Video

CitationFrom the September 4, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

PETER NAVARRO (GUEST HOST): Drop boxes, let’s face it. They’re the Achilles' heel of the whole election system right now. And a lot of that — your 2000 Mules kind of, I think, proved that. What are you doing, as an organization, to police those drop boxes? How can the posse help?

CATHERINE ENGELBRECHT (TRUE THE VOTE FOUNDER): Well, what we learned out of all of our work that ultimately led to 2000 Mules was that those drop boxes were not being monitored, even though states like Wisconsin, like Michigan assured their population that they were absolutely being monitored with surveillance cameras. That was not true.

And so, this cycle, we do intend to have eyes on those drop boxes with surveillance footage. And if everything goes as we hope, what you can expect from us is to see 24/7 streaming video with the support of people and procedures that will give us eyes on those drop boxes. And I don’t wanna go too much further into it except to say that there is a plan, and the goal is to make that video available for anyone who wants to see it 24/7.

And we’re very, very encouraged about that. Not only because it's going to give people an opportunity to see for themselves, but it will also have a deterrent effect to the bad actors that intended to exploit drop boxes thinking that they weren’t going to be called out. They definitely will be.

Related

Election denial organization True the Vote says it “is reaching out to sheriffs across the country” to monitor ballot drop boxes

08/06/24 2:02 PM EDT

2. ### How True the Vote cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers to target an election software company and serve as a pipeline to law enforcement

09/15/22 2:04 PM EDT

3. ### Salem Media retracts Dinesh D’Souza’s bogus voter fraud film 2000 Mules after two years of right-wing media circulation

06/05/24

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January 6 supporters champion Georgia State Election Board rule changes

The same crowd of right-wing pundits who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results are now meddling with Georgia’s certification procedures to potentially deny Democrats a win in 2024

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Payton Armstrong

Published 09/05/24 mma

Several right-wing media figures tied to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have supported changes to Georgia’s election certification process that could be used to question or deny the state’s vote totals this November.

These figures include Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin; Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, an election denialist group; mother-daughter “Stop the Steal” activists Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer (the former is also a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots); and former Trump adviser and attorney Cleta Mitchell, founder of the Election Integrity Network.

Notably, Mitchell is also a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which — along with Tea Party Patriots — is one of the more than 100 organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling effort to provide a second Trump administration with policy and staffing proposals. Project 2025 is also run through with election deniers.

Several of the outside groups pushing the changes appear to hold at least some real power in Georgia as well. In May, Fulton County election board member Julie Adams — who is reportedly affiliated with the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network — refused to certify the primary election results. ProPublica further reported that a former board member brought one of the new rule changes forward at the “behest” of Adams, a “regional leader” in the Election Integrity Network who joined the Fulton County election board in February.

Adams isn’t the only new, hard-right election official. In May, the Georgia House speaker appointed Janelle King, a right-wing media personality, to the State Election Board, where she has supported the August rule changes. King has a history of spreading election denial conspiracy theories; in March 2021, she wrote on Facebook that “Republicans produce real proof of voter irregularities and fraud in some cases; stuff like, voting twice, voting from another state, stuff like that to name a few.”

The Georgia State Election Board’s hard-right turn

In early August, the Georgia State Election Board made changes to its certification process that would “require county election officials to make a ‘reasonable inquiry’ before certifying election results to the state,” as reported by The Associated Press. Voting rights advocates worry that the vagueness of the new rule will provide a pretext to delay or deny potential Democratic wins in November.

Later that month, the board made an additional change providing county election officials with the authority to access “all election-related documentation” and resolve any discrepancies prior to certification — another potential avenue to sow doubt and confusion about vote totals. State Democrats have since brought a lawsuit challenging the board’s new rules.

At a rally in Atlanta on August 3, Trump praised the Republican members of the State Election Board by name, including King, calling them “three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” Trump’s comments appear to signal that the board’s changes could be a crucial part of his strategy to undermine confidence in the vote totals if the Republican nominee loses the state in November.

Jenny Beth Martin and Tea Party Patriots

Martin is a significant figure in the election denial movement. Her organization, Tea Party Patriots, sponsored a Trump rally in D.C. ahead of the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, and Martin herself was outside the Capitol that day. According to Talking Points Memo, Martin “helped connect the political, legal, and activist elements of the push to keep Trump in power” and even communicated with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff and an instrumental figure in the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Meadows faces charges in Arizona and Georgia for his role in Trump's scheme, and he is also a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

On August 10, Martin appeared on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's War Room podcast to celebrate the Georgia State Election Board’s rule changes.

“They are clarifying what certification means, which is very important, especially if you are on an election board and you have questions and don’t quite know that — don’t think what you’re certifying is actually the final vote,” Martin said. “They need to get it right before certification.”

Video

CitationFrom the August 10, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Martin returned to War Room on August 27 to further praise the state board’s new policies and baselessly sow doubt about recent election results.

“These are not strange, draconian, hard things to enact,” Martin said. “Why doesn’t the left want these common sense changes to happen? That’s the real question.”

She later added: “We need to have elections we can have faith and trust in, and that’s what these board members are trying to accomplish.”

Video

CitationFrom the August 27, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Martin also hosts a podcast, The Jenny Beth Show, where she recently interviewed Salleigh Grubbs, the head of the Cobb County Republican Party. Grubbs gained some notoriety in right-wing media circles in 2020 after “following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence,” according to ProPublica. She later attended Trump’s January 6 event, and would continue to spread conspiracy theories about “irregularities in the election,” as reported in The Washington Post.

During the September 4 interview, Martin and Grubbs discussed the new Georgia rules. State and county election officials “are there to be a check and balance,” Martin said.

“That’s right,” Grubbs responded.

Martin added, “This is just another place to make sure that you’ve got another set of eyes and that you’re checking that everything really is what the report says it is.”

Catherine Engelbrecht and True the Vote

Martin was joined on War Room’s August 27 episode by Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote and another prominent election denialist. Engelbrecht and her business partner, Gregg Phillips, served as primary sources for 2000 Mules, a discredited conspiracy theory film from Dinesh D’Souza that falsely claimed there had been mass voter fraud in the 2020 election. In addition to participating in the film, True the Vote challenged Georgia’s 2020 election results, claiming it had obtained evidence of a mass ballot stuffing operation. When a judge later asked for the evidence, the group admitted it had none.

Like Martin, Engelbrecht praised the Georgia State Election Board, and she was even more explicit in her baseless accusations that Democrats were attempting to rig the election system.

“The Democrats are going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that the fraud we’ve seen coming out of Georgia over these last few years, that that remains institutionalized,” Engelbrecht said. “I applaud the State Election Board, and even more than that I applaud the people of Georgia who have fought tirelessly to try to bring elections back to some semblance of common sense in their state, and they’re doing a great job.”

“The Democrat Party is opposed for all of the obvious reasons, but I’ll state the obvious, and that is that they intend to manipulate and exploit the weaknesses wherever they can,” she added.

### Cleta Mitchell and the Election Integrity Network

Prior to founding the Election Integrity Network, Mitchell served as a campaign adviser to then-President Trump while he was attempting to overturn the 2020 election. She participated in a call during which Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” more than 11,000 votes, enough to throw the election to him. A grand jury later recommended indicting Mitchell for her role in Trump’s efforts to stay in power, though prosecutors in Fulton County declined to charge her.

Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has issued at least two formal press releases in favor of the Georgia election changes.

On August 13, EIN issued a statement urging the passage of new rules that would “demand accurate counts before certifying elections.” Following adoption of the new policy, EIN said the State Election Board had “stood up to left-wing pressure groups and voted to ensure vote-tallies reconcile before certification.”

Mitchell has been a vocal supporter of the Georgia election board meddling. On August 3, she celebrated Trump’s speech singling out the three State Election Board members who later voted in favor of the new rules.

CitationFrom Cleta Mitchell's account on X/Twitter, accessed August 30, 2024

Since then, Mitchell has written at least five other posts in favor of the changes or criticizing opponents of the moves — including praising Trump-aligned board member Janelle King.

“GA State Election Board Member Janelle King is smart, tough, and conservative,” Mitchell wrote. “She stands for the rule of law and election integrity - leftists hate that. We are with you Janelle!”

Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer

Longtime tea party activist Amy Kremer helped organize the January 6, 2021, rally where Trump instructed the crowd to “fight like hell” and march to the U.S. Capitol. Her daughter, Kylie Jane, created a “Stop the Steal” Facebook group following the 2020 election that ballooned to 350,000 members over the course of a day. The duo previously founded the pro-Trump group Women for America First in 2019.

Following Joe Biden’s inauguration, Amy Kremer pushed for an “audit” of the Georgia vote totals, similar to a sham audit Trump allies pursued in Arizona. More recently, she successfully ran for a seat on the Republican National Committee in a campaign that was supported by Steve Bannon.

Both Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer have repeatedly supported the Georgia State Election Board rule changes. On August 19, Amy Kremer accused Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Attorney General Chris Carr, and Gov. Brian Kemp — all Republicans — of “standing in the way &/or running interference to stop the GA State Election Board from securing GA’s elections & investigating election fraud.”

CitationFrom Amy Kremer's account on X/Twitter, accessed September 3, 2024

Amy Kremer has repeatedly cast doubt on Georgia’s election systems throughout August, and responded to the Democrats’ lawsuit challenging the changes by asking Carr, “What are you going to do about this?”

Kylie Jane Kremer has similarly criticized Kemp, Raffensperger, and Carr, writing on August 3 that they’re “like the three amigos who steal elections.” On August 26, she praised Trump-aligned State Election Board member Janelle King. One day later, she urged her followers to show the board “the support they deserve as they stand strong for Georgians against attacks from Governor Kemp, SOS Brad Raffensperger, AG Chris Carr and Democrats!”

Raffensperger, who famously declined Trump’s request to “find” enough votes to overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020, has now spoken out against the State Election Board rule changes. As of late August, Kemp hadn’t publicly commented on the changes, though his office referred an ethics complaint against the pro-Trump board members to the attorney general’s office. Carr released an official opinion stating that the State Election Board can’t force him to reopen an investigation into the vote totals in Fulton County in 2020, as requested by Trump’s allies on the board.

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:{:{May 13, 2024 rww}:

• Frederick Clarkson @ Religion Dispatches: Where’s Wallnau? A NAR Apostle Takes Aim at Swing Counties in ‘The Battle for the Mountain of Government’

Just as they prophesied Trump’s victory and collaborated in the 2020 attempted coup, the Trump wing of the New Apostolic Reformation is on the offensive once again, waging a campaign in counties they think will swing the 2024 presidential election.

• Khaya Himmelman @ Talking Points Memo: Far-Right Group Recruits Followers To Overwhelm Election Offices With Voter Roll Challenges

True the Vote is enlisting private citizens to help it overwhelm under-staffed and under-resourced election offices with voter roll challenges ahead of election day.

• Peter Green @ The Bucks County Beacon: Republican Pennsylvania State Representative with Ties to the New Apostolic Reformation Wants Chaplains in Public Schools

Rep. David Zimmerman’s bill is the latest carefully spun attempt to inject a right-wing brand of Christianity into schools in hopes of bringing more children to Jesus. It has already happened in Texas and Florida.

• Riley Rogerson @ The Daily Beast: Mike Collins Is the Hardest-Working Troll in Congress

The freshman member from Georgia doesn’t have much of a legislative record, but he sure can stir up trouble online.

• Martin Pengelly @ The Guardian: Outrage after ex-Trump aide claims he gave unhoused people fake money

Johnny McEntee, the former White House Trump aide closely linked to plans for radical federal government reform should Donald Trump win re-election, stoked outrage with a TikTok video in which he claimed to give unhoused people fake money, thereby to ensure their arrest.

• Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: In his latest flub, Trump touts ‘the late, great Hannibal Lecter’

As Donald Trump remarks on “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” perhaps the former president ought to just give up on pop culture references altogether.

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--

April 8, 2024 RWW

• David Gilbert @ Wired: Inside the Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November

Groups like True the Vote and Michael Flynn’s America Project want to mobilize thousands of Trump supporters by pushing baseless claims about election fraud—and are rolling out new technology to fast-track their efforts.

---

REF

:{:{WIRED}:

As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.}:

All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.

These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.

Catherine Engelbrecht and her organization True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram. As the 2024 presidential election looms, they are ramping up efforts to do it again.

“It could be exponentially worse than what we saw in 2020, but we're going to be awake, we're going to be engaged, we are going to understand the process, and we're going to have options to continue to hold to those truths,” Engelbrecht said during a March webinar titled “Election Integrity Team Building 101.” “We're not going to back down. There's too much to lose.”

The hour-long presentation was delivered from a hotel room in Denver, with Engelbrecht laying out what could sound like a relatively benign plan to monitor elections and check voter rolls. “Keep a soft heart, keep a kind word in your mouth, approach people irrespective of party with love. You will find that things will be much better if that is the approach that is taken,” Engelbrecht said. The session, she said, was overbooked.

Engelbrecht then began speaking about elections being “perilously close to cracking in half,” and her presentation became a highlight reel of election conspiracies, references to crystals, Christian nationalist rhetoric, and militaristic jargon. “If this republic’s to be saved, it's because [of] people like all of you that are on this webinar right now. There are some bad actors out there and we live in particularly chaotic and caustic times,” said Engelbrecht. “If we wait on somebody to do something, we will watch freedom slip away on our watch. That's how close we are.”

“These groups are trying to lay the groundwork to potentially make later claims about the election that very well may be false. But the more chaos that can be caused along the way will give more fodder to that disinformation,” Andrew Garber, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, tells WIRED. “It's not just bad if there's a mass voter challenge because people might get kicked off the rolls. It's also bad if people then take that challenge and say, ‘See, look at all these ineligible voters,’ when in fact that's not the case.”

:{:{Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, when she was an activist for the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. After the 2020 election, Engelbrecht and her collaborator Gregg Phillips became central figures in the Stop the Steal movement, and starred in the widely-debunked election conspiracy film *2000 Mules*.}:

They were also arrested for contempt of court after refusing to identify their source behind allegations that the Chinese government had accessed US election data. True the Vote also made wild allegations of widespread ballot stuffing in Georgia during the 2020 vote and a subsequent runoff in 2021. Earlier this year, True the Vote was forced to admit in court that the group had no evidence to back up its claims.}:

In 2022, the group rolled out a slick new software tool known as IV3, based on technology developed by Phillips, that compared names on voter rolls to a database maintained by the US Postal Service, allowing anyone to challenge voter registrations across the country if they spotted a discrepancy. A WIRED investigation, however, revealed that the information used to challenge the registration of hundreds of thousands of people was based on unreliable data.

:{:{Undeterred, True the Vote announced last week that it was relaunching IV3. Phillips claims that the software’s database now has close to “100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States.” WIRED has not seen proof of this claim. The new IV3 system will soon be available in all 50 states, the organization said.}:

On Thursday, the group held a webinar to train local activists on how to use it. The new system also relies on data from the US Postal Service, but Engelbrecht claimed during the presentation that Phillips and his team had “normalized” the data from all 50 states to ensure the system would not produce inaccurate results. She also said that thousands of people across the country were already registered, and that they had a long waiting list.}:

*Additionally, she said that another software tool developed by Phillips’ team, called Ground Fusion, would be released soon; it is aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions.

Engelbrecht declined to comment, claiming without evidence that WIRED had “written unfairly about True the Vote and IV3 in the past.”

True the Vote is not the only group seeking to leverage technology to supercharge the spread of election conspiracies. A secretive Georgia-based firm called EagleAI NETwork has developed a voter information database to fast-track the deletion of ineligible voters from the system. Voter rights groups have advised against its use, as insignificant errors—such as a missing comma before the suffix “Jr.”—have led to eligible names being removed. Still, at least one county in Georgia has agreed to use EagleAI to review voter challenges and conduct list maintenance activities.

One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.

The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.

Mitchell, EagleAI, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Another training webinar called “We the People” was also hosted last month by the America Project and its offshoot, Vote Your Vision. Broadcasted online to hundreds of attendees, the webinar featured a lineup of election conspiracists, Republican lawmakers, a guy who wrote a book about fifth-generation warfare, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The webinar, the group’s website said, was designed to give people “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” by using “state-of-the-art election tools,” including those involving artificial intelligence technology. While the details of exactly what these tools will look like and how they will be used are unclear, the America Project has already scheduled more training sessions in the coming weeks to give supporters more information. The group also did not reply to requests for comment.

The America Project was cofounded by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO and conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who also funds part of the organization. Both Flynn and Byrne reportedly attended a White House meeting in late 2020 to urge Trump to essentially declare martial law and seize voting machines.

While Flynn didn’t speak during last month’s webinar, he has arguably done more than anyone since 2020 to push the notion that America’s elections are fundamentally fraudulent, appearing at conferences, in podcasts, and on right-wing news shows on a near-daily basis. Trump has also indicated that Flynn will be brought back into his administration should he win.

:{:{These efforts have been given the seal of approval by the Republican National Committee, which was recently restructured by Trump to include election deniers and family members in top positions while cutting minority outreach efforts.}:

One of those election deniers is Christina Bobb, who will be running the “election integrity unit.” A former Trump lawyer and TV presenter on far-right channel One America News, Bobb is a major promoter of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The RNC’s election-related priorities, according to an internal memo recently obtained by NPR, include “a broader effort over the coming months to [legally] challenge voter identification and signature verification rules which were put into place for the 2020 election.”}:

During the America Project webinar last month, one of the hosts apologized to listeners for being unable to get Bobb to join the call that day, but promised that she would join a future session—highlighting just how closely these conspiracy-focused groups work with the mainstream GOP apparatus.

“These groups have a playbook nationally that they tend to deploy locally,” says Garber. “Some of these playbooks that have an intended national reach are then deployed through local activists, and it's concerning because it's the voters at the local level who suffer the effects. It's the election officials at the local level trying to keep order at the polls, trying to make sure their voter rolls are up to date, who have to deal with this stuff.”

One of Flynn’s core messages over the past four years has been that “local action equals national impact” —an expression that revolves around a concept called “precinct strategy,” which aims to get people into key positions on local committees in order to push their narratives at the local level. In 2024, that strategy has been primed and polished.

“This concept of precinct strategy was actually endorsed by President Trump in the last election cycle,” Yehuda Miller, a Republican county committee member in New Jersey, said during the America Project seminar. “We want to take the strategy to the next level. We want to get more organized, we want to start organizing across multiple counties in a state, we want to start organizing across multiple states. We have the power to direct our elected officials.”

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year in hate

https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2022/trends-and-threats#sheriffs

the no lnx nice grsf

Sheriffs Working to Subvert Democracy

By Rachel Goldwasser

A smattering of county sheriffs across the U.S. tested the limits of democracy in 2022, with an assist from extremist law enforcement groups.

These constitutional sheriffs are devoted members of an antigovernment extremist movement that believes sheriffs are the highest authority in the country, above even the president. They usurp the duties of the Supreme Court by personally deciding which U.S. laws are legitimate and whether to enforce them.

These sheriffs are actively damaging the nation’s rule of law and attempting to shape the U.S. into a country where fringe law enforcement officers determine what human, civil and property rights they will enforce.

In the U.S., where the justice system already perpetuates great inequities that disproportionately effect people of color, these members of law enforcement further undermine equal justice under the law.

In 2022, constitutional sheriffs’ ideology intruded into another facet of democracy: elections. Members melded their extremist positions with their law enforcement authority to investigate rogue, conspiratorial allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and brought doubt into the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections.

Two extremist law enforcement groups, Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) and Protect America Now (PAN), led these efforts.

CSPOA radicalizes sheriffs and the public through law enforcement training, presentations to lawmakers and civilians, online media and books written by the group’s founder Richard Mack. The organization is linked to extremists, including Oath Keepers, sovereign citizens, neo-confederates and white nationalists.

PAN was founded by political operatives and is less outspoken about their constitutional sheriff beliefs, but most of their advisory board and members are constitutional sheriffs whose ideology has shaped the organization at large. PAN has focused its attention on immigration issues, supporting the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) in its efforts to demonize migrants and lobby for policies that reflect this.

Beginning in the summer of 2022, both organizations worked with election conspiracy group True the Vote, whose founders participated in the film 2000 Mules, which promotes the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory parroted by former President Trump that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

The Sheriffs Alliance Interfering with U.S. Elections

Graphic connecting individuals and groups with efforts to interfere in U.S. elections

Photos credits: Donald Trump: James Devaney/GC Images; Michael Flynn: Chris Kleponis/AFP via Getty Images; Sidney Powell: Drew Angerer/Getty Images; Catherine Engelbrecht: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images; Lin Wood, Mark Lamb, Richard Mack: Gage Skidmore; Gregg Phillips: CNN Screen Shot via Texas Tribune

CSPOA posted a press release to its website on May 24, 2022, calling on local law enforcement agencies to investigate the 2020 election. The organization’s leaders and member sheriffs repeated the claim on July 12 at a CSPOA press conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Sheriffs that were investigating and those considering it spoke publicly about their efforts and repeated themselves a day later at the Libertarian Freedom Fest in Las Vegas.

True the Vote announced its partnership with PAN on June 22, calling it ProtectAmerica.Vote. The group advertised that the effort was intended to teach sheriffs about their state election laws and provide them with grants to investigate alleged voting violations. The partnership included a plan to build a “National Election Integrity Voter Hotline” that would be linked to sheriffs’ offices and promote their cause in an informational campaign starting Aug. 1.

Multiple sheriffs affiliated with CSPOA and PAN spent the year attempting to investigate the 2020 election or interfering in the 2022 midterm elections. A group of devout constitutional sheriffs from Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin were the most egregious.

ARIZONA’S CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFF PROBLEM

Mark Lamb, sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, and PAN leader acted as the face of the PAN True the Vote partnership. In an interview published in the right-wing media source American Greatness on July 20, Lamb claimed that he was “disturbed” by talk of a law enforcement focus on domestic violence threats, that the feds had no jurisdiction over his county and that if they tried to push what he called unconstitutional mandates, “We would stop them,” Lamb said.

David Rhodes, Sheriff of Yavapai County, Arizona, has been linked to CSPOA and the Oath Keepers, and most recently an Oath Keepers offshoot organization, the Yavapai County Preparedness Team (YCPT). YCPT and the group Lions of Liberty formulated a plan to stake out and film Arizona ballot drop boxes for cases of fraud. At a July 23 YCPT meeting, group leader Jim Arroyo told members, “We have already coordinated with Sheriff Rhodes, and he told us if we see somebody stuffing a ballot box, and we get a license plate, they will make an arrest, and there will be a prosecution. Bottom line.” YCPT and Lions of Liberty eventually halted monitoring after a lawsuit was filed against them by Protect Democracy on behalf of the League of Women Voters asserting the group was engaging in voter intimidation.

MILITIAS, ELECTIONS AND PLOTS IN MIDWEST

Dar Leaf,Sheriff of Barry County, Michigan, is a lifetime member of CSPOA. He received the group’s Sheriff of the Year award in 2017. On May 18, 2020, Leaf appeared at a protest alongside members of the Michigan Liberty Militia (MLM), whose members were found guilty in 2022 of a 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Leaf was asked if he regretted having shared a stage with MLM members, and he replied, “It’s just a charge, and they say a ‘plot to kidnap,’ and you got to remember that. Are they trying to kidnap? Because a lot of people are angry with the governor, and they want her arrested. So, are they trying to arrest or was it a kidnap attempt? Because you can still in Michigan if it is a felony, make a felony arrest.”

In December 2020, Leaf began his investigation into the presidential election. Leaf’s attorney Carson Tucker reached out to Trump allies, including conspiracy theorist and former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, attorney Sidney Powell and Lin Wood’s Fight Back Foundation asking for information regarding "counties that have been potentially compromised.” Leaf tried to seize the voting machines from those counties to run his own investigation. In 2021 Leaf also worked with a private investigator who partnered with a sheriff’s deputy to question county clerks in six Michigan townships. After learning that the state was investigating his own investigation, on June 3, 2022, Leaf sued the Michigan attorney general, secretary of state and members of the state troopers for illegal interference. His claims in his lawsuit were dismissed by a Michigan judge on Aug. 29, 2022.

Leaf’s extremist election denial continued through 2022 as he made claims of voter fraud at the July CSPOA True the Vote press conference, FreedomFest in Las Vegas and to CSPOA members after the midterms. Leaf has gone so far as to call for sheriffs to host common law grand juries on the 2018 “stolen election” conspiracy. This type of grand jury is promoted by the National Liberty Alliance, a sovereign citizen group Leaf has worked with.

Christopher Schmaling, Sheriff of Racine County, Wisconsin, has also closely affiliated with CSPOA. He has appeared on Sheriff Mack’s online show and presented with CSPOA at 2022 FreedomFest. Schmaling, who was once the keynote speaker at a Trump rally, launched his own investigation into alleged 2020 voter fraud.

In 2021, Sheriff Schmaling tried to have nursing home staff and the majority of the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) arrested. He claimed they committed voter fraud after the WEC changed a policy during the pandemic that allowed nursing home staff to assist residents with their ballots in 2020. The Racine County District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute.

Ironically, in 2022, Schmaling refused to charge Harry Wait, leader of the group H.O.T. Government, who requested multiple absentee ballots using false information. When asked about it, Wait said, “Basically, I committed a crime when I ordered them. I emailed Sheriff Schmaling, asked if he was going to arrest me, and he said, ‘hell no.’ ” The Wisconsin attorney general’s office began an investigation July 29, 2022.

Schmaling also presented at 2022 FreedomFest, alongside other election denying sheriffs.

Unfortunately, these men have made a significant impact, using their power as law enforcement officials to make and investigate spurious allegations and gotten their ideas in front of a wide audience. Fortunately, these men represent a fringe movement, one many law enforcement officers still refuse to participate in.

While multiple Arizona sheriffs including Sheriffs Lamb and Rhodes joined the constitutional sheriff’s movement and meddled in U.S. elections, making the process more fraught for voters, another Arizona sheriff, Paul Penzone of Maricopa County, Arizona, exemplified the legitimate role of sheriffs: He chose to denounce the same extremist ideology and support democracy rather than participate in actions or groups working to damage it.

In in the run-up to the 2020 election, Penzone said in a press release, “With the same conviction we display when taking the oath of office, we must commit to practice impartial and nonpolitical actions during the course of our duties.” He continued, “Denying, ignoring or refusing to recognize and apply the laws as they are written is not within the authority of law enforcement professionals. Terms such as ‘Sanctuary’ county become an excuse to circumvent the law and defy due process and democracy.”

Then again on Nov 12, 2022, when speaking to the groups and politicians targeting elections and voting facilities, Penzone told the press he would not stand for any threat to voting, voting facilities or election workers.

“We are seeing a radical movement, including some local law enforcement, of people who are committed to destroying trust in our system for their own selfish gain,” Penzone told the press in August as the 2022 midterm elections heated up. “We must fight against it, or our nation will no longer be the democratic standard.”

REJECTING CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFFS IN POLICY

All law enforcement can play a role in minimizing the harm from the constitutional sheriff movement. They can resist disinformation and conspiracy theories. They can resist recruitment into extremist groups like CSPOA, PAN and the Oath Keepers that actively prey on them. County sheriffs and police chiefs can push back on the notion that their function is to interpret the law rather than enforce it. The National Sheriffs Association can finally decide that there is no place for extremism among their ranks and refuse membership to sheriffs who actively promote antigovernment ideologies, including constitutional sheriffs.

State leaders can ensure that board members of their state police officer trainings and certification programs (POST) are not constitutional sheriffs or affiliated with extremists. These same boards can also create rules that prevent extremists from conducting official law enforcement training in their state.

States should limit the role of sheriffs’ posse members or deputized private citizens to core law enforcement functions – not election administration. And federal and state authorities should ensure that constitutional sheriffs do not engage in voter intimidation or intervene or interfere in election administration in any way.

Congress can ensure no federal funds are used for training that promotes CSPOA propaganda. Congress should investigate all law enforcement departments’ links to extremism. Law enforcement officials who self-identify as constitutional sheriffs, engage in election interference or otherwise violate the Department of Justice’s new Title VI protocols prohibiting discriminatory conduct, should be ineligible to receive federal funds.

Every level of government from national, state, and local law enforcement organizations should publicly reject the views and practices of constitutional sheriffs – and should not permit these individuals to serve in leadership positions.

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June 5, 2023 

• Liz Skalka @ HuffPost: Mike Pence Files Paperwork To Run For President Against Donald Trump.
• Cassandra Jaramillo @ ProPublica: True the Vote Leadership Accused of Using Donations for Personal Gain.
• Prem Thakker @ The New Republic: Ron DeSantis Says Woke Seven Times in 26 Seconds in Wildly Out of Touch Remarks.
• Zachary Petrizzo and Ursula Perano @ The Daily Beast: Far Right Turns on Marjorie Taylor Greene—and MTG Hits Back in Text to Matt Gaetz.
• R.G. Cravens @ Hatewatch: Documents Reveal ADF Requested Anti-Trans Research From American College of Pediatricians.
• David Badash @ The New Civil Rights Movement: ‘Untrue and Hateful’: Nikki Haley Slammed for ‘Damnable Lie’ of Blaming Teen Girls Contemplating Suicide on Trans Kids.
• Greg Owen @ LGBTQ Nation: Moms for Liberty goes ballistic over mention of LGBTQ+ students in yearbook.
• Jerod MacDonald-Evoy @ Arizona Mirror: AZ GOP senator proudly flies flag adopted by ‘fringe’ far-right extremists.

Tags: Catherine Engelbrecht Gregg Phillips Janae Shamp Marjorie Taylor Greene Mike Pence Nikki Haley Ron DeSantis Round-Up Alliance Defending Freedom Moms for Liberty True the Vote

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/conspiracy-theorists-with-badges-and-guns-pro-trump-sheriffs-vow-to-police-elections/

An Unholy Alliance of Election Deniers, ‘Constitutional Sheriffs,’ and Profiteering Propagandists Threatens Elections

Two years after former President Donald Trump began aggressively attacking the integrity of the 2020 election to justify his efforts to stay in power, an unholy alliance threatens the fair conduct of elections this fall and again in 2024. A national network of conspiracy theorists and right-wing political operatives have been joined by far-right sheriffs, whose determination has been fortified by lies about election fraud and fueled by a belief that they are waging a holy war against the forces of evil.

Richard Mack, a former Arizona county sheriff and former board member of the anti-government extremist organization Oath Keepers, summoned members and supporters of his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association to a July gathering in Las Vegas, where he delivered an urgent message:  The country’s county sheriffs, Mack said, must launch investigations into voting fraud in the 2020 election—investigations that he thought could put Trump back in power.

“I would love for the investigations to prove that he indeed won the election, and I think at the time the Supreme Court would have to rule that he gets put back in because it was based on criminal activity,” Mack said. Though he wasn’t sure enough sheriffs would step up and “do their duty” to make investigations into the 2020 election happen, Mack urged sheriffs to take an active role in policing this year’s elections.

Mack is the founder and leader of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches local sheriffs that they are the supreme law enforcement officer in their counties, and that it is their duty to resist state and federal “tyranny.”

Mack and other MAGA-minded sheriffs like Mark Lamb turned their focus to policing elections after seeing “2000 Mules,” a film produced by right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote leaders Catherine Englebrecht and Gregg Phillips, longtime promoters of election fraud conspiracy theories. Experts from across the political spectrum debunked the movie’s claims about voter fraud, but Trump and many of his supporters have embraced and promoted its inflammatory claims.

The Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol and evidence gathered by the House select committee investigating the insurrection have provided clear evidence that lies about election fraud can drive people to violence. In the weeks before Election Day, the embrace of “2000 Mules” and its inflammatory claims by public officials and far-right activists has already led to multiple reports of armed voter intimidation by vigilantes at ballot drop boxes. It could also increase the potential for violence at the polls.

“The involvement of ‘people with guns and badges’ to intimidate voters, and attempts to access voting equipment, could become ‘go-to-tactics,’” Bulwark editor Charlie Sykes told Reuters. “It doesn’t feel hyperbolic to say this is extremely dangerous.”

Armed Enforcers for the Anti-Democracy Coalition?

Mack founded CSPOA in 2009, a period of far-right ferment after the election of former President Barack Obama. As a leader of the self-described “constitutional sheriffs” movement, he has painted the federal government as authoritarian, referring to federal agencies as “the gestapo” and suggesting there were “some startling and irrefutable comparisons between Barack Obama and Adolph Hitler.”

Mack became a right-wing folk hero when he successfully challenged a Clinton-era federal gun law in the mid-90s. In 2014, Mack was back in the spotlight when he joined Cliven Bundy’s armed standoff with federal officials promoted a public relations strategy of putting women up front if shooting started.

Political scientists Emily Farris and Mirya Hollman recently conducted a survey of sheriffs’ attitudes and concluded that “Mack’s group has successfully radicalized a generation of sheriffs to believe that the office has seemingly unlimited power and autonomy.” That attitude is particularly dangerous among sheriffs, who compared to other law enforcement officials often have little structural oversight and accountability.

“We can and must take America back county by county and state by state,” Mack wrote in his 2014 book, “Are You a David?” That message is central to his current organizing efforts and one that he delivers to sheriffs and other law enforcement officials, often in state-sanctioned training sessions.

After the release of “2000 Mules” in May, Mack began shifting CSPOA’s focus from training sheriffs about his view of their constitutional superpowers to urging them to mobilize against “voter fraud.” He has described the movie’s oft-debunked claims as “overwhelming” and “compelling” evidence and said that “every sheriff and every chief of police in this country should be following up with a criminal investigation on the claims made in ‘2000 Mules.’”

Richard Mack speaks at CSPOA press conference on election fraud.

While Mack claims that his “2000 Mules”-inspired “election integrity” efforts are nonpartisan— he declared in a July press release that he simply wanted to know whether the claims made in “2000 Mules” are true and called for “honest, professional, and independent investigations”—it’s clear where his support lies when speaking to right-wing audiences. On a right-wing radio show in July, he called Trump’s defeat “a horrible, heinous crime” and “one of if not the worst crime committed against the American people in the last 100 years.”

“This is a coup against the American people,” Mack declared during a September appearance on another radio show. He recently told listeners of the right-wing Liberty Monks podcast that they “must vote for any Republican that we possibly can” to “punish the Democratic Party” and “stand against the destruction of America.”

Other sheriffs have taken up Mack’s call to investigate the 2020 presidential election and police future elections. One of Mack’s allies, Sheriff Calvin Hayden of Johnson County, Kansas, has “promoted unsubstantiated suspicions of election fraud,” according to the Kansas City Star. Hayden also offered to have his staff collect ballots from drop boxes, a move rejected by local officials as an attempt to interfere with the election.

Mack has also backed Dar Leaf, a sheriff in Berry County, Michigan, who is under investigation by the state’s attorney general over the conduct of his investigation of election equipment. Leaf has been represented by an attorney who was sanctioned by a federal judge for her role in Sidney Powell’s legal efforts to overturn the election results. Turning the system of governance on its head, Mack has said Leaf has the right to arrest state officials who interfered with his investigation.

From Insurrection to Elections: Sheriff Mark Lamb and Protect America Now

Mack isn’t the only far-right law enforcement official who was fired up by “2000 Mules.” Mark Lamb, sheriff of Arizona’s Pima County, was also drawn in by True the Vote’s conspiracy fraud claims. After viewing an interview that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk did with Engelbrecht—an interview that has been viewed more than 2 million times—Lamb contacted Englebrecht and brought his Protect America Now organization into a formal partnership with True the Vote. In October, Mack met with the Arizona Oathkeepers to talk about “election integrity” and the partnership being between Lamb and True the Vote, the Arizona Mirror reported.

An admirer of Mack and the CSPOA, Lamb built a national following through reality TV shows before turning energy toward Trumpian politics and the promotion of false voter fraud claims with the launch of his own organization in 2021.

Lamb founded Protect America Now in the month following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The insurrection, Lamb said, was not Trump’s fault, adding, “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they have to listen to us and know we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away.”

Describing Lamb as “charismatic and ambitious” in a 2021 profile, Politico reported that at ananti-vaccine rally that year, Lamb told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.”

Protect America Now’s website declares, “We support Sheriffs and law enforcement members that believe inGod, Family and Freedom.” The group asks for a monthly donation of $17.76 to “help us win this battle for the soul of America.” It promotes a hard-right line on immigration and other issues. In videos on Protect America Now’s YouTube channel, Lamb that crime is running rampant and “liberals want to take our guns.” In another, Lamb, “together, we are fighting back against the liberal takeover.”

In June,True the Vote and Protect America Now announced ProtectAmerica.Vote, a partnership that it said would “empower sheriffs” to “support election integrity” and would bridge the gap between voters and law enforcement to “ensure we have secure elections in this country.”

Engelbrecht has said she embraced the sheriffs after the FBI dismissed True the Vote’s allegations of voter fraud. “It’s like the lights went on,” she saidat a CSPOA event this July. “It’s the sheriffs. That’s who can do these investigations; that’s who we can trust; that’s who we can turn over information to.” True the Vote says its partnership with the constitutional sheriffs will include raising grant money and providing equipment to sheriffs to expand ballot drop box surveillance and investigate fraud claims.

Lamb claims his partnership with True the Vote is a nonpartisan effort, but he makes no secret of his support for Trump and Trump’s stolen election claims. Trump “loves the rule of law,” Lamb said at a Trump rally in Arizona this July. “We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Lamb pledged. “We will not let happen what happened in 2020.”

Local critics say Lamb has politicized law enforcement. Pinal County, where Lamb is sheriff, experienced ballot shortages during the August primary, and Lamb, true to character, that there might be something more at play than incompetence by election officials and vowed to investigate.

Inspired by Lies: ‘2000 Mules’ as Political Warfare

Right-wing filmmaker and author D’Souza describes his propaganda movies as weapons of political and spiritual warfare. By that measure, the “2000 Mules” movie has proven itself effective in mobilizing Trump’s troops.

Far-right wing media have boosted Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules” even though its claims have been widely debunked.

In “2000 Mules,” D’Souza dramatized claims made by Engelbrecht and Phillips that liberal nonprofits had mobilized “ballot harvesting” operations to stuff drop boxes with illegal votes. But for all the wild hype about their use of mobile device geolocation data and security camera footage from ballot drop boxes, election experts have repeatedly said that there’s essentially no there there. Even former Trump administration Attorney General William Barr dismissed the movie’s claims as laughable in testimony before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The movie’s claims have also been declared bogus by experts in cell phone tracking technology and by election officials. As critics have pointed out, despite all the data, footage, and money available to the producers, the film does not show a single documented instance of the kind of fraud it claims to expose. Georgia election officials tracked down one person the movie accused of being a “mule” and determined that the person was depositing his own ballot and his family members’ ballots, as permitted by law. On Oct. 26, a Georgia voter sued D’Souza, Englebrecht, Phillips, and True the Vote for wrongly accusing him of casting illegal votes.

Among the other demonstrably false claims in the movie was that True the Vote’s geolocation data was so accurate that it helped solve a murder case.

But MAGA world activists primed to believe Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories ate it up. Trump himself hosted a premiere for the film at Mar-a Lago in May. Many Republican officials and proponents of election conspiracies like MyPillow founder Mike Lindell have joined Trump in promoting the film and its claims.

As the film took MAGA world by storm, it came to the attention of far-right militias, too. It was cited by Lions of Liberty, an Arizona “preparedness” group connected to the far-right Oath Keepers that is organizing armed surveillance of ballot boxes, and by Matt Shea, a far-right former state legislator known for his handbook on “biblical warfare,” who is organizing similar efforts in his state.

The release of the book version of “2000 Mules” was delayed at the last minute by the publisher after it had been printed and sent to bookstores containing potentially libelous accusations against several nonprofit groups it accused of mobilizing voter fraud. Before a toned-down version was released, Engelbrecht and Phillips distanced themselves from the book, saying they were looking ahead to future elections and their work with sheriffs.

Before ‘2000 Mules’: True the Vote’s History of Election Fraud Conspiracies

True the Vote is well known among voting rights experts for its long history of promoting voter fraud conspiracy theories and supporting actions to restrict voting.

“True the Vote and groups like it are well-documented voter intimidation scams,” former Harris County Clerk and current Houston mayoral candidate Chris Hollins told Texas Monthly this summer. “They’re created to amplify conspiracy theories, funded by wealthy right-wing activists, to tie the hands of election administrators and embolden partisan poll watchers.”

Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center points to True the Vote’s “long history of anti-voter conduct, including orchestrating mass challenges to voters,” some as recent as the 2021 Georgia runoff elections.

True the Vote leaders Engelbrecht and Phillips—business and reportedly romantic partners—have profited from unproven claims of voter fraud. The organization has been the subject of multiple investigations and exposés revealing their repeated failure to make good on outlandish claims while funneling money raised by their nonprofit group into their own pockets via loans and payments to for-profit companies they run.

True the Vote was founded after the 2008 election and grew out of a local Tea Party organization in Houston, Texas, called the King Street Patriots, which was accused of conducting “1960s style” voter intimidation during the 2010 election cycle.

For the past decade, True the Vote has promoted alarmism about voter fraud and resisted voting rights protections. It falsely claimed, for example, that the Obama administration was intentionally registering noncitizens to vote and charged that renewing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would encourage “race-based segregation.” As “voter fraud” and “election integrity” became right-wing justifications for voter suppression, True the Vote pulled in money from right-wing funders and activist groups, including the Bradley Foundation, Donors Trust, the Judicial Confirmation Network, and State Policy Network.

True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht railed against a bill she said would “blow up our elections” in a March 2020 YouTube video.

When Trump was elected in 2016 while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Phillips stroked Trump’s ego by claiming that Phillips could verify that 3 million noncitizens cast votes in the election. While Trump touted the baselessand repeatedly debunked claim that he was the actual popular vote winner, True the Vote never released any evidence to back him up.

Though True the Vote claims that its so-called “election integrity” work is nonpartisan, the group aggressively promotes the interests of right-wing Republican candidates. In 2018, a New Jersey judge decided not to renew a 1981 ban on the Republican Party recruiting soldiers and cops as poll watchers to intimidate Black voters. True the Vote saw this as an opportunity. At a 2020 gathering of the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of influential right-wing and far-right leaders, Englebrecht touted True the Vote’s “Continue to Serve” initiative, which she said would recruit retired military and law enforcement as poll watchers. One participant suggested it would be especially useful in “inner city” and Native American precincts.

True the Vote’s credibility has been challenged by some on the right, even by other Big Lie and voter suppression advocates. After Trump’s defeat in 2020, True the Vote officials took $2.5 million from Fred Eshelman, a Trump-supporting billionaire who believed that the group was going to use state-level election data to prove Trump’s fraud claims in court. When they seemingly did little more to overturn the election than pay piles of cash to their companies and their lawyer, right-wing movement consigliere James Bopp, for a few short-lived lawsuits, Eshelman sued in an unsuccessful effort to get his money back.

Conspiracy Theories as Spiritual Warfare

Just as Christian nationalist ideology and the belief that keeping Trump in office was a sacred cause energized the Jan. 6 insurrection and suffused much of the MAGA movement, True the Vote’s leaders and their far-right sheriff allies rely on spiritual warfare rhetoric to justify their actions and motivate their followers.

Before the 2020 election, True the Vote partnered with Intercessors for America, a group of pro-Trump “prayer warriors,” to spread right-wing talking points about the threat of voter fraud. On an online prayer call in May 2020, Englebrecht called the struggle over expanded voting by mail a “spiritual battle” for “control of the free world.”

After the release of “2000 Mules,” Intercessors for America claimed that the movie documented “an indisputable and alarming gravy train for fraudulent votes.” Intercessors for America defended Engelbrecht and Phillips from critics, portraying them as victims of persecution.

This August, True the Vote held a gathering focused on voter fraud that it called “The Pit,” a name taken from a biblical passage that says God will grant his disciples relief from days of trouble “until a pit is dug for the wicked.” On a “prayer call” promoting the event,Intercessors for America’s Kris Kubalsaid that election fraud is “demonic” and an “evil from Satan.”  True the Vote, she declared, was involved in a “supernatural battle.” Phillips agreed that “there is so much evil around all of this right now.”

“God wants us to expose that pit and shut it down, and that’s what we’re going to do,” Engelbrecht said. True the Vote leaders did not release compelling new evidence of voter fraud at “The Pit,” but they did announce the creation of a “fusion center” that would gather “actionable intelligence” for local sheriffs to act on.

Like Engelbrecht and Phillips, Mack portrays his “constitutional sheriff” movement and its involvement in election issues in spiritual terms. In his 2014 book, “Are You a David?” Mack argued that “modern-day Davids”—by which he meant sheriffs and other local public servants—are “the only viable solution for the restoration of our God-given rights, in conjunction with our willingness to repent and return to God’s law as a people.” At a July press conference Mack organized during the right-wing “Freedom Fest” held in Las Vegas, he urged sheriffs to “join us in this holy cause.”

Sheriffs: The Law or a Threat to the Law?

There is a long history in this country of corrupt local sheriffs abusing their power, from Jim Clark leading attacks on civil rights marchers in Alabama in the 1960s to Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva overseeing a department notorious for violent deputy gangs threatening public safety today.

In 2020, the research group Political Research Associates identified 136 sheriffs aligned with the far-right “patriot” and militia movement in which Political Research Associates situates Mack’s CSPOA. The research group noted that at the time, 90 percent of the 3,081 county sheriffs in the United States were white men, and that “there has been a concerted effort in the last decade to mobilize sheriffs toward further supporting and expanding systems of racialized social control and expulsion.” The Reflective Democracy Campaign, a project of the Women’s Donor Network, noted that “The alarmingly skewed demographics of sheriffs suggest a system hard-wired for abuse, and their track record of mistreating women and people of color confirms it.”

Some sheriff’s offices have connections to, or have been infiltrated by, other far-right extremist groups. The Brennan Center found that sheriff’s deputies in Washington state and Louisiana had publicly supported and joined the Proud Boys—whose leaders have been charged with seditious conspiracy in the attack on the Capitol—and noted that a sheriff’s deputy in Orange County, California, was photographed wearing a patch that included the word “Oath Keeper” and the logo of the Three Percenters on his bulletproof vest. The Washington state and Louisiana deputies were fired; the California deputy was not.

Added to this already toxic mix are messages from the likes of Mack and Lamb that sheriffs must investigate electoral fraud. Such declarations are a “significant overreach of authority,” David Mahoney, a former president of the National Sheriffs Association, told The Guardian.

So what role, if any, should sheriffs play in our elections?

“There is a critical role for law enforcement to play in protecting our election: they should be offering protection to election officials and election workers that have come under attack as a result of lies being spread by groups like True the Vote,” the Brennan Center’s Sean Morales-Doyletold The Guardian in August.

It is not difficult to imagine the chilling effect of being accused of voter fraud by a person with a badge and gun, what Jessica Pishko called “part of an escalating campaign to police the vote” in a recent story for Bolts magazine. “The prospect of increased involvement of armed officers recalls the days of voter intimidation in the Jim Crow South (and beyond), and could also help encourage extremist vigilante violence by perpetuating baseless rumors of fraud, often against Black and Latinx communities,” Pishko wrote.

Recent reports of armed bands gathering at ballot drop boxes and challenging voters suggests that Pishko was right. (This week a federal court ordered a group in Arizona to stop intimidating voters with their armed and body-armored presence at ballot drop boxes.) [check]

The multi-faceted campaign to corrupt elections by convincing millions of Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by Black and Brown voters is a threat to democracy. It has created and inflamed a large group of enraged Trump supporters and sparked harassment and threats against election officials. It has led to a wave of state laws designed to restrict registration and voting. It has led to Trumpist partisans and conspiracy theorists becoming poll workers and running for political offices where they will have the power to interfere with the administration of elections. And it has led some armed vigilantes to set up intimidating “security” operations at voting locations.

Added to this volatile mix are groups of sheriffs riled up by falsehoods and propaganda, pumped up an ideology of virtually unchecked power, and spurred on by the belief that they are engaged in a holy war to save America from destruction. Voters and other public officials must be alert to the abuses that could flow from these new partnerships and be prepared to hold individuals accountable for any actions to intimidate or interfere with people exercising their right to vote.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/14/arizona-ag-true-the-vote-00061973

no lnx

KYLE CHENEY and NICHOLAS WU

10/14/2022

The office of Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is asking the FBI and IRS to investigate True the Vote, a conservative vote-monitoring nonprofit Donald Trump has repeatedly touted for its efforts to raise doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Reginald Grigsby, an investigator with Brnovich’s office, described a series of questionable interactions with the group’s leaders and suggested there may be evidence of financial improprieties if the agencies pursued them.

“Given TTV’s status as a nonprofit organization, it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted,” Grigsby wrote.

The letter, dated Friday, is particularly remarkable coming from the office of Brnovich, a Republican who once vied for Trump’s support in a Senate GOP primary bid that hinged on false claims about the 2020 election results.

The IRS and the FBI’s Phoenix field office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A True the Vote spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.

Grigsby urged the federal agencies to pursue the group after what it described as multiple suspicious interactions with leaders Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips. Grigsby said the pair met with state investigators three times since early 2021 and promised to provide data it said would prove widespread fraud in the 2020 election — but the evidence never arrived.

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Even though the group never turned over the promised data, Grigsby wrote, it began publicly claiming that it had given the state a hard drive — a claim Grigsby indicated the group also made to the Arizona Senate and to the Phoenix office of the FBI.

“Not only is this patently false, TTV acknowledged via correspondence and during a meeting with them that they had not given us the information but that they would,” he wrote.

True the Vote propagated claims of vote fraud by relying on geolocation data, which became the central focus of the movie “2000 Mules.” Trump has cited the movie as proof the election was stolen, and he’s praised the group’s work. But the movie’s claims have been sharply called into question by federal investigators and researchers who have tested its theories.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr delivered a forceful rebuke of the movie’s premise in testimony to the Jan. 6 select committee. He told the panel that in any metropolitan area, geolocation data would likely show “hundreds” of people who passed by drop boxes on multiple occasions.

“The premise that if you go by a box, five boxes or whatever it was, you know that that’s a mule is just indefensible,” Barr said, adding, “It didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting,” Barr said.

Despite Barr’s mockery of the premise, Trump has promoted its claims both online and during his public events.

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}:

In an April 2022 meeting, Grigsby said the group claimed to have evidence of “243 mules” who had stuffed ballot boxes in Arizona. But they presented no hard evidence to back it up, he said.

In his most recent meeting with the group on June 1, Grigsby said Engelbrecht and Phillips indicated they had shared all their data with the FBI and were working with the bureau as informants. But he said the FBI’s Phoenix field office quickly confirmed this to be false and said the group had, in turn, told FBI agents to contact Brnovich’s office to obtain their data.

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Grigsby also flagged the nonprofit status of the organization, noting the “considerable sums of money” they had raised while alleging massive voter fraud and promises to provide law enforcement with the information — even as they remained unable to provide the information.

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7wvj/lions-of-liberty-oath-keepers-midterm-ballot-boxes

Armed Fringe Groups Are Gearing Up to ‘Protect’ Midterm Ballot Dropboxes

The groups, inspired by conspiracy theories and the Big Lie about the 2020 election, could deter some voters, experts warn.

TO

By Tess Owen

October 6, 2022​Screenshot of a YCPT meeting in August led by Jim Arroyo

A “patriot group” in Arizona called Lions of Liberty—which is closely tied to the Oath Keepers—is organizing their supporters to go out and conduct round-the-clock surveillance of ballot dropboxes during the midterm elections. It’s the latest sign that groups with clear ties to extremists, galvanized by conspiracy theories, are seeking to take matters into their own hands this election season. 

Ballot dropboxes have become the central focus of election fraud conspiracy theorists, thanks to the debunked documentary 2,000 Mules, by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza.

That film claims that a shadowy network of hired “mules” in contested states were hired by nonprofits as part of a giant ballot trafficking operation to stuff dropboxes with fake absentee ballots, all with the goal of stealing the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The film was released in May, six months before the midterms, reinvigorated the “Stop the Steal” movement and inspired vigilante efforts around the country—in some cases spearheaded by innocuous-sounding groups that obscure the known ideologues and extremists behind them.

Lions of Liberty is the “political arm” of a newly-formed nonprofit called Yavapai County Preparedness Team (YCPT), led by the former vice president of Arizona’s Oath Keeper chapter, Jim Arroyo. At a meeting in August that was posted to YouTube, Arroyo explained that they had turned the Oath Keeper chapter into a corporate nonprofit under the name of YCPT, which in turn gave them the ability to get a bank account.

In an email to VICE News, Arroyo said that the Arizona chapter officially broke ties with the national leadership of the notorious militia group after it was  implicated in the violent riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. (Five members are currently standing trial for seditious conspiracy charges, including the group’s leader Stewart Rhodes. Prosecutors allege that Rhodes and his cohort plotted an “armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy.”) However, they had been operating more or less independently from the national organization for about four years, said Arroyo; Rhodes broke ties with the Arizona contingent after they declined to assist in armed vigilante activities at the border, out of respect for Border Patrol.

News

The Oath Keepers’ Jan. 6 Texts Sure Do Look Damning

GREG WALTERS

10.05.22

Arroyo, who insists YCPT is not a militia, led that August meeting in an Oath Keepers hat and T-shirt. He explained to the crowd that he would need volunteers to monitor ballot drop boxes, and that he was particularly concerned about the period between midnight and 6 a.m. “If you saw the movie 2,000 Mules” he said, that timeframe was “when the bulk of the problems happen, that’s when we will be on scene with a camera and flashlight.” Arroyo told VICE News that some volunteers might be armed. “This is Arizona; almost everyone is armed, all the time,” he said. “That's not a big deal here.”

Arroyo said he will likely pick up a couple of shifts to monitor dropboxes.

In the August meeting, Arroyo assured members of the crowd that they’d be welcome to continue wearing their Oath Keepers merch, even while conducting ballot dropbox surveillance. “Your shirts and hats are what tell the world you’re not ashamed to be an Oath Keeper, or afraid of the government just because of that crap that happened on January the 6th, which was completely staged. It was a setup,” Arroyo said, before acknowledging, “Yeah, they did something stupid beyond all belief.”

During the meeting, Arroyo also stoked fears of an imminent civil war. “This is not the same as (Black Lives Matter) and George Floyd or antifa. This is a direct confrontation with the federal government,” he said. “This is now the federal government of the United States of America in direct conflict with its own citizenry.”

The Lions of Liberty describe themselves as a “resolute nucleus of concerned, passionate conservative patriots who are determined to correct the course for our country which has been hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats, and fake news.” Their goal? “To bring God back to our leadership and win this spiritual battle for the soul of our nation.”

The Lions of Liberty aren’t the only ones calling for and coordinating vigilante activity around the midterm elections.

Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a Seattle-based nonprofit, has been closely tracking this trend.

“The threat of groups of far-right vigilantes, some potentially armed, fueled by Big Lie misinformation, lurking near ballot dropboxes, could potentially deter some from casting their votes,” warned Burghart. “The possibility of conflict in such a scenario is real.”

Burghart added that “dropbox vigilantism” perpetuates unsubstantiated claims of rampant voter fraud that “keep the Big Lie alive and further erodes confidence in elections and democracy.”

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Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea runs On Fire Ministries, an apocalyptic Christian nationalist church in Spokane, and has been leading “training sessions” for prospective volunteers to monitor dropboxes. 

“We are doing something for the community. How many of you watched 2,000 Mules? Raise your hands,” said Shea during a service in September. “I think it would be good if we had some folks who were certified, trained, dropbox observers, in Spokane County.” The training took place on Sept. 30.

Shea is a particularly controversial character; a 2019 investigation by the Washington Legislature concluded that he’d “participated in an act of domestic terrorism” for his involvement in three armed conflicts against the federal government between 2014 and 2016, including the Bundys’ armed standoffs in Nevada and Oregon and an armed conflict with the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department in Priest River, Idaho.

And a group called True the Vote, which was involved in the 2,000 Mules documentary, is also teaming up with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) to monitor dropboxes nationwide. CSPOA is headed by Richard Mack, who has long-standing ties to the militia movement, including to the Oath Keepers.

“The plan from national Big Lie groups, like True the Vote, is to use those “voter fraud” claims to get sympathetic sheriffs to intervene in elections,” said Burghart.

Dropbox surveillance efforts started getting underway earlier this summer, during the primaries, described then by the New York Times as a “nascent” movement. In some places, like in Arizona, groups were planning dropbox “tailgate parties.” One person with a handle referencing QAnon posted a photo of their party to Trump’s platform Truth Social, and credited Seth Keshel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and conspiracy theorist, for the idea.

[Screenshot from the app TruthSocial showing a "dropbox tailgate party"

Brian Cates, a columnist for the fringe-right publication The Epoch Times, has long been a proponent of the “Big Lie” and has been riling up his more than 120,000 followers on Telegram around the idea of taking matters into their own hands this election season. 

“The time for calling for people to just show up to vote is long past. We’re moving into another completely different era,” he wrote. “Citizens will be given the tools to monitor all the dropboxes and engage in massive real-time information operations in order to bring about election integrity.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” he added. “An army of patriots is going to force compliance with the election laws in their states before these next elections are held.”

One of the primary examples of “evidence” of nefarious activity offered by 2,000 Mules was surveillance videos that appeared to show individuals posting multiple ballots into a dropbox, including in Georgia. Submitting multiple ballots on behalf of other people is known as “ballot harvesting,” and it is legal in several states, including Georgia.

However, the fact that submitting multiple ballots has been presented as a telltale sign of election fraud lays the groundwork for possible confrontations between dropbox “monitors” and people who are acting entirely within the law. (Right-wing political commentator Monica Matthews, from Clear Talk Media, even tried to remind her followers of this fact. “Before you all plan Dropbox tailgate parties to monitor the integrity of your elections- MAKE SURE you check your new state laws. Some states allow harvesting,” she wrote on Twitter in August. “Confronting people at dropboxes could land you in jail.”)

Earlier this summer, ahead of Washington’s August 2 primary, some signs began showing up near dropboxes near Seattle saying “This Ballot Dropbox is Under Surveillance” and warned of criminal penalties for ballot harvesting, the Seattle Times reported. However, it’s also legal in Washington to drop off multiple ballots at once on behalf of family members.

The signs also had a QR code that allowed passersby to report “suspicious activity” to the King County Republican Party(whose chair disavowed the vigilante activity). Amber Krabach, a GOP activist, QAnon conspiracy theorist and member of the Kings County Republicans’ “Election integrity Committee”, was behind the signs. The county elections office asked the sheriff’s department to investigate whether Krabach had broken a state law barring civilians from influencing someone’s vote within 25 feet of a ballot dropbox. They didn’t press charges, but they did refer the matter to the FBI.

All these vigilante efforts are taking place against a backdrop of increasingly incendiary rhetoric from GOP figures and far-right forums alike, about what will happen if they get even so much of a whiff of “voter fraud” this election season.

“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place—and it’s bloodshed,” said ex-Congressman Madison Cawthorn at a GOP event in North Carolina this summer.

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On Patriots.win, a pro-Trump forum, some have discussed the need to bring guns to monitor dropboxes. Someone shared an article from the right-wing Gateway Pundit claiming they’d found evidence of massive voter fraud in Detroit during the 2020 election. “We need people waiting for that shit this time and take that shit at gun point,” someone responded. “Use walkie-talkies and don't park anywhere near there or use fake plates and a vehicle wrap.”

Others, like Arroyo from YCPT, have stoked fears of an imminent civil war instigated by the Democrats. “Keep your powder dry until after the midterms,” one person wrote. “No matter what, they are going to try like hell to provoke a civil war before then.”

“Hold the line till Nov… then do whatever the fuck you gotta do,” another user on patriots.win wrote.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/how-true-vote-cultivated-relationships-qanon-influencers-target

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How True the Vote cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers to target an election software company and serve as a pipeline to law enforcement

True the Vote’s activity with QAnon influencers shows how the election denial movement is exploiting the conspiracy theory’s network

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 09/15/22

True the Vote, a conservative organization that’s known for pushing false claims of widespread voter fraud and that was behind the debunked film 2000 Mules, has actively collaborated with QAnon influencers, promising to act as a liaison between them and law enforcement and using them to target an election software company in Michigan.

True the Vote’s collaboration with QAnon influencers is a significant development when it comes to the QAnon community’s ongoing influence in the election denier movement. Media Matters has previously reported on the community’s close associations with election denial efforts; one QAnon influencer is even involved with a coalition recruiting and electing election-denialist secretary of state candidates.

A Media Matters investigation into True the Vote’s extraordinary and blatant collaboration with QAnon figures to push election misinformation — including during repeated appearances on QAnon-supporting shows and the group’s “The Pit” event that included many QAnon figures — reveals the community’s connection with the election denial movement taken to a new level. Most recently, a software company targeted by True the Vote and its QAnon collaborators has sued the group, claiming defamation and saying its founder has left his home due to death threats. True the Vote’s leaders claimed the FBI refused to look at their supposed evidence against the company, so they turned their findings over to QAnon-supporting “citizen researchers.”

True the Vote’s background and history of election denial

Then-tea party activist Catherine Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2009, following the election of then-President Barack Obama, to push for voter ID laws and purging voter rolls. (“Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander has called Engelbrecht “the godmother of the election integrity movement.”) In 2016, Engelbrecht’s business partner, Gregg Phillips, a Republican operative and former Mississippi official, claimed without evidence that that year’s presidential election featured millions of illegal votes, a claim embraced by then-President Donald Trump.

Both Engelbrecht and Phillips are also listed as executive producers for and starred in 2000 Mules, a widely debunked film claiming evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Despite 2000 Mules’ false claims (and True the Vote’s dubious record with its finances), right-wing figures have widely embraced the film, which was screened at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in May. True the Vote has since announced partnerships with right-wing sheriffs groups.

As 2000 Mules catapulted True the Vote into fame within the right, Engelbrecht and Phillips also began to cultivate a relationship with another particular group: supporters of QAnon, a categorically false conspiracy theory that has been tied to multiple acts of violence, including the January 6 insurrection. The conspiracy theory has also spurred internal warnings of domestic terrorism from multiple government agencies.

True the Vote has cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers, appearing on QAnon-supporting shows at least 20 times in four months, and proposed getting their material to law enforcement

Around the same time that 2000 Mules was released, Phillips joined Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, whose leadership has extensively appealed to the QAnon community. There Phillips interacted with multiple QAnon figures, including repeatedly amplifying posts explicitly promoting the conspiracy theory and calling QAnon influencers his “friends.” (Phillips has explicitly credited Truth Social for connecting him with QAnon figures.)

Phillips Q post1

Phillips’ association also extended outside of Truth Social posts. Since at least June, Phillips has repeatedly gone on theQAnon-supporting MatrixxxGrooove Show (or MG Show), which is co-hosted by QAnon supporters Jeffrey Pedersen (known online as “intheMatrixxx”) and Shannon Townsend (known online as “ShadyGrooove”). In fact, he has been on the show at least a dozen times since June.

During those appearances, Phillips has worn flannel for “Flannel Friday,” a trend that developed in the QAnon community,and lauded the QAnon community, saying it was “becoming a force” and adding, “It’s not a fringe movement. It’s not a conspiracy theory.” Phillips even promised the hosts to get Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake on the show — which he did.

Video CitationFrom the July 15, 2022, edition of MatrixxxGrooove Show

Phillips has also gone on other QAnon-supporting shows — such as X22 Report, RedPill78, and those hosted by Jon Herold (known online as “Patel Patriot”) — at least 6 times since May, leading Pedersen to brag that Phillips had been “going on all the anon shows.”

Phillips seemingly revealed some of his motivation for going on QAnon-supporting shows in May, writing, “I don’t agree with all I hear but as long as the motive is freedom from tyranny, I’ll stand next to ANYONE and fight.”

Phillips has also collaborated with QAnon figures for Patriot Games, a podcast that he launched in July. A QAnon influencer has been co-running the podcast’s official Truth Social page, and J.T. Wilde, a QAnon-supporting musician, wrote a song for the podcast, which they first debuted on MatrixxxGrooove Show. Phillips said he is also working with Wilde on other projects.

Engelbrecht, too, has associated with the QAnon community. Besides going on RedPill78,she has appeared multiple times on both X22 Report (whose host is an “old friend” of Engelbrecht, according to Phillips) and MatrixxxGrooove Show. During the latter, the show featured on screen a donation link for True the Vote that suggested some kind of collaboration between the show and the group.

Engelbrecht also participated in the QAnon Flannel Friday trend on the show alongside Phillips and has lauded the show’s “awesome” hosts for doing “such a great job of building an audience of activists and of people that are not willing — not only willing to listen, but willing to engage.” She has also said, “It is coming, there is nothing that can stop what is coming” — echoing a common QAnon phrase. (Engelbrecht has also said a QAnon influencer was “helping to run” True the Vote’s Substack.)

Phillips and Engelbrecht also see QAnon figures as tools to support their agenda. Phillips in recent months said he wanted to use supposed research from QAnon figures to give to law enforcement and the sheriffs groups that partner with True the Vote. Phillips has praised the QAnon community’s research efforts — saying that its “open source intelligence” is “spectacularly good” — and said that he wants to involve its “citizen researchers.” He has also specifically floated giving their research and findings toPinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Mark Lamb — the head of one of the sheriffs groups True the Vote is partnering with who once signed a book with the QAnon slogan (“where we go one, we go all,” or “WWG1WGA” for short) — and to “any of the other sheriffs that are going to be involved.”

Many QAnon figures attended True the Vote’s The Pit event

In August, Phillips and Engelbrecht hosted an event in Arizona they called The Pit (which Herold said he helped coordinate), where they would supposedly reveal “devastating” information showing the 2020 election was stolen.

In the weeks leading up to the event, Phillips told the MatrixxxGrooove Show hosts it would be a “secret meeting” of “influencers, folks like you all, you know, Patel [Patriot] and all the guys” where they would “turn over a bunch of information to you.” Multiple QAnon influencers were photographed at the event, including Zak Paine, the host of RedPill78 and who participated in the January 6 insurrection; David Hayes (know online as “Praying Medic”), who has called for a military coup against Biden; and the host of X22 Report. Multiple members of We The Media, a QAnon influencer collective channel, were also photographed together at the event, and one of its members, Jordan Sather, said “a bunch” of them were attending.

QAnon influencers the pit photos

Media Matters identified at least a dozen QAnon figures who attended. Multiple QAnon influencers later praised the gathering, saying it allowed “us to meet, in the flesh, fellow digital soldiers who have been working tirelessly together in the trenches for years” and thanking Phillips for “bringing the anon community together” because “nobody else has done what you did for us and bringing us together.”

Political figures also attended the event, such as Arizona gubernatorial candidate Lake and Arizona Republican secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem, along with Lamb, the Pinal County, Arizona, sheriff, and Trump attorney Christina Bobb, who used to work for far-right network One America News.

True the Vote used QAnon influencers to target Michigan election software company Konnechafter allegedly being rejected by the FBI

From The Pit, Phillips and Engelbrecht used the QAnon community to target Konnech, a Michigan-based election software company, with election fraud conspiracy theories. Konnech has since sued True the Vote, Phillips, and Engelbrecht for their claims about the company, saying they hacked its servers and that their campaign resulted in death threats against its founder and forced him and his family to flee their home.

While much of The Pit was livestreamed, a portion of it was kept private. That portion focused on conspiracy theories about Konnech, where they claimed it was a “questionable company involved in this that may have been rigging elections on behalf of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” according to Sather, and that the FBI was “too compromised to do anything” about it.

Engelbrecht has criticized the FBI, saying True the Vote shared this information about Konnech with the FBI, but “we became the target” of the agency instead. Therefore, the aim of The Pit event was to “go public … initially in a trusted space with people who could help gather up more and more and more information so that if, God forbid, something happens to us ... that other people are equipped.” Phillps has also said that the FBI “betrayed us.”

Video CitationFrom the August 19, 2022, edition of GraceTime TV

In response to their grievances with the FBI, Phillips and Engelbrecht turned to the QAnon community to “take what we had done and turn it over to these men and women on the internet, these anons, and just let them have it.” Phillips said that because of what they claimed was their falling out with the FBI, they turned to the “most maligned community on Earth,” the “anonymous researchers, you know, that were linked to ‘Q’” (referring to the conspiracy theory’s central figure).

Video CitationFrom the August 31, 2022, edition of 1819 News The Podcast

And the QAnon community responded, saying after the event that it was now “focusing on” and “digging in to” Konnech. Figures also spread nefarious allegations about the company, such as calling it one of the “front companies here in the United States … owned by the CCP” and saying it was tied to efforts to “manipulate our elections.” They also claimed its owner had questionable connections. Sather even called Konnech “our new Dominion,” referring to the election voting software and hardware company that has been targeted with numerous false conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Video CitationFrom a video uploaded to Rumble on August 17, 2022

Some QAnon influencers also said Phillips and Engelbrecht had emailed or planned to email them material about the company, and some even helped establish a Telegram channel dedicated to finding supposed information about Konnech.

Both Phillips and Engelbrecht also subsequently shared content that QAnon figures created regarding Konnech on Truth Social and praised it as “brilliant” and “great work,” and even praised and recommended people follow multiple We The Media members for their supposed findings. One QAnon influencer’s blog targeting Konnech has since been shared by former national security advisor Michael Flynn and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, both QAnon-connected and election denialist figures. Both Phillips and Engelbrecht also pointed to what the “anons” supposedly found to further criticize the FBI.

Phillips and Engelbrecht have also said they are talking with law enforcement and giving them the supposed information from those QAnon figures, invoking their partnerships with sheriffs. “We’re in with attorneys general and district attorneys and sheriffs and governors and any level that will take action,” Engelbrecht said. Phillips also said they were speaking with some United States senators, a secretary of state, and state attorneys general, and Engelbrecht in September said she had been meeting “a number of” elected officials in Washington, D.C.

Video file

CitationFrom the September 8, 2022, edition of MatrixxxGrooove Show

Days before Konnech’s lawsuit was filed, Engelbrecht disclosed — on a QAnon-supporting show — that Konnech sent True the Vote a cease-and-desist order. She refused. A federal judge has since granted Konnech’s motion for a temporary restraining order against True the Vote.

The clear collaboration between True the Vote and QAnon figures to target Konnech serves as a warning on how the QAnon movement has become an online anti-reality network that helps boost other conspiracy theorists — including the election denial movement.

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• Natalia Contreras @ The Texas Tribune: Lawsuit alleges Texas’ True the Vote hacked data and targeted small election vendor with racist, defamatory campaign.

Tags: Charlie Kirk John Cardillo Mike Lindell Round-Up True the Vote

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Lawsuit alleges Texas’ True the Vote hacked data and targeted small election vendor with racist, defamatory campaign

Case cites election integrity group’s own public claims that it stole data from Michigan company that makes software for managing poll workers.

BY NATALIA CONTRERAS, VOTEBEAT AND THE TEXAS TRIBUNE SEPT. 14, 2022

Democratic primary voting in the West University area in Houston on Mar. 6, 2018.

Primary voting in Houston in 2018. A small election vendor this week filed a lawsuit against Texas-based True the Vote, accusing the organization of defamation. Credit: Michael Stravato for The Texas Tribune

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. The article is available for reprint under the terms of Votebeat’s republishing policy.

A defamation and computer fraud lawsuit filed this week against Texas-based True the Vote asks a judge to essentially determine whether the election integrity group’s campaign against a small election vendor constitutes slanderous lies or a participation in criminal acts.

The suit was brought by Konnech Inc., a small elections logistics company based in Michigan. It alleges that True the Vote and its followers launched a stream of false and racist accusations against the company’s founder, forcing him and his family to flee their home in fear for their lives and damaging the company’s business. The suit cites True the Votes’ public claims that it hacked the company’s servers and accessed the personal information of nearly 2 million U.S. poll workers.

In a rare move, the judge granted Konnech’s request for a temporary restraining order against Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, leaders of True the Vote, a nonprofit organization known for making allegations of voter fraud without evidence to support their claims. Judge Kenneth Hoyt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas found a “substantial likelihood” that Konnech would “suffer irreparable injury” without it. The order also prohibits True the Vote from accessing, or attempting to access, Konnech’s computers or disclosing any of the company’s data and orders the group to disclose more information about the alleged breach.

Experts told Votebeat the damage done through the spread of conspiracy theories about election software companies such as Konnech by groups like True the Vote could impact the already limited tools available that help election officials hire, train and schedule election workers.

True the Vote has for years claimed that voting machines are not secure and that U.S. elections are increasingly fraudulent but has offered little evidence, and its claims have failed to stand up to basic scrutiny. Konnech’s lawsuit specifically names Engelbrecht, True the Vote’s founder, and Phillips, a board member, saying that they “have intentionally, repeatedly, and relentlessly attacked” Konnech, and its founder, Eugene Yu, with a “unique brand of racism and xenophobia.”

Engelbrecht and Phillips, for example, repeatedly called Yu a “Chinese operative” who was spearheading a “Red Chinese communist op run against the United States.”

“On August 27, 2022, True the Vote posted an article claiming that Konnech is ‘owned by the Chinese Communist Party,’ even though Konnech is owned by U.S. citizens who are not affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, and claiming that Konnech is involved in the ‘subversion of our elections’ which is tantamount to falsely accusing Konnech of election fraud, treason, and espionage,” the complaint states.

True the Vote named its campaign targeting Konnech and Yu the “Tiger Project.”

In a text message to Votebeat on Tuesday, Engelbrecht said “True the Vote looks forward to a public conversation about Konnech’s attempts to silence examination of its activities through litigation.”

Hours after Engelbrecht was served with the lawsuit Monday, she took to social media to tell her followers about how they can prepare for an “honest election” in November. But first, she announced True the Vote had been sued and reassured the nearly 1,600 viewers who tuned into a livestream on the crowdfunding site Locals that allegations made by Konnech Inc. are “meritless.”

“We're going to keep moving forward. Everything we have ever said about any of this is true,” Engelbrecht said during the hourlong livestream she hosted from a hotel room in Washington, D.C., where she encouraged viewers to sign up as poll watchers and to monitor drop boxes. “And it's just a function of how we find our path to release it publicly in a way that allows us to keep moving forward.”

To date, no proof of widespread voter fraud has been found and True the Vote has not released any evidence of such fraud.

The fact that a federal judge granted the temporary restraining order under the case’s circumstances is significant, said Peter Vogel, a Texas litigation attorney who specializes in cybersecurity and information technology. Federal judges rarely grant injunctions without allowing a defendant to present evidence, he said.

“So that tells me that there must be very persuasive evidence for a federal judge to grant a temporary restraining order without having the other side be present," Vogel said

Vogel also has decades of experience as a computer programmer and has examined electronic election systems for the Texas secretary of state’s office.

Another significant aspect of the order, he said, is the relatively low level of bond the judge required Konnech to post: just $100. The bond usually protects the enjoined parties from any damage.

“This tells me the judge doesn't think there's any damage to the defendant.” Vogel said.

True the Vote’s “Tiger Project” consisted of filing dozens of public record requests to Konnech’s customers, “all in an apparent effort to intimidate those customers or to otherwise raise customers’ suspicions about Konnech,'' according to the company’s complaint.

In addition, the complaint says, True the Vote, Engelbrecht, and Phillips “falsely claimed” they discovered Konnech had stored data on an unsecured server in Wuhan, China, “which Defendants hacked into and stole data from,” including personal data on 1.8 million poll workers “which they claim is a vehicle for the Chinese Communist Party to breach U.S. elections.”

The company said it uses no such server, and stores all U.S. data “exclusively on protected computers located within the United States.” In addition, it said, it does not have data on that many poll workers “or even a small fraction of that number.”

“When [True the Vote] claimed to have illegally accessed Konnech’s system, the software was being used to manage poll worker recruitment and scheduling by 17 cities and counties (no states),” Jon Goldberg, a spokesman for Konnech, said in an emailed statement to Votebeat.

Konnech’s only Texas client is Travis County, which uses the company’s PollChief tool to recruit, train and schedule poll workers.

According to the complaint, Konnech “does not select, communicate, or otherwise interface with any poll workers.” Konnech also argues that it “never handles any ballots and no ballots or other voting counts ever enter any of Konnech’s computer servers.”

Experts say the claims and conspiracy theories spread by groups like True the Vote about small companies such as Konnech, which offers a software that election officials can use to train, recruit and schedule poll workers for an election, could negatively impact election offices and ultimately voters and taxpayers.

The market for technology available to help support elections is already very small, said Tammy Patrick, election administration expert and senior adviser at Democracy Fund. There’s typically only a handful of election support software available for election administrators. Additionally, the shepherding of hundreds and sometimes thousands of election poll workers to get hired, trained and scheduled to work can be a huge task that requires a lot of time, staff and additional resources, she said.

“Software like the one this company provides, removes all of that back and forth and allows for a more streamlined, more efficient process,” Patrick said.“And so when you have a situation like this, that is infringing and slowing down, and making the hiring of poll workers less efficient in a time when it's already a huge challenge. It can be incredibly problematic.”

The right-wing nonprofit organization has spearheaded the spread of voter fraud conspiracy theories in Texas and beyond. Earlier this year, Engelbrecht teamed up with conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza to produce the documentary film “2000 Mules”. The movie aims to expose voter fraud in the 2020 election, which has been repeatedly debunked and criticized. The organization has also partnered with conservative sheriffs across the county to increase surveillance of voting and to help in investigating voter fraud allegations.

According to the lawsuit the “attacks” on Konnech began with “The Pit,” a True the Vote, invitation-only event in August, which was also live streamed, where Engelbrecht and Phillps would finally release “devastating information” that would prove the 2020 election was stolen.

“Instead, Defendants used The Pit as a platform to announce their website, and publicly launch their attack against Konnech by spreading baseless lies,” the lawsuit claims.

The “smearing campaign” against Konnech continued with True the Vote followers associating the otherwise unknown company to “everything from Mark Zuckerberg, to George Soros, the Chinese Communist Party, and even the origins of COVID-19,” the lawsuit states.

The complaint lays out True the Vote’s conspiracy theories about Konnech, which read like a cyber thriller.

Speaking on a podcast titled “Prophets and Patriots,” Phillips described meeting his “guys” at a hotel room in Dallas, where they put “towels under the doors” like “some kind of a James Bond kind of thing,” and proceeded to hack into a Konnech server, according to the complaint, which included a copy of the podcast.

Konnech’s complaint is another example of several ongoing lawsuits that allege that “individuals are knowingly and intentionally putting out misinformation as a way of making money and accumulating power,” said David A. Schulz, Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic director.

Other election tech companies, such as Dominion and Smartmatic have filed defamation, libel and slander lawsuits against groups and allies of former president Donald Trump who echoed his false claims about 2020 election fraud, including Fox News and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

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In Georgia, two election workers filed a defamation lawsuit against cable news channel One America Network over debunked claims that the election workers had brought suitcases filled with illegal ballots while working as ballot counters. The lawsuit was resolved with a settlement in May.

“This is not the first case where this spread of false information has caused people to make death threats, and that has required people to leave their homes,” Schulz said. “This misinformation not only damages reputations, but it has real effects on people's lives and companies causing grave damage, and bringing a claim for libel is one of the few tools that companies have to fight back.”

A hearing on Konnech’s case is scheduled for Sept. 26 in U.S. District Court in Houston.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

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https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/true-the-vote-election-fraud/

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How True the Vote Fabricates Claims of Election Fraud, for Fun and Profit

Gregg Phillips, a former Texas official who claims that “2,000 mules” stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, has raised millions of dollars to chase nonexistent fraudulent votes.

By Mimi Swartz

August 22, 2022

Gregg Phillips True the Vote

Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips.]

If your movie preferences lean toward the likes of Top Gun: Maverick, or if your politics fall anywhere to the left of Liz Cheney, you might have missed the theatrical release of a documentary titled 2000 Mules. But if you tuned in to the January 6 hearings, you might have caught a reference to the film by former attorney general William Barr, who, doubling as a movie critic, dismissed it as “singularly unimpressive” and “indefensible.”

Directed by right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules purports to prove that Democrats engaged in widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election and stole the presidency from Donald Trump—who, coincidentally or not, pardoned D’Souza in 2018 after his felony conviction for making illegal campaign contributions. Trump, who hosted a screening of 2000 Mules at Mar-a-Lago, called it the “greatest and most impactful documentary of our time.”

As with so many things hyped by the former president, the film became a viral sensation, complete with its own eponymous hashtag. It is among the highest-grossing documentaries of the year so far, having earned nearly $1.5 million at the box office since its May release. (Documentaries don’t tend to attract Marvel franchise–size audiences.) Streaming revenues—D’Souza’s website sells the film for $19.99 a pop—totaled $10 million in just the first two weeks of release, according to Salem Media Group, the conservative Christian company that financed the film.

Whatever haul it’s actually made, 2000 Mules and its claims have clearly achieved a broad reach. A Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely U.S. voters conducted in the first week in June found that 41 percent had heard of the film and 15 percent had seen it. (Of the 146 likely voters who had watched the film, 77 percent said it strengthened their “conviction that there was systematic and widespread election fraud in the 2020 election.”) One of the movie’s admiring viewers was Texas Secretary of State John Scott, a Greg Abbott appointee who briefly represented Trump in a challenge to Pennsylvania’s 2000 election tally. “It’s really amazing,” the state election chief told an audience of Jewish conservatives in Dallas in mid-July. “You get an enormous amount of information.”

This success has come despite the movie’s claims being repeatedly debunked. The Associated Press, NPR, the New York Times, PolitiFact, and the Washington Post, among others, have pointed out that the film’s central assertion—that cellphone tracking data reveals multiple trips by Democrat-funded flunkies (a.k.a. “mules”) to stuff drop boxes with phony ballots in battleground states—is just so much hooey. The film contains video footage of people putting multiple ballots into drop boxes (which is not, as the film would have it, illegal). But as NPR notes, the videos never show the same individuals taking votes to multiple drop boxes, or returning to the same boxes to stuff them with additional ballots.

Some of the alleged ballot-harvesters get tagged as though they’ve been spied on by undercover cops—including “dog guy,” who was filmed with his pup. Another fellow is deemed suspicious for taking a picture of his bike propped against a drop box after voting. “If you’re just casting your own ballot,” one of the film’s talking heads asks darkly, “what reason in the world would you have to come back and take a picture of the box?” Millions of Instagram users could provide the answer.

The absurdities don’t stop there. A map that purports to depict cellphone usage in Atlanta—one of the main alleged centers of mulish activity—actually shows a slice of Moscow, according to the Washington Post. The film boasts that the “geolocation” technology not only backs up Trump’s assertions of systematic election theft but had such pinpoint accuracy that it also helped solve the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Georgia. Law enforcement officials told NPR that there was no truth to the story; the murder had been solved two months before the brains behind 2000 Mules said they turned over their evidence to authorities.

You might think such disproven claims would discredit the filmmakers. But for many conspiracy theorists, the depictions of shadowy, hoodie-wearing figures approaching ballot drop boxes, interspersed with images of dark rooms lit by computer screens displaying incomprehensible maps and diagrams, is proof aplenty.

The star of the show, along with D’Souza and the hoodied mules, is Gregg Phillips, a Republican who has served as a state official in Mississippi and Texas. He is credited with developing the technology used to “prove” the mules’ nefarious deeds. According to the film, Phillips has “a deep background in election intelligence; he’s worked projects over the world; he has a massive thirty years’ experience.” His costar is Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the Houston-based nonprofit True the Vote, whose stated mission is to “restore America’s confidence in our electoral process.”

Phillips has served as a board member and a highly paid “researcher” for True the Vote. He and Engelbrecht are listed as executive producers of 2000 Mules. And both have shown, time and again, how a lot of money can be made by purporting to show—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that voter fraud is an organized threat to our democracy. As Texas-based reporter Cassandra Jaramillo writes in a recent exposé for the investigative website Reveal, “True the Vote highlights how exploiting the Big Lie has become a lucrative enterprise.”

Engelbrecht and Phillips make a cinematic pair. She is blond, always impeccably made up, and earnest in the way of a former Texas beauty queen turned marketing executive. The tall, pale-eyed Phillips, who began his political career, and his hunt for voter fraud, in Alabama in the eighties, is as steady and sincere as an undertaker, with the kind of elaborate, well-tended facial hair that evokes a Civil War general. You could think of them as the Barbie and Ken of voter fraud, or maybe the Bonnie and Clyde.

Engelbrecht, a former small-business owner and Parent Teacher Organization board member in southeast Texas, began chasing alleged voter fraud in 2009 after finding herself “sickened” by the election of President Barack Obama. She’s been a leading advocate for restrictive voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls, and has organized controversial poll-watching efforts focused on Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Houston.

Elected officials including the late Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas have raised questions about the tactics of Engelbrecht’s organizations. King Street Patriots, the anti-voter-fraud group that Engelbrecht founded prior to True the Vote, in 2009, was registered as a charitable 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Democratic officials and voting rights groups such as Fair Fight, founded by Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic legislator and current candidate for governor of Georgia, have charged that True the Vote uses “suppressive tactics” and supports only Republican candidates, in violation of nonprofit rules. Journalists for the Washington Post and the Center for Investigative Reporting have documented questionable financial dealings—including the transfer of large sums of money going to Engelbrecht’s and Phillips’s for-profit businesses. In every case, the two have denied wrongdoing.

(Texas Monthly made multiple requests to interview Engelbrecht and Phillips, then sent a detailed list of questions to them and James Bopp, a lawyer who has represented True the Vote. Brian Glicklich, True the Vote’s communications consultant, said Engelbrecht and Phillips would not respond to questions or meet with a reporter.)

Phillips became nationally notorious immediately after the 2016 election, when he tweeted on November 11—soon after Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton—that he had “Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations. Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million.” At the time, Phillips was marketing an app he’d created, called VoteStand, which allowed users to send photos or videos of suspected improper voting or electioneering to a central database.

Not surprisingly, President-elect Trump jumped on Phillips’s claim, tweeting: “Look forward to seeing final results of VoteStand. Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal.” (Coincidentally or not, that is approximately the margin by which Clinton won the popular vote.) Despite promises to produce evidence of his claims, Phillips never did so. Reputable election officials from both parties, in states across the country, said no such fraud took place. But Phillips’s “finding” became the basis for Trump to repeatedly assert what he started saying in November of that year: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The Associated Press, among others, started poking into Phillips’s history in the wake of his splashy claim. In 2017, AP reported that the self-proclaimed foe of voter fraud was registered in 2016 to vote in three states: Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. Queried on that subject, Phillips’s response was, “Why would I know or care? Doesn’t that just demonstrate how broken the system is?”

Across the country, judges appointed by presidents of both parties have heard claims of widespread voter fraud, with not one finding any compelling evidence to support them. Yet Phillips and Engelbrecht, along with Trump, have brought to mind Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ observation that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” When the lie is amplified by partisan outlets such as Fox News and by influencers on social media, that makes it easier for the conspiracy mongers to advance their political goals—and for some to make money along the way.

Christian Menefee, a Democrat who serves as county attorney for Harris County, where Houston is located, told me that “the lies and exaggerations about voter fraud . . . are used by conspiracy theorists to file meritless lawsuits, and by elected officials to push partisan audits that end up finding nothing. It leads legislators to pass restrictive voting laws, causes people to question election processes that have been safely used for decades, and makes election workers fear they’ll find themselves in court if they make a minor mistake. These are real impacts, changing how our elections are run and making it harder for eligible voters to cast ballots.”

Andrew Wheat, the research director of the corruption-exposing nonprofit group Texans for Public Justice, put it a little differently. “Sometimes you get the feeling that we as a human race have lost the ability to do a simple Google search, because these hustlers keep doing the same things over and over.”

When Gregg Phillips entered political life in his home state of Alabama, he was a clean-shaven, baby-faced fund-raiser for the state’s Republican party. As he later told the Atlantic, “Our first voter project I did when I worked for the GOP in Alabama back in the 1980s. I’ve been involved off and on since then, and I’ve always said we need to ensure integrity in our systems.”

At a legislative hearing in Arizona in late May, Phillips recounted an experience back home that he said turned him into a crusader against voter fraud. In 1994, a race for chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama between the Democratic incumbent, Ernest “Sonny” Hornsby, and a Republican challenger, Perry O. Hooper Sr., came down to fewer than 300 votes out of 1.1 million cast. Hooper, whose campaign was run by GOP campaign guru Karl Rove, won after a recount. But while the outcome was in question, Hooper’s campaign made vociferous charges of voter fraud, which were never proved. Phillips said he advised the campaign in its investigation. “I worked in Alabama since I was a kid and you know, 15,000 votes showing up in Selma, Alabama”—a city that is overwhelmingly Black—“was not a super big surprise to anyone,” Phillips told his Arizona audience.

In 1991, Phillips moved on to work in Mississippi as a fund-raiser for Kirk Fordice, who became the first Republican to be elected governor of the state since Reconstruction. Fordice, in turn, tapped Phillips to head the Mississippi Department of Human Services in 1993. But when the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (or PEER), made up of legislators appointed by the lieutenant governor and house Speaker, conducted a background check on Phillips, it found discrepancies in his résumé. Phillips, who was then 33, claimed he’d majored in finance at the University of Alabama, but the committee’s records search showed he had majored in transportation. And though Phillips said he was a registered voter in Mississippi at the time, the committee found that his name did not appear on the rolls. Phillips also failed to file a required financial report to the state ethics commission. And he was, according to reports citing his former wife’s new husband, a deadbeat dad who’d failed to pay child support. (Phillips denied that accusation.)

Nevertheless, the state Senate approved his nomination. Within two years, Phillips left for more lucrative work with a contractor who had benefited from an $878,000 deal with his department. Phillips’s new salary: $84,000 a year. (In today’s dollars, that’s around $164,000.) A subsequent investigation by the same PEER committee concluded that “Mr. Phillips’ actions create the appearance of impropriety, facilitating an erosion of the public trust.” The committee also asserted that Phillips’s moves “relative to the contractual arrangement create the appearance of impropriety and could constitute a violation of state ethics laws.” Phillips denied any wrongdoing.

Phillips’s next public position was as the executive director of the Mississippi GOP, which was hellbent on combatting alleged voter fraud in Black communities (in a state that is 38 percent Black). A lawsuit from Black leaders in one such area resulted in a restraining order against the state GOP’s voter-intimidation tactics, and representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice stationed themselves at polling locations during Mississippi’s 1995 elections to make sure voters of color were not turned away. The state GOP provided no evidence of the fraud that it had alleged.

Phillips hadn’t yet become a national figure, but his pattern was set: a life of toggling between ever-more-lucrative public and private-sector jobs. Phillips has mostly shown impeccable timing in his entrances and exits, experiencing only one glitch: he was up for a job as head of human resources for the state of Alabama in 1995, but a negative editorial in the Birmingham News dashed his chances, citing Phillips’s “shaky qualifications and a suspect track record.”

For some Texas Republicans, though, Phillips’s track record seemed to inspire little more than a shoulder shrug. In 2003, Phillips was hired as executive deputy commissioner of the state Health and Human Services Commission under Governor Rick Perry. (When a Houston Chronicle reporter later looked into how Phillips had come to be hired, no officials could recall. There were no letters of recommendation in his file.)

Another reported conflict of interest followed. When Phillips oversaw a billion-dollar plan to streamline and privatize Health and Human Services, two clients of a company called Enterject, a “management consulting services” firm that Phillips had founded, won $167 million in state contracts. Phillips claimed to have severed all ties with Enterject while serving in state government, but his then-wife was the company’s chief financial officer. In addition, the Chronicle reported, “a company called GHT Development Inc. owned the Internet registration for the Enterject Web site. GHT listed Gregg Phillips as its chief executive.”

When Phillips resigned from the Texas HHSC, he said it was because of a lingering health issue and that he wanted to spend more time with his family. But as it had in Mississippi, controversy followed him. According to a subsequent Dallas Morning News investigation, the company Phillips hired to replace state workers—to the tune of $899 million for five years—produced chaos, including jammed call centers and clients who were separated wrongfully from their benefits. “Most infamously,” the News reported, “applicants for a time were given a wrong fax number for sending pay stubs and other private documents. It belonged to a Seattle warehouse that had no part of the deal.”

Five years later, in 2010, the state hired an Austin-based company called AutoGov to help fix the continuing problems in Health and Human Services, at a cost to taxpayers of $207,500. State officials thought the company’s software expertise might simplify some of the confusion Phillips had left behind. Phillips, it turned out, had founded AutoGov and served as its chairman and CEO. The News reported that there was nothing illegal about bringing Phillips back into the fold given the years he had been away from state government, but noted that “critics of the deal say it’s troubling that a former employee is getting paid to try to fix problems spawned by an idea he helped hatch.”

Engelbrecht and Phillips have shown, time and again, how a lot of money can be made by purporting to show that voter fraud is an organized threat to our democracy.

Nobody can deny that Phillips is relentlessly entrepreneurial. In 2012, he garnered attention nationally with his VoteStand app. “People will have somewhere to turn if they see voter fraud or something that is not quite right in their eyes,” Phillips explained to Politico. “We think this will help us leave a positive legacy this election cycle, rather than just putting up a bunch of ads.” The app, available for iPhone through Apple’s app store, purportedly sent all reports to a “team of experts that are interested in and investigating this issue,” Phillips said, though he declined to offer more specifics about how the app worked and who had paid for its development. (He also declined to answer Texas Monthly’s question about who the “experts” were.)

It turned out that funding for VoteStand came from a super PAC, Winning Our Future, for which Phillips served as managing director. The PAC, which received $15 million from right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, backed former Republican U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s unsuccessful presidential run in 2012.

Phillips appears to have connected with Catherine Engelbrecht around 2014, when she was continuing to gain national notoriety for fighting imaginary voter fraud. Phillips had his mysterious technology, and Engelbrecht had a platform to market their investigations nationwide.That year, Phillips followed up on VoteStand with a nonprofit he founded called theVoters Trust, which offered a $1 million bounty to anyone who could prove that IRS leaders or members of the Obama administration were targeting right-wing or tea party groups. (It’s unclear who collected the cash, if anyone did.)

Even before that time, Englebrecht’s efforts, like Phillips’s, had begun to attract scrutiny. In 2011, the Texas Observer reported on multiple controversies emanating from her King Street Patriots, including one that involved a video featuring a doctored image of a Black woman holding a sign declaring, “I only got to vote once!” In a harbinger of things to come, Engelbrecht’s group had taken “evidence” of invalid voter applications to Harris County’s Republican voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, who subsequently claimed in August 2010 to have found more than five thousand such invalid applications.

The questionable research from King Street Patriots was challenged by Houston Votes, a progressive group that was registering voters. Englebrecht had publicly claimed that Houston Votes was being controlled by the New Black Panthers, a “radical, racist, criminal hate group.” The group’s leader filed a defamation suit, but the damage had been done: before the allegations were made, Houston Votes had been registering one thousand minority voters a day; afterward, its daily tally dropped to two hundred. That November, at the request of Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, federal monitors from the Department of Justice came to Houston to protect voters against intimidation by King Street poll watchers on Election Day.

More trouble followed. The Texas Democratic Party filed a lawsuit alleging that King Street Patriots made “unlawful expenditures in coordination with the Republican Party and/or one or more of its candidates.” The suit further alleged that King Street was a “sham domestic nonprofit corporation that instead acts as an unregistered and illegal political committee.” Though King Street denied the allegations, a state court judge ruled in favor of the Democrats. Appeals dragged on for several years, however, by which time King Street had morphed into a different group, True the Vote. The case was ultimately dismissed by agreement of both parties, and, according to Chad Dunn, the attorney who represented the Democrats, “It looks like Catherine went into the vote-suppression business full-time.”

None of the controversies stopped Engelbrecht from becoming a tea party star, hosting events where she charmed Republican county clerks, state legislators, and members of Congress in Texas and beyond. Despite the clear partisan flavor of these events, Engelbrecht continued to claim that True the Vote was nonpartisan. Engelbrecht was becoming a Fox News darling, and True the Vote said it was organizing poll-watching volunteers in 35 states, while pushing for voter roll purges and drawing accusations of voter intimidation.

It’s easy to see why Engelbrecht and Phillips joined forces. They had a lot in common, including a loathing for President Obama, a love of the spotlight, and a penchant for turning a personal profit from their crusades against alleged voter fraud. Their companies have shared a mailing address, and in 2016 Engelbrecht was named the chief financial officer of one of Phillips’s companies. Engelbrecht and Phillips have been coy about a reported romantic link, though both listed the same address in the small Central Texas town of Cat Spring, about sixty miles west of Houston, for several years. “You know, Gregg and I have actually talked about this and how we would answer this question,” Engelbrecht told the New York Times in May, “and the best answer that I think either of us are going to give is, it is totally unrelated and unimportant.”

Regardless, they’ve made quite a team. By 2016, True the Vote’s national influence was growing, with a substantial network of volunteers, event co-sponsorships with the Koch brothers’ tea party advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, and data collected by Phillips, who by then was touting a proprietary algorithm for his research. (That includes the research that he claimed—without ever showing any evidence—proved that more than three million noncitizens voted in 2016.) In the two years prior to 2016, one of Phillips’s companies was paid $30,000 by True the Vote, while he was a board member of the organization.

Allegations of widespread voter fraud were repeated by Donald Trump and right-wing media so often that they became gospel, first on the far right and eventually among a majority of Republicans. Phillips was always eager to congratulate himself for his work. “I’ve torn down govt in two states, eliminated 20K jobs and saved $5 billion,” he boasted in a 2016 tweet. “Requires enormous stones.”

When legitimate media outlets came calling, Phillips was more circumspect about his never-proved claim of more than three million illegal votes. “I’m not gonna be goaded into going faster than I want to,” he told the Atlantic in January 2017, when pressed about releasing his data. “I’m not a government official.” Besides, he said, “Our interest is not in uncovering anything that might somehow change any past election, because once those votes are certified, they’re certified and that’s over. The work that we’re doing could create a foundation for looking at elections moving forward.” The same month, The Guardian reported that the man who had built a career excising government waste owed about $100,000 in back taxes. Phillips said he owed less than $50,000, and that he was “in a disagreement with the IRS.”

A lesser man might have retreated with his spoils to, say, a villa in the Caymans. Not Phillips. Joe Biden’s victory in 2020—along with Trump’s incessant claim that the election had been stolen—inspired a deeply conservative North Carolina donor by the name of Fred Eshelman to wire $2 million shortly after Election Day to True the Vote, whose leaders were saying they needed to raise $7.3 million to stop the certification of the election and get to the bottom of the grand conspiracy that robbed Trump of his presidency. A former pharmaceutical executive and financier who gave $100 million to the University of North Carolina, Eshelman could afford to make the biggest donation True the Vote had ever received.

On November 9, not long after Eshelman’s payment arrived, Phillips’s latest venture, OPSEC, billed True the Vote $350,000. The following day, True the Vote gave a $500,000 retainer to Bopp, a right-wing lawyer best known for winning the Citizens United case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down limits on corporate campaign contributions. While True the Vote had promised that OPSEC would “aggregate and analyze data to identify patterns of election subversion,”Bopp’s role was to try to persuade judges to give the organization access to voter rolls in closely contested states so it could show proof of fraud. Eshelman was told that Bopp would file lawsuits in seven states. He filed four, and then voluntarily withdrew each of them within a week.

Eschelman pitched in another $500,000 after a consultant told him True the Vote needed “additional short-term money for Bopp.” But Bopp, Engelbrecht, and Phillips had promised much and delivered little. “We were just not getting any data or proof,” a lobbyist for Eshelman later told the Washington Post. “We were looking at this and saying to ourselves, ‘This just is not adding up.’”

Disgusted, Eshelman filed suit, demanding a refund. The lawsuit, first filed in federal court, was withdrawn and then refiled in Texas, where a judge threw out the case, ruling that Eshelman did not have standing to sue in the state. The proper authority to investigate the case, the judge said, was the Texas attorney general’s office. Republican attorney general Ken Paxton—who’s been a guest on Engelbrecht’s podcast, has taken no action.

Or rather, the Attorney General’s office has chosen a different kind of action. On May 13th,  before the official May 20th release date of 2000 Mules, Jonathan White, the Division Chief of the AG’s Election Integrity Division, sent out an email to his team, stating that Deputy AG Josh Reno had invited everyone on it to a screening of D’Souza’s “voter fraud documentary” the next evening. The event was free to all comers, along with a plus-one.General Paxton had a block of reservations, White continued, and would be present. “I think they would love to have a good showing from our office…” the head of AG’s Election Integrity Division wrote. The office hosted another screening on June 6, complete with a BBQ lunch.

Meanwhile, according to Reveal’s reporting, court records showed that Phillips’s voter analysis company, OPSEC Group LLC, continued to bill True the Vote after Eschelman broke ties, receiving another $400,000 for a project called Eyes on Georgia.

True the Vote’s tax returns, linked to in the Reveal exposé, have been “riddled with inconsistencies and have regularly been amended,” Jaramillo wrote. Her extensive investigation found that along with the handsome sums paid to Phillips’s various companies for their data analysis, True the Vote has made questionable loans to Engelbrecht, who received $113,396 in 2019 alone.

Phillips is currently CEO and Engelbrecht is “chief experience officer” of a company called CoverMe Services Inc.—formerly known as AutoGov—which says it uses software to “bridge the financial and social service gaps faced by both hospitals and their patients.” CoverMe claims that “in the span of a five-minute interview, hospitals can provide patients with real-time eligibility and enrollment support, creating better outcomes for both the patient and provider.” The State of Mississippi has paid the company close to $1.7 million for its services.

But that doesn’t mean Phillips has given up on voter fraud investigations—especially after the attention garnered by 2000 Mules. The film has the ultimate power-endorser in Trump, who brought up Phillips’s claims again in a twelve-page missive refuting the claims of the January 6 committee. “The data is astonishing!” Trump said in his publicly released statement. “Rather than 2000 mules, the number jumps to 54,000 mules.”

Both Engelbrecht and Phillips are now certified stars on the conspiracy circuit—with their credibility boosted by state and federal lawmakers eager to use their “findings” to make the case for overturning elections. In Wisconsin, the duo addressed the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections in March. In Michigan, seventeen Republican House members asked the state’s attorney general to investigate the claims made in 2000 Mules. Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona, has called for congressional hearings about the film’s allegations. On July 27, in a sign of how much weight Phillips’s name now carries in far-right circles, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake tweeted prior to her primary victory, “I am honored to have the endorsement of True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips!”

Engelbrecht and Phillips have still failed to present any credible evidence to prove the claims they made in the movie. In the Arizona legislative hearing, Phillips said criticism of their methods came from “journalistic terrorists.” (The Republican Party of Arizona picked up on his phrase, twice tweeting out: “The mainstream media is domestic terrorists.”) Asked to describe his process in greater detail, Phillips refused, calling the methods “proprietary.”

Phillips says criticism of True the Vote’s methods comes from “journalistic terrorists.”

On a right-wing podcast in late spring, he claimed that an even bigger finding would soon be revealed. At the hearing in Arizona, he doubled down: “We do indeed have a matter brewing that is ten times bigger than Mules,” he said, inspiring excited whispers in the audience. “It’ll be about six weeks before we can clear our way through it, but I assure you it is the most explosive issue that you have ever come in contact with related to elections in the United States.”

Twelve weeks later, as this story was being published, the explosive revelation had still not been delivered.But Phillips was still dropping hints to titillate the conspiracy-minded. On a podcast in late July, he claimed that what would be revealed stems from an “op” involving “the United States government, which we worked for,” until “we were betrayed by the United States government.” This month, True the Vote held asymposium inArizona called “The Pit,” where Phillips promised to roll out “devastating” findings, including “the part that was left out of the movie.” The proceedings were livestreamed on the Right Side Broadcasting Network. But in lieu of a big reveal, Engelbrecht and Phillips announced they were putting up a new website that would include surveillance video taken at drop boxes and documents from various election lawsuits—but not the geolocation data that was the basis for the film’s allegations. And that, they said, would be a wrap on 2000 Mules. “The end of Mules!” Engelbrecht exclaimed. “End scene. We’re done.”

The pair had already been moving on to their next project. In late July, Phillips appeared withEngelbrecht on a stage in Las Vegas at a gathering of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization of local police officials who claim that federal and state authorities are subordinate to local sheriffs. They were joined by sheriffs who have signed on to True the Vote’s Protect America Now initiative, designed to encourage them to investigate elections—or, as the True the Vote website puts it, to “equip local sheriffs with the tools that they need to fight potential fraud,” such as enhanced video surveillance. A national hotline, according to True the Vote, will be set up “to connect American citizens with their local sheriffs in case they see anything awry” at the polls this fall. Five Texas sheriffs (and one former sheriff) from small, rural counties have signed up.

And so it goes, despite the many investigations of Phillips and Engelbrecht, and despite True the Vote’s continued inability to prove that voter fraud exists. “True the Vote and groups like it are well-documented voter intimidation scams,” said Chris Hollins, a Democrat running for mayor of Houston who, as county clerk for Harris, was on the front lines in the 2020 election. “They’re created to amplify conspiracy theories, funded by wealthy right-wing activists, to tie the hands of election administrators and embolden partisan poll watchers.”

They are also created, as Engelbrecht and Phillips have long demonstrated, with an eye toward making money. To support their efforts to “equip” sheriffs for November’s elections, True the Vote aims to raise a cool $1 million.

Correction 8/22/2022: An earlier version of this article reported Miriam and Sheldon Adelson had given $15 billion to the super PAC Winning Our Future. They gave $15 million.

Update 8/24/2022: This article has been updated to include information about invitations to members of the Texas Attorney General’s office to watch 2,000 Mules.

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https://revealnews.org/article/true-the-vote-big-lie-election-fraud/

video

leaders of the Big Lie Movement Warn Donors Not to Fund Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote

Published onMay 31, 2022

At the secretive Council for National Policy in August 2020, speakers warned attending big money donors not to fund Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote. The panel consisted of many of the leaders of efforts to spread the voter fraud myth, including former Trump campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell.

John Fund:"Let me be very, very blunt and sad at the same time. I am the person who first met Catherine after she bravely fought the vote fraudsters in Harris County, Texas. I gave her her first national publicity. I wrote the Wall Street Journal article that featured her. I enabled her to get the first three foundation grants. You're looking at the person who by putting my reputation on the line, got her her first three foundation grants. Catherine is still a friend of mine.

I like Catherine, but she has gone astray. She has hooked up with the wrong associates. And I have to say this with the greatest of sadness, because I have to be honest with you, because you're the people who actually have to make decisions on your own about who to support. As much as I like Catherine personally, I would not give her a penny. She's a good person who's been led astray. Don't do it."

Cleta Mitchell: "Nancy, don't look so shocked. It's true."

This recording was shared by Documented with the New York Times and was featured in "A Big Lie in a New Package" by Danny Hakim and Alexandra Berzon, published on May 29, 2022.

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ref no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/us/politics/2000-mules-trump-conspiracy-theory.html

A Big Lie in a New Package

A new documentary from Trump allies makes the latest case the election was stolen, but the group behind the claim has been assailed even by some on the hard right.

Former President Donald J. Trump speaking at a screening of “2000 Mules” at Mar-a-Lago on May 4.Credit...D'Souza Media

By Danny Hakim and Alexandra Berzon

    Published May 29, 2022Updated June 8, 2022

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Votes switched by Venezuelan software. Voting machines hacked by the Chinese. Checking for telltale bamboo fibers that might prove ballots had been flown in from Asia. After the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump and his allies cycled through a raft of explanations for what they claimed was the fraud that stole his rightful re-election as president, all of them debunked.

Yet on a recent evening at his Mar-a-Lago resort, there was Mr. Trump showcasing his latest election conspiracy theory, one he has been advancing for months at rallies for his favored midterm candidates.

:{:{The basic pitch is that an army of left-wing operatives stuffed drop boxes with absentee ballots — a new spin on an old allegation that voter-fraud activists call “ballot trafficking.” And while MAGA-world luminaries like Rudolph W. Giuliani, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and the MyPillow founder Mike Lindell filled the gilded ballroom, the former president called out two lesser-known figures sitting up front — the stars of “2000 Mules,” a documentary film promoting that ballot-trafficking theory and premiering at Mar-a-Lago that night.}:

“These people are true patriots,” Mr. Trump said, gesturing from the podium to the pair — a Tea Party veteran from Texas, Catherine Engelbrecht, and Gregg Phillips, her full-bearded sidekick, a longtime Republican operative — and imploring them to “stand up.”

}:

While the early primaries have delivered a mixed verdict on the former president’s endorsements and stolen-election obsessions, polling nonetheless shows that a majority of Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, even though vote fraud is exceedingly rare. Mr. Trump and his allies hope “2000 Mules,” now playing at several hundred theaters, will win over doubters among establishment Republicans.

Ms. Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, a group that has spent years warning of the dangers of voter fraud, has criticized the earlier narratives of the 2020 election as unhelpful. “What they were putting out there was a lot of misinformation that just wasn’t true,” she said in a recent interview. “People want to believe the conspiracies in some ways.” Their film, she maintains, offers a more-serious theory.

[Image

Catherine Engelbrecht, center, founder and president of True the Vote.]

Yet a close look at the documentary shows that it, too, is based on arguments that fall apart under scrutiny.

The film, directed by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, is based in part on an erroneous premise: that getting paid to deliver other people’s ballots is illegal not just in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia where True the Vote centered its research and where third-party delivery of ballots is not allowed in most cases, but in every state.

What’s more, the film claims, but never shows in its footage, that individual “mules” stuffed drop box after drop box. (Mr. Phillips said such footage exists, but Mr. D’Souza said it wasn’t included because “it’s not easy to tell from the images themselves that it is the same person.”) Those claims are purportedly backed up by tracking cellphone data, but the film’s methods of analysis have been pilloried in numerous fact-checks. (True the Vote declined to offer tangible proof — Mr. Phillips calls his methodology a “trade secret.”)

More broadly, Ms. Engelbrecht has said that the surge of mail-in voting in 2020 was part of a Marxist plot, aided by billionaires including George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg, to disrupt American elections, rather than a legitimate response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Phillips, whose firm OpSec does data analysis for True the Vote, is perhaps best known for making a fantastical claim in 2017 that more than three million illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election, which was amplified by Mr. Trump but never backed up with evidence. Mr. Phillips is also an adviser to Get Georgia Right, a political action committee that received $500,000 from Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC this past March 25, the day after Mr. Phillips and Ms. Engelbrecht advanced their 2020 vote-fraud theories to a legislative committee in Wisconsin. Mr. Phillips said he had “received zero money” from Get Georgia Right, which backed Mr. Trump’s favored and failed governor-primary candidate, David Perdue.

Mr. Phillips and Ms. Engelbrecht have become controversial even within the hard-right firmament. They are embroiled in litigation with True the Vote’s largest donor, and Ms. Engelbrecht has feuded with Cleta Mitchell, a leading Trump ally and elections lawyer. John Fund, a prominent conservative journalist who was once a booster of Ms. Engelbrecht, has implored donors to shun her, according to videotape provided to The New York Times by Documented, a nonprofit news site.

“I would not give her a penny,” Mr. Fund said at a meeting of members of the Council for National Policy, a secretive group of right-wing leaders, in the summer of 2020. “She’s a good person who’s been led astray. Don’t do it.”

But Ms. Engelbrecht found support from Salem Media Group, which distributes right-wing talk radio and podcasts, including one hosted by Mr. D’Souza, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump after being convicted of campaign finance fraud. After meeting with Mr. Phillips and Ms. Engelbrecht, Salem Media spent $1.5 million to make the film and $3 million to market it, according to Mr. D’Souza. An elaborate and shadowy film set, with giant screens and flashing lights, was built to show Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips conducting their cellphone-data analysis.

[Image

Directed by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, “2000 Mules” is based on an erroneous central premise: that getting paid to deliver other people’s ballots is illegal in every state.]

The group has not presented any evidence that the ballots themselves — as opposed to their delivery — were improper. “I want to make very clear that we’re not suggesting that the ballots that were cast were illegal ballots. What we’re saying is that the process was abused,” Ms. Engelbrecht said in Wisconsin. In an interview, she backtracked, but when asked to provide evidence of improper votes, she only pointed to previous accusations unrelated to the 2020 general election.

A repeated contention of the documentary is that getting paid to deliver other peoples’ ballots is illegal in every state. Mr. D’Souza emailed The New York Times a citation to a federal statute that outlaws getting paid to vote — and does not discuss delivering other people’s ballots. Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation fellow, appears in the movie agreeing that the practice is outlawed nationwide, but in 2019 he wrote that it was “perfectly legal” in some states for “political guns-for-hire” to collect ballots. (Asked about the discrepancy, Mr. von Spakovsky said he believed the practice is illegal based on federal law.)

The swing states where Mr. Phillips and Ms. Engelbrecht focused their research do ban the delivery of ballots on behalf of others, with some exceptions. But elections officers in 16 other states surveyed by The Times said their states did not prohibit people getting paid to deliver a ballot. Some of those states limit how many ballots an individual can deliver, or bar campaigns from doing so.

:{:{}:

Mr. Phillips and Ms. Engelbrecht’s case is largely built on cellphone data. A report created by the group includes an appendix that claims to list “IMEI” numbers of the tracked devices — 15-digit codes unique to each cellphone. But each entry on the list is a 20-character string of numbers and letters followed by a lot of x’s. Mr. Phillips said new IDs had been created “to obfuscate the numbers.”

The same report says the group “purchased 25 terabytes of cellphone signal data emitted by devices” in the Milwaukee area in a two-week period before the 2020 election. They claim to have isolated 107 unique devices that made “20 or more visits to drop boxes” and “multiple visits to nongovernmental organizations” that were involved in get out the vote efforts.

A number of researchers have said that while cellphone data is fairly precise, it cannot determine if someone is depositing ballots in a drop box or just passing by the area.}:

“It’s really, really hard to assign even what side of the street you’re on when you’re using this kind of data,” said Paul Schmitt, a research scientist and professor at the University of Southern California.

The Trump Investigations

[Card 1 of 8

Numerous inquiries.Since Donald J. Trump left office, the former president has been facing civil and criminal investigations across the country into his business dealings and political activities. Here is a look at the notable inquiries:

Jan. 6 inquiries. A House select committee and federal prosecutors are investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and examining the possible culpability of a broad range of figures — including Mr. Trump and his allies — involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In a series of public hearings, the committee appears to be laying out evidence that could allow prosecutors to indict Mr. Trump.

White House documents investigation. The Justice Department has begun a grand jury investigation into the handling of classified materials that ended up at Mr. Trump’s Florida home. The investigation is focused on the discovery by the National Archives that Mr. Trump had taken 15 boxes of documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when he left office.

Manhattan criminal case. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has been investigating whether Mr. Trump or his family business, the Trump Organization, intentionally submitted false property values to potential lenders. But new signs have emerged that the inquiry may be losing steam.

New York State civil inquiry. The New York attorney general’s office has been assisting with the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation while conducting its own civil inquiry into some of the same conduct. The civil inquiry is focused on whether Mr. Trump’s statements about the value of his assets were part of a pattern of fraud or were simply Trumpian showmanship.

Georgia criminal inquiry. Mr. Trump himself is under scrutiny in Georgia, where the district attorney of Fulton County has been investigating whether he and others criminally interfered with the 2020 election results in the state. Several allies of the former president, including Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham and John Eastman, have been subpoenaed.

Westchester County criminal investigation. The district attorney’s office in Westchester County, N.Y., appears to be focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the value of a golf course, Trump National Golf Club Westchester, to reduce its taxes.

Trump’s social media merger. A federal grand jury in Manhattan has issued subpoenas regarding the merger of Mr. Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, with Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The merger has also been under investigation by financial regulators for months.

True the Vote focuses on Democrats, but in 2019 the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee vowed to be more aggressive in its use of the same practice of collecting mail-in ballots. In fact, one of the few specific allegations of vote fraud cited in the film concerns a North Carolina Republican operativewho was facing ballot-tampering and obstruction-of-justice charges when he died last month. The case led state elections officials to order the first redo of a federal election because of fraud allegations.

As True the Vote’s funding faltered in recent years, it found new adversaries among old friends. During an elections panel hosted by the Council for National Policy in the summer of 2020, Mr. Fund, a former member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, said Ms. Engelbrecht had “hooked up with the wrong associates” and “gone astray.”

:{:{}:

Ms. Mitchell, the elections lawyer and leading vote-fraud activist in her own right, was sitting next to Mr. Fund and nodding through his comments. “It’s true,” she said after he finished.

Ms. Mitchell once represented Ms. Engelbrecht in a dispute with the I.R.S. over allegations that it was targeting conservative groups. Ms. Engelbrecht said that Ms. Mitchell has been “on a rampage against me” since she fired Ms. Mitchell in 2017.}:

She believed the I.R.S. litigation had been “a great fund-raising vehicle” for Ms. Mitchell “and her associates. I wanted to win the case and move on and not be a cottage industry.”

Ms. Mitchell, in a text, said that her legal team spent years doing “all the heavy lifting,” but was fired after issuing a public statement, which had been standard practice. “Problem is that Catherine hates it if anyone else deals with reporters,” she said.

Soon after the 2020 election, with its funding faltering in recent years, True the Vote got a windfall $2.5 million donation from Fred Eshelman, a North Carolina entrepreneur seeking evidence to overturn the election. But the effort sputtered and Mr. Eshelman sued, claiming he had been swindled.

:{:{}:

He lost an initial round in Texas court and is now appealing. The suit alleges Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips were in a romantic relationship and violated Texas law related to conflicts of interest, since True the Vote directed a “substantial portion” of Mr. Eshelman’s funds to OpSec.}:

Asked about a personal relationship, Ms. Engelbrecht said, “You know, Gregg and I have actually talked about this and how we would answer this question. And the best answer that I think either of us are going to give is, it is totally unrelated and unimportant.”

True the Vote’s eventual focus on ballot trafficking was inspired by an Arizona investigation into ballot collection in the 2020 primary that led to indictments.

But True the Vote’s efforts have prompted little action from law enforcement. Last year, after True the Vote circulated its research in Georgia, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the cell data turned over, which tracked people to within 100 feet, was insufficient to act on.

“What has not been provided is any other kind of evidence that ties these cellphones to ballot harvesting,” the bureau said in a letter. “For example, there are no statements of witnesses and no names of any potential defendants to interview.” It added that while the group had said it had “a source” who could validate such findings, “despite repeated requests that source has not been provided.”

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https://documented.net/media/leaders-of-the-voter-fraud-myth-movement-warn-donors-not-to-fund-catherine-engelbrecht-of-true-the-vote

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docs receipts

https://revealnews.org/article/true-the-vote-big-lie-election-fraud/

...a review of thousands of pages of documents from state filings, tax returns and court records, however, paints the picture of an organization that enriches Engelbrecht and partner Gregg Phillips rather than actually rooting out any fraud. According to the documents, True the Vote has given questionable loans to Engelbrechtand has a history of awarding contracts to companies run by Engelbrecht and Phillips. Within days of receiving $2.5 million from a donor to stop the certification of the 2020 election, True the Vote distributed much of the money to a company owned by Phillips, Bopp’s law firm and Engelbrecht directly for a campaign that quickly fizzled out. 

Legal and nonprofit accounting experts who reviewed Reveal’s findings said the Texas attorney general and Internal Revenue Service should investigate.

“This certainly looks really bad,” said Laurie Styron, executive director of CharityWatch.

And while the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been dismissed out of hand by courts and debunked by audits, even those led by Republicans, the story of True the Vote highlights how exploiting the Big Lie has become a lucrative enterprise, growing from a cottage industry to a thriving economy.

The records show:

• True the Vote regularly reported loans to Engelbrecht, including more than $113,000 in 2019, according to a tax filing. Texas law bans nonprofits from loaning money to directors; Engelbrecht is both a director and an employee.
• Companies connected to Engelbrecht and Phillips collected nearly $890,000 from True the Vote from 2014 to 2020. The largest payment – at least $750,000 – went to a new company created by Phillips, OPSEC Group LLC, to do voter analysis in 2020. It’s unclear whether OPSEC has any other clients; it has no website and no digital footprint that Reveal could trace beyond its incorporation records. The contract, which one expert called “eye-popping” for its largess, did not appear to be disclosed in the 2020 tax return the organization provided to Reveal.
• True the Vote provided Bopp’s law firm a retainer of at least $500,000 to lead a legal charge against the results of the 2020 election, but he filed only four of the seven lawsuits promised to a $2.5 million donor, all of which were voluntarily dismissed less than a week after being filed. The donor later called the amount billed by Bopp’s firm “unconscionable” and “impossible.”
• The organization’s tax returns are riddled with inconsistencies and have regularly been amended. Experts who reviewed the filings said it makes it difficult to understand how True the Vote is truly spending its donations.

In one instance, True the Vote produced two different versions of the same document. A copy of the 2019 tax return Engelbrecht provided to Reveal does not match the version on the IRS website.

The IRS version showed Phillips as a board member. Englebrecht’s version did not. The IRS return showed Engelbrecht had a loan balance of $113,396. Engelbrecht’s version indicated the loan’s balance was gone. In response to questions from Reveal, Engelbrecht said she was going to submit an amended version of the group’s 2019 tax return – the one she’d provided to Reveal – to the IRS....

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ref

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-houston-pennsylvania-056cf0e2512a3382a900814b6a8e5599

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Conservative group alleging voter fraud ends its lawsuits

By NOMAAN MERCHANT

November 16, 2020

[Cobb County Election officials handle ballots during an audit, Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, in Marietta, Ga. A hand tally of the nearly 5 million votes cast in the presidential race in Georgia has entered its fourth day Monday. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

HOUSTON (AP) — A conservative group on Monday moved to dismiss voter fraud lawsuits it had filed in four states days after the group’s leader made baseless allegations questioning the integrity of the election.

Lawyers for True the Vote filed notices to dismiss cases in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania less than a week after suing in all four states. Jim Bopp Jr., an attorney for the group, declined to say why they were ending their lawsuits, but confirmed there were no other cases pending from the group.

The action highlighted the dwindling legal options that President Donald Trump has as he continues to insist — against overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that fraud cost him an election he claims to have won.

Based in Houston, True the Vote is one of several conservative groups that have tried to sow doubts about President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Following Trump’s lead, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht accused states that Biden won of counting illegal votes without presenting evidence.

“All we want are the facts — regardless of the final outcome — so that we can determine where vulnerabilities in the election system exist and take steps to fix them,” Engelbrecht said in a statement Friday announcing the group’s Wisconsin lawsuit.

Instead, Engelbrecht’s group ended that case and others before the lawsuits could proceed further. Engelbrecht did not return messages seeking comment.

Several other lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and its have been rejected by judges, dismissed voluntarily, or settled. Others are still pending.

Also Monday, lawyers suing on behalf of the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania moved to withdraw from the case. They were replaced by Marc Scaringi, a Harrisburg-area lawyer who volunteered on Trump’s 2016 campaign, is a conservative activist who hosts a radio talk show and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2012.

Trump has won at least two victories in court. A Pennsylvania judge ordered authorities in Philadelphia to let observers be physically closer to the tallying of mail-in ballots. Another judge in the state ordered counties not to count mail-in or absentee ballots for which the voter didn’t submit valid identification within six days after the election, but that ruling is expected to affect no more than a few thousand ballots.

Biden leads Trump in Pennsylvania by 67,000 votes.

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an 6 22

Long before the rise of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement — long before the Big Lie and the January 6, 2021 insurrection — True the Vote made voter suppression its top priority. Founded in Houston in 2009 by far-right Tea Party activist Catherine Engelbrecht, True the Vote has spent 13 years pushing the false narrative that voter fraud is widespread in Democratic areas.And True the Vote has raised millions of dollars with that narrative. But exactly how that money has been spent, according to Mother Jones reporter Cassandra Jaramillo, remains a mystery.

“A review of thousands of pages of documents from state filings, tax returns, and court records…. paints the picture of an organization that enriches Engelbrecht and partner Gregg Phillips rather than actually rooting out any fraud,”Jaramillo reports in an article published on June 8. “According to the documents, True the Vote has given questionable loans to Engelbrecht and has a history of awarding contracts to companies run by Engelbrecht and Phillips. Within days of receiving $2.5 million from a donor to stop the certification of the 2020 election, True the Vote distributed much of the money to a company owned by Phillips, (attorney James) Bopp’s law firm, and Engelbrecht directly for a campaign that quickly fizzled out.”

True the Vote, according to Jaramillo, has “engaged in a series of questionable transactions that sent more than $1 million combined to its founder, a longtime board member romantically linked to the founder, and the group’s general counsel, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.”

True the Vote has a shameful history. The group claims that its mission is to “prevent voter fraud,” but its real mission is making it more difficult to vote — especially if one is African-American. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California has been a vehement critic of True the Vote’s efforts to discourage African-Americans and Latinos from voting, saying that a more accurate name for the group would be “Stop the Vote.”

Nonetheless, True the Vote’s voter suppression efforts have made Engelbrecht a star in the MAGA movement and the right-wing media.

“A former PTA mom-turned-Tea Party activist, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht has played a pivotal role in helping drive the voter fraud movement from the political fringes to a central pillar in the Republican Party’s ideology,” Jaramillo observes. “Casting herself as a God-fearing, small-town Texan, she’s spread the voter-fraud gospel by commanding airtime on cable television, space on the pages of Breitbart News, and even theater seats, as a new feature film dramatizing her organization’s exploits,‘2000 Mules,’ plays in cinemas across the country.”

“2000 Mules,” a documentary by far-right conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, claims to offer proof that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. But the documentary proves nothing, and D’Souza’s slopping reporting has drawn widespread criticism. Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter, for example, has slammed “2000 Mules” as a badly done, embarrassing cash grab on D’Souza’s part.

According to Jaramillo, Reveal’s findings don’t look good for True the Vote.

“The records show: True the Vote regularly reported loans to Engelbrecht, including more than $113,000 in 2019, according to a tax filing,” Jaramillo notes. “Texas law bans nonprofits from loaning money to directors; Engelbrecht is both a director and an employee.”

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https://www.ajc.com/politics/what-2000-mules-leaves-out-from-ballot-harvesting-claims/

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What ‘2000 Mules’ leaves out of ballot harvesting claims

POLITICS

By Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

May 10, 2022

Proof missing from Georgia videos and cellphone data

A new movie spreading suspicions of voter fraud, “2000 Mules,” shows surveillance video of Georgia voters dropping off multiple ballots.

Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza says that’s a crime, suggesting that a network of unnamed “mules” rigged the presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden and against Republican Donald Trump.

Based on these unproven allegations, the documentary-style movie jumps to the conclusion that the election was stolen.

The hour and a half-long film leaves voters uninformed about precautions that help prevent mass absentee ballot fraud, instead encouraging them to believe elections were subverted by a shadowy cabal of nonprofit organizations.

The movie hinges on the theory that 2,000 people in five states, including 242 in metro Atlanta, collected and delivered multiple absentee ballots, a practice called “ballot harvesting.” Georgia law prohibits voters from delivering anyone’s ballot besides their own, with exceptions for family members and caregivers of disabled voters.

The movie "2000 Mules" includes video surveillance of a Fulton County ballot drop box that shows a man delivering ballots at night during the 2020 presidential election.

Credit: 2000 Mules

While it’s possible that some of the alleged perpetrators shown in the movie actually committed a crime, video surveillance of drop boxes alone doesn’t prove anything. Voters might have been delivering ballots for their relatives, which is allowed.

Even if there were a ballot harvesting scheme, it wouldn’t invalidate legitimate ballots just because they were turned in by unauthorized individuals. Verified ballots of registered voters still count, regardless of how they were delivered.

Election investigators have reviewed several videos included in “2000 Mules” and found no illegal behavior, including a video that showed a Gwinnett County man inserting ballots into a drop box, according to the secretary of state’s office.

“We investigated, and the five ballots that he turned in were all for himself and his family members,” said Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffenspergerduring a debate last week.

In the movie, D’Souza promotes allegations made by True the Vote, a Texas-based organization that gathered drop box surveillance video and cellphone location data in parts of Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All were swing states where Biden won.

True the Vote hasn’t cooperated with Georgia’s election investigations, refusing to disclose the names of people who allegedly harvested ballots. The State Election Board issued subpoenas on the organization last month to seek documents, recordings and names of individuals involved.

The organization also doesn’t explain how ballot harvesting could have occurred.

Every absentee ballot is assigned to the voter who requested it, and voters can only cast one ballot each.

Returned ballots must be included in an envelope that includes the voter’s registration information, signature, and a bar code. Ballots delivered without an envelope aren’t counted, meaning ballot-stuffing wouldn’t work.

True the Vote claims that cellphone location records show that “mules” visited multiple drop boxes in a day, but publicly available location data often aren’t accurate enough to prove that people actually stopped at drop boxes. They could have been driving by drop boxes on busy streets as they travel to and from work.

None of the surveillance videos in the movie shows anyone visiting more than one drop box in a day.

A map of downtown Atlanta displays cellphone travel patterns, but few of them intersect with drop boxes, which were required to be located on government property such as the Fulton County Government Center.

[Explore

From AJC investigation: Five fraud claims from the Georgia 2020 election and what investigators actually found]

A map from the movie "2000 Mules" shows cellphone signals in downtown Atlanta, but most of these paths don't intersect with drop boxes or indicate ballot harvesting.

Credit: 2000 Mules

True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht said in the movie that her organization tracked cellphones that were near both drop boxes and unidentified nonprofit organizations, which she believes coordinated the ballot harvesting operation.

“What does this even mean if this is happening in broad daylight and nobody’s doing anything to stop it?” Engelbrecht said. “It won’t stop unless we stop it.”

The GBI reviewed True the Vote’s allegations last fall and found they lacked sufficient evidence to merit a law enforcement investigation.

“What has not been provided is any other kind of evidence that ties these cellphones to ballot harvesting,” wrote GBI Director Vic Reynolds in a Sept. 30 letter. “As it exists, the data, while curious, does not rise to the level of probable cause that a crime has been committed.”

While the movie blames drop boxes for enabling ballot harvesting, it ignores the fact that multiple ballots could more easily be returned through the Post Office or home mailboxes, where there isn’t video surveillance. There’s no indication of ballot harvesting in mailed ballots during the 2020 election.

D’Souza, the filmmaker and narrator, has produced several movies and books that promote conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda, including “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left” and “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.”

D’Souza pleaded guilty to a felony campaign finance violation in 2014 for using straw donors to exceed contribution limits to a Republican candidate running for a U.S. Senate seat in New York. Trump pardoned D’Souza in 2018.

The movie, which costs $29.99 to stream online, ends with a QR code that directs voters to a website where they can donate money to True the Vote.

About the Author

ajc.com

Mark Niesse

Mark Niesse covers voting rights and elections for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He also reports on the Georgia House of Representatives and government. He has been a reporter at the AJC since 2013 following a decade at The Associated Press in Atlanta, Honolulu and Montgomery, Ala.

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see stop the steal, legal suppression jenna ellis esq?

True the Vote Files Lawsuit Against Pennsylvania Officials, Offers Cash to ‘Incentivize’ Allegations of Voter Fraud

lt gov patrick 1 mill$ but dem lt gov found 2 gop eg welch

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/true-the-vote-files-lawsuit-against-pennsylvania-officials-offers-cash-to-incentivize-allegations-of-voter-fraud/

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/true-the-vote-files-lawsuit-against-pennsylvania-officials-offers-cash-to-incentivize-allegations-of-voter-fraud/

[pix true the Vote's Catherine Engelbrecht railed against a bill she said would "blow up our elections" in a March 2020 YouTube video.

True the Vote, which calls itself a “voters’ rightsorganization” while supporting restrictive voting laws, announced in a press release Wednesday that it has filed a lawsuit against Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Secretary of State Kathryn Boockvar “to contest illegal ballots that were counted in the recent elections.”

True the Vote is making the highly dubious claim that there is sufficient evidence to cast doubt on President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania—which is currently larger than the margin by which Trump won the state in 2016.

A week earlier, True the Vote announced the establishment of a “Validate the Vote” initiative and a million-dollar “whistleblower compensation fund” to “incentivize election malfeasance reporting”—in other words, to pay people to allege voter fraud. The group’s press release claims that it “aims to facilitate a discussion that reflects credible facts, evidence, and demonstrably actional incidents of voter fraud.”

True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht struck a different tone in May when speaking to the pro-Trump “prayer warriors” of Intercessors for America. She warned that the struggle over efforts to expand vote-by-mail was a “spiritual battle” for “control of the free world.” She claimed that vote-by-mail advocates “want to cause chaos” and that thespirit of chaos “is from Satan.”

In 2016, Engelbrecht told Breitbart that the Obama administration was intentionally registering noncitizens to vote, and True the Vote claimed that Hillary Clinton would try to steal the presidential election through voter fraud. After the 2016 election, True the Vote defended and set out to prove Trump’s debunked claims that he would have won a popular vote majority that year if not for millions of people who voted illegally.

As Right Wing Watch noted in May:

True the Vote describes itself as a nonpartisan “citizen-led movement” working for “free and fair elections.” It has a track record of challenging voter registrations, supporting voter ID laws and voter-roll purges, and fielding election observers who provoked allegations of voter intimidation.It is planning to field off-duty police officers and veterans to patrol polling places this year.

After Trump claimed without evidence that he would have won the 2016 popular vote if not for “millions” of people voting illegally, True the Vote launched a “national audit” of the election and one of its leaders claimed it had verified more than 3 million non-citizen votes before the group abandoned the effort, Engelbrecht said at the time, for lack of funds.

Back in 2014, Dallas Morning News reporter James Drew exposed how a racially charged speech by Engelbrecht led then-Attorney General Greg Abbottto investigate a voter registration effort called Houston Votes. No charges were filed against the group, but under pressure from the investigation, the group and its efforts to register low-income voters shut down.

That same year, when Congress was considering the Voting Rights Amendment Act in response to the Supreme Court’s 2013 gutting of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Engelbrecht claimed that the law would “turn our elections over to Eric Holder and Barack Obama” and move the country “toward race-based segregation.”

True the Vote’s legal counsel is James Bopp, Jr., an influential right-wing and Republican Party activist. Its work is promoted by right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza.

Tags: Catherine Engelbrecht Dinesh D'Souza James Bopp conspiracy theories Disinformation Election 2020 True the Vote

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-voter-fraud-lawsuit

...There's little sign the newest (as of this writing) pro-Trump suit will have better prospects. On Thursday, three Wisconsin voters, backed by a controversial Texas conservative group called True the Vote, filed suit, asking a federal judge to block officials from certifying votes in three counties that favored Biden over Trump. (The group has filed similar lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania.) According to the lawsuit, the “Plaintiffs possess advanced technical capability to conduct statistical analyses" and want officials to give them a range of voting data to analyze. But when ProPublica interviewed James Bopp, an Indiana-based attorney representing the plaintiffs, he offered an account at odds with the document he filed. “None of the plaintiffs have the credentials to, or the resources to, conduct a very sophisticated data analytics operation," he said. Bopp is hoping True the Vote, which is not a party to the suit, will be allowed to conduct the analysis.

Even if the Trump campaign were to turn its legal luck around, the quantities of votes questioned by most of the postelection lawsuits fall far short of the numbers needed to change the outcome of the election.The campaign has failed to find evidence of the kind of widespread irregularities that it would need to turn up in at least three states to have a chance to push Biden's presumptive 306 electoral votes below the 270 threshold and throw the election to Trump. Biden's margins in the states key to his victory range from nearly 148,000 in Michigan, as noted, to 59,000 (and counting) in Pennsylvania and 35,000 in Nevada, on down to 11,000 in Arizona, a figure that may tighten but is expected to allow Biden to carry the state.

...

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-propaganda-war-against-voting-by-mail/

no lnx

THE FIRST Tuesday in April, as the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic was becoming all too real, Americans got a scary glimpse of what Election Day in November might look like if the virus were still spreading. We also got a big, loud, ugly preview of the 2020 voting wars.

The state of Wisconsin had no business holding an election on April 7. Sixteen other states had bumped their primary dates back, hoping to give election officials time to adjust to the drastic new conditions and allow more voters to cast their ballots safely by mail. Governor Tony Evers had issued a statewide stay-at-home order. In Milwaukee alone, at least 51 people had already died from the new coronavirus. And so many poll workers were refusing to show up that the city, home to Wisconsin’s largest concentration of voters of color, would be hard-pressed to open even a handful of polling places, never mind the usual 180. “We are over our heads in chaos,” Neil Albrecht, Milwaukee’s election chief, told The Guardian a few days before the voting was slated to start.

Evers, a Democrat, tried to push the election date to May 23 and send mail ballots to all registered Wisconsinites. But he waited too late. By the time Evers called the state legislature into emergency session the week before the polls were to open, asking legislators to approve the delay and green-light an all-mail ballot, President Donald Trump and his right-wing amen chorus had begun to paint voting by mail not as a public-health necessity during a pandemic, but instead as a Democratic plot to “rig” the 2020 elections—“perhaps the worst of all the scams perpetrated through the COVID nightmare,” as Trump fan Laura Ingraham put it to viewers of her Fox News Channel show.

In addition to the Democratic presidential primary that was to take place on that day, there was also an election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“A lot of people cheat with mail-in voting,” the president said on April 4. “In Wisconsin what happened is I, through social media, put out a very strong endorsement of a Republican conservative judge, who’s an excellent brilliant judge, he’s a justice. And I hear what happened is his poll numbers went through the roof, and because of that, I think they delayed the election.”

So Wisconsin Republicans forced the show to go on.The Republican leaders of the state Assembly and Senate both gaveled in their special sessions, then gaveled them out within seconds. When the governor responded by issuing an executive order to delay the primary, the majority-Republican state Supreme Court stayed it on the night before the election.

Voting went smoothly enough in the state’s smaller counties and towns, where white Republicans predominate and polling places had no lines. But in the cities, it was an unholy mess. Lines were so long in Green Bay that some people couldn’t vote till after midnight. In Milwaukee, the scene was downright eerie; some poll workers wore makeshift hazmat suits fashioned from plastic bags. National Guard troops, hastily called in to serve as poll workers, dashed around with plastic bottles of disinfectant spray, wiping things down between voters. Local firefighters passed out hand sanitizer to the thousands who waited for hours in lines that stretched for blocks, far past the trail of orange traffic cones that had been set up to keep folks six feet apart. Outside Washington High School, one waiting voter, Jennifer Taft, summed it all up perfectly, holding up a hand-lettered sign reading: “THIS IS RIDICULOUS.”

“I’m disgusted,” Taft told a local reporter. “I requested an absentee ballot almost three weeks ago and never got it. I have a father dying from lung disease, and I have to risk my life and his just to exercise my right to vote.”

Statewide, overall turnout was higher than expected. Even in that compressed time period, 1.1 million of Wisconsin’s 3.3 million voters had sent in absentee ballots—five times the number of voters who did so in the  2016 primary. And when the votes were all tallied six days later, the Democratic Supreme Court challenger had won easily, giving the lie to Trump’s theory that Evers wanted to delay the election to prevent a GOP victory.

But the Republicans’ efforts to sew confusion and long lines in the cities had worked in certain ways: In Milwaukee, which saw historically low Black turnout in 2016 after a strict new Voter ID law went into effect, the primary vote was half what it had been four years earlier. “It was voter suppression on steroids,” said Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez. “They tried to steal the election.”

[I have to risk my life just to exercise my right to vote.

JENNIFER TAFT, MILWAUKEE VOTER]

The mail balloting hadn’t gone smoothly, either: Nearly 12,000 voters who’d requested absentee ballots, like Jennifer Taft, never got them. Three tubs full of absentee ballots that never reached voters were found in a mail center outside Milwaukee. And 23,000 absentee ballots sent in by voters—more than Trump’s margin of victory in the state in 2016—had been disqualified for technical problems. Here as elsewhere, Republican lawmakers had made the process as complicated and time-consuming as possible to keep mail voting down, including a requirement that a witness sign every ballot. Voters’ signatures had to match the signatures on file with the state; as in other states, it’s left to election volunteers and staffers, not handwriting experts, to decide whether the signatures match. Thousands of votes were tossed on this subjective basis. (In June, after the delayed New York primary, 30,000 votes from Brooklyn, one-quarter of the total, would be tossed out for similar reasons.)

The threat of robust turnout figures posed by mail-in voting had fully stirred the right-wing propaganda machine by now—and it had given them a fresh new story to tell about what they claimed was the looming threat of mass left-wing “voter fraud.” The same day Wisconsin’s primary results were announced, an apparently new group called the Honest Elections Project aired an Orwellian TV and digital ad across the country—a six-figure buy—casting what happened in Wisconsin as Democrats’ “brazen attempt to manipulate the election system for partisan advantage by exploiting the coronavirus pandemic.” It was, the narrator intoned, a sign of election-rigging to come: “The facts about the Wisconsin election: Record absentee voting. Five times more than 2016. Democrats didn’t think they could win so they tried lawsuits, changing the rules, even canceling the election. They create chaos. It’s wrong.”

The Honest Elections Project turned out to be a legal alias for the Judicial Education Project, a powerful dark-money PAC funded by the Donors Trust, a nonprofit donor-advised fund often referred to as the “dark money ATM” of the right, with such heavy-hitting benefactors as billionaire Charles Koch and the (Betsy) DeVos family.It was the brainchild of Leonard Leo, a Trump confidant who was instrumental in the choice and confirmations of the president’s Supreme Court nominees, and it would soon begin filing lawsuits seeking to block the expansion of remote voting, and other pandemic-inspired election reforms—using the same lead attorney, longtime Washington litigator William Consovoy, as the Trump campaign.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a litigious right-wing group that sues to effect voter-roll purges.]

At least three other lavishly funded far-right groups—Judicial Watch, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and True the Vote—are also combining legal challenges with propaganda efforts designed to discredit, and disable, remote voting for November.The Republican National Committee issued a statement this spring promising to devote at least $20 million to such lawsuits as well. The messages they’re all promoting are identical to Trump’s rhetoric about the dangers of mail-in balloting and the Democrats’ purportedly cynical promotion of it to allegedly rig the election. Their combined resources and firepower adds up to the biggest coordinated effort to suppress votes in history. Until this year, battles over voting rules were mostly waged by Republican state lawmakers and right-wing legal firms not quite acceptable to the mainstream, cheered on by talk-radio shouters and extremist websites like The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart.

“You used to have these small-time, right-wing operations,” Mark Elias, a top Democratic litigator who’s working on several ongoing lawsuits, told The Washington Post in June. “Because Donald Trump has normalized all these crackpot theories about voter fraud, they’ve all now joined forces under the banner of the legitimate Republican establishment.”

All they want, they say, are the same old “fair” and “normal” elections that Trump keeps calling for. But the president, characteristically, had already given away the game before the Wisconsin primary lit the right wing on fire. On “Fox & Friends” during the week before that primary from hell, he’d warned the friendly hosts what would happen if voting by mail were allowed to metastasize: “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

[Gallows humor from artist Mike Licht regarding Wisconsin’s April 7, during-the-pandemic, in-person Spring election. via Flickr creative commons]

THE CRUSADE TO suppress votes in the 2020 election began long before COVID-19 existed, and long before the pandemic led to a popular clamor for more voting by mail. Three weeks after his razor-thin victory in the Electoral College, still irked at hearing about Hillary Clinton’s edge in the popular vote, President-elect Trump issued a tweetstorm citing right-wing conspiracy theories. His chief claim, often to be repeated: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

On stage at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Committee convention three months later, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, backed up Trump’s claims. “The left would have you believe that we have about 43 million aliens in this country, both lawful and unlawfully present,” he said. “And none of them vote!” The activists in the audience cheered and chuckled. “You know, under the Obama administration, they opposed Voter ID; they opposed the idea of even asking someone whether they were a citizen before they register to vote,” Fitton went on to say. “Why would you be opposed to that, other than maybe wanting to steal elections when necessary?” Cue applause.

Fitton also seconded Trump’s call for a “federal investigation into voter fraud,” promising that it would be “the most significant civil rights investigation in a generation,” because, he said, “We’re on the side of civil rights. We’re on the side of the civil rights of Americans who potentially are having their votes stolen from them by the thousands, if not millions, by illegal votes.” Getting the findings to back up those assertions would be a breeze, he promised. “It’s easy to figure out where there’s voter fraud,” Fitton said, “and obviously that’s why the leftist voters are screaming, because they’re afraid their gig is up.”

Not quite, as it transpired. That “investigation” was launched in May 2017, when Trump made appointments to his newly concocted Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which included top vote-suppression specialists Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state and anti-immigration zealot, and Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation. But it didn’t prove so easy to find hard proof of the massive fraud they’d long been claiming. After eight months of trying, the commissioners dug up only scattered cases drawn from media reports, and the president disbanded the effort.

[This is a pretext for blocking voices they do not want to hear.

STACEY ABRAMS, FAIR FIGHT FOUNDER]

But voter-suppression is now an industry unto itself, and Judicial Watch and its peers didn’t skip a beat.Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Judicial Watch and PILF sent 248 letters to state and local election officials across the country, threatening lawsuits if they didn’t undertake massive, aggressive “purges” of their voter rolls. “Your jurisdiction is in apparent violation of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act,” the letters claimed. The NVRA, known as the “Motor Voter Act,” was passed in 1993 to “expand voting opportunities” in various ways, including offering registration at driver’s license offices. It also required local elections offices to undertake “uniform, non-discriminatory maintenance” of their registration rolls, striking those who’d become ineligible—by dying, going to prison, or moving out of state.

Under previous administrations, the Justice Department monitored these purges and sometimes stepped in when they became overzealous and were clearly targeting voters of color. “The rationale of removing voters from the rolls to protect against fraud is nonsensical,” Stacey Abrams, who founded the voting-rights group Fair Fight after narrowly losing the Georgia governor’s race in 2018, told Mother Jones earlier this year. “This is a pretext for blocking voices they do not want to hear.”

The letters contained legal threats, but their primary purpose was to stoke publicity about voter fraud—and to raise the profiles of Fitton andJ. Christian Adams, a former Department of Justice official who heads PILF and served on the ill-fated Election Integrity Commission. Adams is best known as the DOJ attorney who promoted a 2008 “voter intimidation” case against two members of a group that dubbed itself the New Black Panthers. On Election Day 2008, the two stationed themselves outside a predominantly white polling place in Philadelphia, one of them holding a nightstick. When Obama’s Justice Department declined to press charges, Adams loudly resigned and wrote a book called “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” In lawsuits and legal threats targeting jurisdictions with large numbers of non-white voters, Adams first launched suits via the American Civil Rights Union (a right-wing group that fancies itself to be the analog to the American Civil Liberties Union), and then with PILF.

[“The rationale of removing voters from the rolls to protect against fraud is nonsensical,” says Stacey Abrams. “This is a pretext for blocking voices they do not want to hear.” (Photo of Abrams on election night 2018 from Abrams’ Facebook page.)]

Judicial Watch and PILF got a few big victories out of their threats and lawsuits, in 2018 and again last year. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a Judicial Watch settlement agreement with Ohio and allowed a massive voter purge—a decision that opened the floodgates for more of the same, permitting states to strike voters who haven’t voted in recent elections. 

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As 2020 began, counties in California and Kentucky were busy removing close to 2 million voters; ditto, Allegheny County, one of the largest Pennsylvania counties carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016. In three other large Clinton-voting Pennsylvaniacounties Judicial Watch dragged into court this year, the group claimed an almost comically high number of “ineligible” voters—800,000 in all, which would amount to more than 65 percent of all registered voters in the counties. “We 100-percent dispute the claims,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who was also sued, told state senators.

Most of this year’s election lawsuits are related to COVID-19—or, more precisely, they target attempts by states and municipalities to make voting easier and safer during the pandemic. The number of these cases is staggering: More than 200were still percolating through the courts in mid-August. Many have been brought by the Trump campaign, theRepublican National Committee, Judicial Watch, PILF, and the Honest Elections Project, all of whom have the same agenda: Keep voting restrictions in place. Three more states have switched to all-mail elections this year: California, Nevada, and Vermont. When lawmakers in Nevada, where Trump lost by just 27,000 votes in 2016, approved all-mail voting in a special session on the first Sunday of August, Trump called it “an illegal late-night coup” on Twitter, with the promise, “See you in court!” Two days later, still fuming, he posted a tweet falsely stating that voting by mail would mean a “Rigged Election.” It became the first tweet flagged by Twitter as untrue. The same day, the Republican National Committee, the Trump campaign, and Nevada Republican Party all filed suit against Nevada.

In most states, election officials and lawmakers have simply tried to ease restrictions that can make absentee voting difficult or confusing: early deadlines for requesting ballots, Election Day deadlines for having them returned or postmarked, requirements that witnesses or notaries sign the ballots, strictly limited forms of acceptable ID. In some cases, the question is whether vulnerability to COVID-19 counts as an “excuse” for needing a mail ballot. (Most states already allow no-excuse absentee voting, but a few—like emerging battleground Texas—do not.)

Graphic from the National Conference of State Legislatures.]

Justin Levitt, a Loyola University law professor who tracks all these cases, has not detected a pattern in the decisions. But as he’s noted, it’s already a win for right-wing organizations and the Republicans to keep elections officials tied up in courts—and election rules in a state of suspended uncertainty as states try, with chronically inadequate funding, to manage an election during a pandemic. “My usual election-cycle comment is that we’re trying to find enough duct tape to cover the holes in the bucket,” Levitt said recently. “This time, we’re trying to make the bucket out of duct tape.”

The uncertainty created by the lawsuits, combined with the disinformation about voting that will be plastered all over social media this fall, creates an indirect but powerful form of voter suppression in itself.“Voter suppression is a combination of things,” says Georgia state Rep. and voting-rights advocate Renitta Shannon. “It’s a chipping away of people either not being able to vote, or thinking it will be a major hassle. When people have a question about whether their vote is going to be counted, that [becomes] a reason not to vote.”

ON JUNE 5, Tom Fitton and J. Christian Adams were both invited to testify at a U.S. House hearing on “Protecting the Right to Vote During the COVID-19 Crisis.” It was another sign of how formerly fringe right-wing conspiracies had become thoroughly mainstreamed in Trump’s GOP. And it provided another platform to spread the falsehood that Democrats were using the pandemic to make real their fraudulent dreams. “It is now about five months until Election Day,” Fitton testified, “and the pandemic’s infection curve has flattened. Insisting now on all-mail-ballot elections seems less like a response to a health crisis and more like a partisan application of the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’”

Fitton’s coronavirus predictions would soon be disproved, but the notion of Democrats using mail ballots to commit grand theft in 2020—“using COVID to defraud the American people,” as Trump expressed it on the first night of the Republican National Convention—remains the central deceit of the right’s propaganda campaign. “The Democrats have cooked this thing up,” Rush Limbaugh bellowed in August, “because they don’t feel confident that they can win in a traditionally fair and normal election.”

[J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation in 2019 screencap.]

In many places, the relative unfamiliarity of mail voting is a boon to the fear-mongering. And with folks on the right having been treated to years’ worth of “voter fraud” talk, they’d been conditioned to take it seriously. “When they talk about voter fraud,” says Tomas Lopez, executive director of the progressive group Democracy North Carolina, “they’re talking about race, of course. They’re lamenting the fact that those people get a vote.”

Across platforms—Fox News, talk radio, social media, presidential briefings—the narrative being served up about mail voting has been remarkably consistent in all its main plot points. It’s almost as if Judicial Watch teamed with the Trump campaign and sent out a bullet-point memo, which kicks off with “stealing and rigging” and proceeds, from there, to the following talking points:

Even more “illegals” get to vote.“Here’s a shocking things for your audience to consider,” senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller, architect of the immigration policy that caged children at the U.S.-Mexico border, said in August on “Fox & Friends.” “Nobody who mails in a ballot has their identity confirmed; nobody checks to see if they’re even a U.S. citizen. Think about that. Any foreign national—talk about foreign election interference—can mail in a ballot, and nobody even verifies if they’re a citizen of the United States of America.” (In reality, every state verifies the identity of the person requesting the mail-in ballot.)

This summer, Judicial Watch bought at least 263 ads on Facebook (cost: $210,000) to drive home the same spurious claim delivered by Miller on Fox News.According to a tally from Media Matters for America, 144 of the ads, which were full of disinformation about “voter fraud,” claimed that “illegal aliens are voting,” while 119 got more specific, claiming that “25% of noncitizens are registered to vote.”

Ballots Are On the Loose.

On May 1, Trump retweetedMollie Hemingway, a writer for The Federalist, a right-wing publication, who had some “news” that sounded startling: “Nearly one in five of all absentee and mail-in-ballots between 2012 and 2018 remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission,” she wrote. Hemingway drew her figures from a new and scholarly looking report by PILF—J. Christian Adams’ organization—which claimed that 28 million absentee ballots had “gone missing” in recent election cycles. Those ballots represent a golden opportunity for mass-scale fraud, Adams said in a statement accompanying the PILF report—“28 million opportunties for someone to cheat.”

The “missing ballots” meme spread like wildfire. But as voting-rights advocates (and logical thinkers) pointed out, the ballots aren’t just floating around, waiting for noncitizens and Democrats to scoop them up and send them in; they simply hadn’t been returned by the voters who got them. Twelve million of the “loose” ballots, as they’re also called, had been sent by election officials in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington state, where everyone who registers automatically receives one. About 30 percent of voters in those states typically don’t return their ballots in a given election. “Where are they now?” said Paul Gronke, a Reed College professor who runs the Early Voting Information Center, of the so-called “missing” ballots. “Most likely, in landfills.”

Democrats Are Harvesting Those Loose Ballots.

Expect to hear several earfuls about “ballot harvesting” between now and November. It’s the hip, scary-sounding new catchphrase for voter-fraudsters, though the practice it describes is a routine feature of absentee voting in more than half the states: Basically, it just means that a third party can collect someone’s vote in its sealed envelope and hand-deliver it to an election office. The laws are meant to help people who live at great distances from polling places without transportation, or who are sick or shut in, to cast a vote. In March, Trump’s own ballot in the Florida primary was “harvested”—he gave it to an (unknown) third party, who delivered it directly to an elections office in Palm Beach. Nonetheless, as he tweeted on April 14, we must “GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD.”

Democratic workers sometimes organize “community collections,” leading right-wing pundits to peddle fantastical visions of thugs pounding on doors and demanding people’s blank ballots for harvesting. The proof? Well, in Paterson, N.J., this spring, a postal employee noticed something odd in a local post office five days before an all-mail primary: 347 completed ballots bundled together. They were part of a scheme for which four perpetrators, including one city council member, have all been charged with fraud. Amid the controversy, Paterson’s election board disqualified 19 percent of the ballots in the primary—which, trickling up from Gateway Pundit, a conspiracy theory website, to the West Wing, served as  evidence of the fraudulent potential of “harvesting.” “Look at Patterson[sic], N.J.,” Trump tweeted. “20% of vote was corrupted!” In fact, election officials said that most of the uncounted ballots were tossed out for the usual technical reasons—mainly for signatures that didn’t appear to match those on file. The only example of large-scale ballot harvesting occurred in a North Carolina congressional race in the 2018 midterms. It was organized by a paid GOP operative who’s facing both state and federal charges.

“THIS IS GOING TO BE the greatest election disaster in history,” Trump promised reporters in the middle of yet another rant against vote-by-mail in August. He failed to mention how hard he and his right-wing allies were fighting to make his apocalyptic predictions about the election come true—or how much his prospects for victory may hinge on it.

The right’s doomsaying about chaos and fraud at the polls have definitely penetrated the national consciousness. In August, a Pew poll found that nearly half of registered U.S. voters expect to “have difficulties casting a ballot” this year. That might not sound surprising—but it’s a sea change from 2018, when 85 percent expected voting to be “easy.”

When it comes to mail voting in particular, however, it’s only Republicans who are moved by the propaganda. When Pew asked Trump supporters how they planned to vote, 80 percent said they’d do it in person, while just 17 percent would vote by mail. By contrast, most Biden supporters—58 percent—said they’d be voting remotely.

Given those results, it’s no surprise that, in the 2020 battleground states,  Democrats are outpacing Republicans in  absentee ballot requests. Far more, in fact. Four years ago in Florida, Democrats requested 6,000 more absentee ballots than Republicans; by the end of August this year, ballot requests by Democrats had surpassed those from  Republicans by 600,000. In North Carolina, where absentee voting has always been sparse, 177,000 Democrats had asked for ballots compared to 50,000 Republicans. “Everybody’s up,” said Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College. “It’s just that Democrats and unaffiliated are through the roof, and Republicans are not even on the second floor.”

This disparity, which is consistent in other battleground states, has saner Republican officials and activists deeply worried. What if the anti-mail campaign ends up backfiring, and suppressing their votes? And with the virus likely to still be raging come November, will GOP voters—seniors, in particular—actually take the risk to show up in person to vote? “What the president is doing when he keeps saying that this mail-in balloting thing is fraudulent, he’s scaring our own voters from using a legit way to cast your ballot,” Rohn Bishop, chair of the Fond du Lac County GOP in Wisconsin, told USA Today. “We’re kind of hurting ourselves.” When he tries to talk up absentee voting to fellow Republicans, Bishop said, he gets a lot of flak that he’s “ignoring voter fraud.” It’s not easy to argue when the Republican president keeps calling vote-by-mail “the greatest scam in history.”

The weird thing, said Bishop and other Republican state leaders, is that while the president continues to slam mail voting on a daily basis, the Trump campaign and RNC have told them to promote it. “I’m out there pushing it at the request of the campaign, because they asked me [to] do that,” said Lawrence Tabas, chair of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, which Trump carried by less than 1 percent in 2016—and where Democrats have made 68 percent of all mail-ballot requests, while Republicans requested just 24 percent. “And then the president is publicly opposed to it,” Tabas added. “Let’s put it this way; it’s made my job more challenging.” The Pennsylvania GOP website urges Republicans to “Vote Safe: By mail. From home.”

GOP voters in California also heard that “safe, from home” message before they voted in this spring’s primary—from two of Trump’s family members, no less. Both daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Donald Jr. recorded robocalls in April urging mail votes for a Republican congressional candidate in a special election. “Nancy Pelosi and liberal Democrats are counting on you to sit on the sidelines this election, but you can prove them wrong,” Lara Trump said in one call. “You can safely and securely vote for Mike Garcia by returning your mail-in ballot by May 12.”

Both Lara Trump and Donald Jr. recorded robocalls in April urging mail votes for a Republican congressional candidate in a special election.

One major group on the right, Americans for Prosperity, is flexing its considerable muscle to counter the president’s message and urge right-wing voters to take advantage of either early or absentee voting this fall. Tim Phillips, president of the “grasstops” group, which underwrote the Tea Party movement, told Politico this spring that AFP “is absolutely going to up the percentage of dollars that go into absentee and early voting.” The group, which raked in $83 million in donations in 2018, has plenty to spend. It plans to target conservative voters in dozens of competitive congressional districts.

But Judicial Watch, PILF, the Honest Elections Project, and allied groups like True the Vote—which is recruiting ex-Navy SEALs to serve as GOP poll-watchers on Nov. 3—are delivering a contrary message: It’s perfectly safe to vote in person. “Don’t let the left scare you from voting on Election Day,” Tom Fitton said on a Judicial Watch podcast on July 31. The same message continues to blast out on conservative media. “If people can go to Home Depot and distance six feet,” Fox host Jeanine Pirro said this summer, “why can’t they go to the voting booth and distance six feet?”

Is there a coherent strategy here, somehow? Do the clashing messages make any strategic sense? Perhaps not. But some political observers suspect that Trump is setting up a way to delegitimize the results in November. If more Republicans do turn out in person, their votes will be among those tallied first—creating a chance that Trump may lead on election night, even if only half of the total vote, or less, is counted by then. In that event, Jamelle Bouie wrote this summer in his New York Times column, “There’s no mystery about what Donald Trump intends to do… . First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have a team of lawyers challenging courts and ballots across the country.”

It’s certainly plausible. Just as in 2016, Trump has refused to say he’ll accept the results—unless, that is, they show him winning. “You don’t know until you see,” he said this summer on Fox News. “It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do.”

In November 2018, when the Republican candidates for governor and senator in Florida held leads on election night that began to dissipate as the vote-counting continued, Trump telegraphed what he might say this November: “The Florida election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” he tweeted. “An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

Attorney General William Barr has indicated that the Department of Justice would have Trump’s back if he tries to shut down the count. “I think the people who want to experiment with different ways of voting right now … are playing with fire and are grossly irresponsible,” Barr told Fox News’ Mark Levin in August. Sounding more like a Judicial Watch attorney than the attorney general of the United States, Barr called it “scary” that “most of those mailings go to a lot of addresses where the people no longer live. They’re misdirected. And I think they will create a situation—they could easily create a situation where there’s going to be a contested election.”

That is chilling to hear. It stirs up nightmare visions of Florida 2000 but on a national scale—and in a year that’s already been full of unrest. Realistically, though, it’s also a far-fetched strategy born of desperation. And there’s a much rosier scenario that is just as plausible as Bouie’s, if not more so.

Say this election proves to be less apocalyptic than Trump and the right are hoping—and say Trump is clearly a loser on election night. The president’s defeat, and the pandemic-inspired rise of mail voting, could begin to unravel the elaborate system of barriers to voting that Republicans have been erecting over the past decade. If Democrats retake a majority in the U.S. Senate, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act will surely be one of the first measures to pass, restoring protections and federal oversight to elections. And if Republicans lose control of state houses they captured (which they are poised to do in several battleground states), Democratic majorities can begin to reverse the race-based voting restrictions that the GOP has been cooking up with relentless creativity since the Tea Party insurrection lifted them to unprecedented power in Congress and the states.

“What we’ve had is the 21st century equivalent of the Mississippi Plan of 1890,” says Carol Anderson, the Emory University historian and best-selling author of One Person, One Vote. That “plan” was the template for other states to “redeem” white supremacy after Reconstruction by disenfranchising Black men all over again, through tactics like poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent intimidation. The 2010s were eerily similar. “It’s been legislative evil genius,” Anderson says. “And so Jim Crow.”

Anderson is a serious historian, so she’ll make no predictions. But there is at least a fair chance that the latest manifestation of the Republicans’ long and fraudulent voter-fraud campaign—the demonizing of remote-voting during a pandemic—will backfire on them in a lasting way. The hollering won’t die down, of course; Trump himself will make sure of that. The voter-suppression industry—the Judicial Watches, the PILFs, the Honest Elections Projects—won’t disappear. Chief Justice John Roberts won’t suddenly start deciding in favor of voting rights. But the more Americans grow accustomed to voting by mail, and the more they keep demanding that it be made easier and more reliable, the harder their votes will be to suppress or toss out. Trump is right, after all, about one thing: Wherever remote voting becomes routine, turnout soars. And we all know who loses then.

Tags: Carol AndersonDonald J. TrumpJ Christian AdamsJamelle BouieJennifer TaftJustice John RobertsJustin LevittLaura IngrahamLawrence TabasLeonard LeoMark EliasMichael BitzerRohn BishopRon DeSantisStacey AbramsTim PhillipsTom FittonTony EversWilliam BarrWilliam Consovoy

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Too much attention is given to the television ads. The Koch network, which is actively training Tea Partiers, via apartnershipwith True the Vote, to harass and intimidate voters, may tip the scales in this election. And you won’t see their work on television, or through FEC disclosures (they refuse to register their grassroots electioneering as independent expenditures). Like Wisconsin, liberals might see the ground shifting beneath them, and wonder what happened. fang

bradley pulled $ busted?

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/True_the_Vote

True the Vote is a Houston based vote-monitoring initiative committed to stopping voter fraud with a "horrendous record of filing inaccurate voter registration challenges."^[1] Many believe that the organization's activities are aimed at voter suppression and a right-wing agenda to further a new administration. TTV trains volunteers to monitor elections and report incidents of voter fraud. It also holds local rallies to promote "voter ID" laws, which it staunchly supports.^[2] TTV has been accused of voter intimidation^[3] and advancing hysterical claims about the pervasiveness of voter fraud.^[4] TTV's current president is Catherine Englebrecht, who is also the founder of the King Street Patriots, a Tea Party 501(c)(4) group based in Texas.^[5]

• 1 History
• 2 2010 Election Cycle
• 3 Voter Fraud and Voter I.D. Laws
• 4 2011-2012 Wisconsin Recall Effort
• 5 2013 - True the Vote Files Suit Against IRS
  • 5.1 Is True the Vote really Nonpartisan?
• 6 References

History

True the Vote claims to be nonpartisan, but began as an outgrowth of the King Street Patriots a nonprofit tea party organization mostly active in Texas. Several members of the King Street Patriots, including their president Catherine Englebrecht, were dissatisfied with the voting process in Harris County Texas during the 2008 election, especially the shortage of poll workers, which they believed "invited fraud and other problems at the polls." ^[6] During the 2010 election season, True the Vote trained over a thousand volunteers to monitor elections in Texas.

2010 Election Cycle

True the Vote's activities during the 2010 election cycle were largely confined to Harris County, the largest and poorest county in Texas. Ms. Engelbrecht claimed that the group settled on that particular district based on the thousands of addresses that housed six or more registered voters. ^[7] True the Vote claims that it uncovered numerous examples of voter fraud including claims like: "Vacant lots had several voters registered on them. An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address." ^[8]^ However, The Harris County assistant attorney could recall only one case where True the Vote had identified the address of a vacant lot where eight to ten people were registered to vote. ^[7] True the Vote found no hard evidence of intentional voter fraud. True the Vote considers their operations in Harris County a success, and claims to have recruited almost 1,000 volunteers to supervise polling places in Texas. ^[9]

True the Vote's trained "poll watchers" did, however, draw accusations of voter intimidation during the 2010 elections as they would hover behind people as they cast their ballots, get into election worker's faces, and block or disrupt lines of voters. ^[7] During the election, the Texas Democratic Party accused True the Vote of voter intimidation in largely Hispanic and African-American polling areas. ^[8] After the November 2010 elections, the Civil Rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into the group and its alleged voter intimidation efforts.

Voter Fraud and Voter I.D. Laws

True the Vote's website portrays voter fraud as largely a Democratic party problem. It routinely runs stories on election fraud being perpetrated by "liberals,"^[10] or "Democrats" ^[11] but has, to date, never run a story on Republican or Conservative instances of voter fraud.

True the Vote's methods of "preventing voter fraud" are reminiscent of the controversial "ballot security" measures utilized by the Republican National Committee in the early 1980s.^[12] Accused of violating the Voting Rights Act through its aggressive presence at polling locations and attempts to deter voters believed to be ineligible, the RNC settled a federal lawsuit by a consent decree agreeing to stop ballot security measures in minority precincts.^[12] Similarly, many view True the Vote's activities as an attempt to build a nationwide army to suppress voters at the ballot, and True the Vote's main activities appear to be targeted at precincts such as Harris County, TX with large populations of minority voters.

Like many groups pushing for strict Voter ID Laws, True the Vote claims that Voter Fraud is widespread and deliberate, and largely substantiates these claims through individual testimony. ^[13] The results of serious policy studies into voter fraud reveal that intentional voter fraud is "even rarer than being struck by lightening or winning the mega-millions. ^[14] In a study conducted by the Department of Justice in 2005, the DOJ identified only 55 cases of convicted voter fraud throughout all 50 states during a 3 year period. [1] The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University compiled a study identifying the irrationality and rarity of actual voter fraud in 2006. [2] View Full Study Here

Englebrecht herself has testified before Congress on behalf of the King Street Patriots, claiming unsubstantiated instances of voter fraud that she and her trained volunteers witnessed. ^[15] These claims are not supported with hard evidence or factual research.

Hand in hand with these far-reaching claims of voter fraud, True the Vote argues for stronger Voter ID Laws in every State, and resists attempts to relax or remove Voter ID laws. On December 13th, 2011, they held a rally in Austin, Texas to support a stricter ID law passed earlier that year. ^[16] On January 20th, 2011 they held a similar rally to protest the invalidation of a South Carolina law requiring picture ID's at the polls (The Justice Department is empowered to invalidate voting laws in South Carolina due to a provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.) Both Rallies strongly criticized Attorney General Eric Holder.

In 2011, True the Vote posted an article on its website claiming that US attorney General Eric Holder supported a plan by the NAACP "to involve the United Nations in U.S. elections." referencing a protest the NAACP held across the street from the UN in December of 2011, and a related petition filed with the UN. Holder gave the protest and the petition no formal support, but True the Vote's press release made it seem like Holder was advocating direct UN involvement in American elections, asking ""Are you ready to have U.N. blue helmets outside your polling place?" This article earned True the Vote a "pants on fire" rating from Politifact.com. ^[17] Blue Helmets resembling those worn by the UN Peacekeeping forces are now commonly worn at True the Vote rallies.

True the Vote's 2012 national summit in Houston largely centered on claims of voter fraud. Speakers included ACORN "whistleblower" Anita Moncrief, Hans Von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, who insisted that "United States has a long history of voter fraud that has been documented by historians and journalists," and Fox News contributor Pat Caddell, who called opposition to voter ID Laws "the demise of our democracy" and "Slow motion suicide.” ^[18]

2011-2012 Wisconsin Recall Effort

In 2012, True the Vote joined several other Tea Party groups in "Verify the Recall", an effort that opposes the 2012 recall of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. True the Vote provided software which it had previously applied to check signatures in petitions in Texas. ^[19] In order to electronically check over 1 million petition signatures, which had previously been posted online by Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board ^[20]^True the Vote recruited thousands of volunteers (mostly out of state) to manually enter signatures into True the Vote's electronic database. True the Vote claims to have recruited over 13,000 volunteers. ^[21] True the Vote has stated that this effort is both "nonpartisan" ^[22] and "not about politics" ^[23] but their website has run at least two stories suggesting that fraud is "rampant" in the recall effort, and frame the effort as decidedly political. In their own words "we should not believe the claims of union-supporters and anti-Walker operatives who say that they collected more than one million signatures on petitions to recall Governor Scott Walker." ^[24]^.

On February 28th, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker called for the data gathered by the "Verify the Recall" effort to be used as an official challenge of the recall.^[25] This data was gathered and compiled entirely by True the Vote. True the Vote's executive summary claimed that only 534,865 signatures gathered during the recall effort were valid. ^[26]. There is evidence that True the Vote used a flawed process to discount signatures on the ballot, and that most of the signatures they discounted are, in fact, accurate.^[27]

In the days before the June 5th, 2012 recall election between Tom Barrett and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, True the Vote announced that they would be training volunteers to monitor polling places throughout Wisconsin, both online ^[28] and at a small number of locations throughout the state ^[29] True the Vote claimed that hundreds of people showed up for training and later monitored the polls in Wisconsin, ^[30] and that these monitors were necessary due to "discrepancies" in the recall petition process as well as "Wisconsin’s long history of election fraud." True the Vote pledged to man every polling place in Wisconsin on the day of the recall election, which drew sharp criticism from the Barret Campaign ^[31]

Throughout the Wisconsin recall, True the Vote has worked in concert with a group of local Tea Party groups including the "Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty" and "We the People of the Republic", which helped True the Vote launch its recall signature verification efforts. ^[32]. True the Vote's efforts during the recall election itself were conducted with an unnamed group of tea party organizations throughout Wisconsin.

2013 - True the Vote Files Suit Against IRS

On May 21, 2013, True the Vote filed a complaint [3] against the Internal Revenue Service to "force a decision in court" of whether its 3-year-pending application for 501(c)3 tax-exempt status should be approved.^[33] This complaint arose from the IRS pattern of targeting organizations containing the words "Tea Party" or "patriot," which the IRS claimed was a method of centralizing a large influx of nonprofit applications between 2010 and 2012. ^[34] While the IRS did admit that mistakes were made in the categorization and review process, it is likely that True the Vote has rightly been scrutinized since its inception in 2010. ^[35] Many media sources identify 2012 as the year when targeted IRS investigations and abuses occurred, but True the Vote's status has been questioned since its inception in 2010. ^[36] While a 501(c)4 Tea Party group, such as the King Street Patriots may engage in some political activity, a 501(c)3 status is an absolute bar against any campaign or partisan activity. ^[37]

Is True the Vote really Nonpartisan?

Questions about whether True the Vote is really a "charity" refraining from political activity (necessary to be considered a 501(c)3 nonprofit) arise as early as its partisan roots. ^[35] A 2010 video announcing True the Vote's launch begins with right-wing activist David Horowitz telling the camera that "Republicans have to win by at least three percent in order to win an election," since Democrats are likely to case fraudulent votes. Further, True the Vote's activities largely consist of training Tea Partiers ^[38] to act as "poll watchers," some of whom have been accused of voter intimidation. ^[35]

In fact, in 2012, True the Vote contributed $5000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee.[4] This overtly political statement would legally, according to tax lawyers specializing in election law, disqualify a nonprofit from 501(c)3 tax-exempt status. ^[40]^ Additionally, the coordinator of Code Red USA has identified True the Vote as a partner in the nation-wide effort to flood the polling places with conservative observers. ^[7] In 2012, Democratic House Representative, Elijah E. Cummings, sent a letter to Catherine Engelbrecht requesting information about the data used by True the Vote to challenge voter registrations, the training provided to volunteers, and the method of choosing voter jurisdictions to monitor. ^[1] This request was made to investigate serious allegations of True the Vote's political agenda and possible criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.At the time of True the Vote's "poll watching" activities in Harris County, Texas during the November 2010 elections the organization was described as a "project" of the Houston-based Tea Party group the King Street Patriots. As a result of a 2010 lawsuit filed against the King Street Patriots by the state Democratic Party, a Texas judge ruled that the organization was an unregistered PAC rather than the nonprofit corporation that it claimed, and that it unlawfully provided in-kind donations to the state Republican Party. ^[39] The judge's ruling was based in part on True the Vote's voter intimidation practices and the parent organization's close ties to the state Republican Party.

References

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sw

Project on Fair Representation is a legal defense fund founded and led by Ed Blum with an agenda "dedicated to reversing race-based legal protections".^[1] The Project is financially supported by Donors Trust. ^[2]

The Project on Fair Representation funded the challenges in Supreme Court cases Shelby County v. Holder and Fisher v. University of Texas with funds from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation funneled through Donors Trust. Both challenges were organized by Ed Blum. In Shelby County v. Holder the Court's ruling severely limited the Voting Rights Act and Fisher v. University of Texas, which attacked university affirmative admissions programs, was differed to a lower court.^[1]

Related Sourcewatch pages

• Donors Trust
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

External Articles

• Brendan Fischer, For Bradley Foundation, Challenging Affirmative Action & Voting Rights Is Part of Long-Term Crusade, PR Watch, June 27, 2013.

References

1. Brendan Fischer, For Bradley Foundation, Challenging Affirmative Action & Voting Rights Is Part of Long-Term Crusade, PR Watch, June 27, 2013.
2. Project on Fair Representation, About Us, Fund website, accessed August 22, 2013.

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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/06/12142/bradley-foundation-challenging-affirmative-action-voting-rights-part-long-term-cr

The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is one-for-two in legal challenges to civil rights and racial equality this term, with the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in one case bankrolled by Bradley, and in another, remanding an affirmative action case to a lower court, turning back the Bradley-backed challenge. The cases represent the latest in the Bradley Foundation's long-term effort to dismantle the gains of the civil rights era.

In the 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Court effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, which had required states with a history of legalized racial discrimination to get pre-approval from the federal government before making changes to either voting laws or procedures. One day earlier, in Fisher v. University of Texas, the Court punted on a challenge to affirmative action, sending the case back to a lower court rather than outright prohibiting the consideration of race in college admissions.

The challenges to both the Voting Rights Act and university affirmative action programs were organized by the same activist, who has acknowledged that he receives funding from the Bradley Foundation -- a Milwaukee-based funder of right-wing causes that has long targeted racial equity.

Same Group and Donors Behind Fisher and Shelby County Cases

The group that brought both challenges is the Project on Fair Representation, a legal defense fund dedicated to reversing race-based legal protections and whose website says it devotes "all of its efforts to influencing jurisprudence, public policy, and public attitudes regarding race and ethnicity."The Project was founded and led by one person, Ed Blum, who coordinated the challenges in both the Fisher and Shelby County cases.

Blum has likened his role in high-profile litigation to "Yenta the matchmaker." "I find the plaintiff, I find the lawyer, and I put them together, and then I worry about it for four years," he said.

Blum urged Shelby County, Alabama, to bring its Section 5 challenge after the Department of Justice blocked its effort to dilute the voting power of its growing African-American population. He also connected with Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin and claimed it was because of her race. Blum was also behind the last Voting Rights Act challenge to make it to the Supreme Court, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder.

The Project on Fair Representation covered the legal fees in both the Shelby County and Fisher cases using funds filtered through the secretive Donors Trust, which has been described as a "Dark Money ATM" since it stealthily funnels money from the Kochs, Bradley and other funders to organizations in the right-wing network.

Typically, the identity of Donors Trust funders remain secret, but two of Blum's donors have been revealed: the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which gave at least $100,000 to bankroll Blum's latest legal challenges, and the Searle Freedom Trust, which for years has funded the Project on Fair Representation.

Bradley, which is headed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's campaign chair Michael Grebe, hands out $30 million in grants each year, and its support of Blum's group is only one example of its long-term effort to roll-back both voting rights and affirmative action.

With Bradley-Funded Challenge, Court Eviscerates Voting Rights Act

"Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions," Roberts wrote in the Shelby County case, joined by four other conservative justices. "African- American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by §5 [of the Act], with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent."

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the four dissenting justices, said: "In the Court's view, the very success of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dormancy." Invoking the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, she wrote: "'The arc of the moral universe is long,' he said, but 'it bends toward justice,' if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion. That commitment has been disserved by today's decision."

"Hubris is a fit word for today's demolition of the VRA."

Bradley's role in attacking voting rights is not limited to its support for Blum and his Project on Fair Representation.

In advance of the 2012 elections, Bradley was revealed as the secret funder that had bankrolled giant billboard ads, exclusively in neighborhoods of color, stating "Voter Fraud is a Felony" during a period when voter ID was on hold in Wisconsin and many were confused as to its status. It funded groups that employed James O'Keefe, whose heavily-edited undercover videos hyped voter fraud allegations and helped take down ACORN, which had helped millions of low-income people register to vote. It also funded the legal advocacy group that represented O'Keefe.

Both Bradley and Searle have funded the American Legislative Exchange Council, which promoted voter ID laws in states across the country. And in the wake of Shelby County, ALEC-inspired voter ID bills and other restrictions will likely take effect across the South. As many as eleven percent of registered voters don't have government-issued photo ID and would be unable to vote under the laws, with those percentages even higher among communities of color and students.

Bradley also backs state-based conservative think tanks like Wisconsin's MacIver Institute, which have advanced unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to drum-up support for restrictive laws like voter ID. And it has given millions to groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, which have long hyped voter fraud and called for more restrictive voting measures.

Shelby County Means ALEC-Inspired Voter ID Law Will Be Implemented in Multiple States

As J. Christian Adams writes in a publication from the Bradley-funded Federalist Society: "those states that fall under Section 5 will be able to enact voter identification laws without seeking clearance from the federal government."

Indeed, just hours after Shelby County was published, Texas' Attorney General announced the state's ALEC-inspired voter ID law, which could disenfranchise up to 800,000 registered voters but was blocked by a federal court under Section 5 last year, would immediately take effect; so will the state's problematic redistricting map, which had been blocked by a federal court due to its discriminatory impact.

Mississippivoters will also be subjected to a voter ID requirement, since state officials need not wait for federal pre-clearance to implement a 2011 constitutional amendment. South Carolina's voter ID law, which was initially stalled by the DOJ, will also take effect. A strict voter ID law passed in Virginia this year -- which likely would not have been pre-cleared under Section 5 -- can also be implemented without federal approval.

True the Vote,whose poll watchers have been accused of voter suppression and which was awarded a $35,000 grant from Bradley in 2011 (later rescinded because the group hadn't received its 501(c)(3) status), stated:

"This is without doubt a step in the right direction for our Republic."

Hiccup for Bradley's Long Fight Against Affirmative Action

The Bradley-funded effort to end affirmative action in the Fisher case was less successful than the attack on Section 5. The challenge to the University of Texas' admissions program was kicked back to a lower court for further proceedings, albeit with instructions that the court more strictly scrutinize the university policy. Affirmative action supporters didn't celebrate the decision, but breathed a sigh of relief that the Court didn't entirely ban consideration of race in college admissions.

The case was only one front in the Bradley-funded war on affirmative action.

It has been a top funder of the Center for Individual Rights, a right-wing legal organization that has challenged affirmative action laws across the country (and where Ann Coulter worked as a litigator in the 1990s). CIR litigated two of the most significant affirmative action cases in recent decades, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, both decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. It had a major victory in the 1996 Hopwood v. Texas case in the 5th Circuit that radically reshaped diversity programs at the University of Texas -- potentially even banning recruitment of people of color -- until the decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The group represented the sponsors of Proposition 209, the 2001 California referendum that eliminates affirmative action in state programs, among other efforts. Bradley has given at least $2 million to CIR since 1989.

The Bradley Foundation has also given millions to Ward Connerley's anti-affirmative action "American Civil Rights Institute," including $700,000 in 2001 to support the Proposition 209 ballot initiative, and in 2005 awarding Connerley a $250,000 "Bradley Prize." And it has consistently funded the National Association of Scholars, giving millions to the group whose mission is fighting affirmative action by building scholar networks and organizing conferences and panels on college campuses across the country.

Bradley has also given over one million dollars to the "Center for Equal Opportunity," whose activities include traveling the country urging Republican legislators to crack down on affirmative action programs, which it claims constitute "reverse discrimination."

In 2011, a Center for Equal Opportunity representative claimed the University ofWisconsinwas guilty of "severe racial discrimination" -- a questionable assertion given that just 2.6 percent of the university's 42,180 students are African-American and 3.8 percent are Hispanic -- prompting protests from students already energized in opposition to the agenda of Governor Scott Walker, whose campaign chair and transition team leader was Bradley CEO and President Michael Grebe.

Bradley Foundation Is Not Going Away, and Neither Are These Fights

The Bradley Foundation is one of the largest "philanthropic" organizations in the country and has funded an array of organizations advancing right-wing causes, ranging from school privatization (as documented by One Wisconsin Now at BradleyWatch.org) to Islamophobia, union-busting, "tort reform" and other issues. Between 2001 and 2010 it gave over $350 million to hundreds of institutions, which is nearly as much as the seven Koch and Scaife family foundations combined.

(See a full list of Bradley Foundation contributions here).

Which means the Bradley Foundation is not going anywhere anytime soon -- and battles over racial equity, voting rights, affirmative action and a range of other issues will continue to be funded and fought for years to come.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/catherine-engelbrecht

True The Vote Suggests Clinton May Steal The 2016 Election

SUBMITTED BY: Miranda Blue, Thursday 02/18/2016, 6:12pm

In case we needed any more proof that the “voter integrity” group True the Vote is more interested in stirring up unfounded fears about voter fraud in order to pass restrictive voting laws than in actually ensuring the integrity of elections, Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog spots this fundraising email: (Image: Election Law Blog) We previously wrote about True the Vote and its leader Catherine Engelbrecht: Engelbrecht has worked to drum up support for harsh voting restrictions that disproportionately affect racial minorities by hyping fears of widespread “voter... MORE >

Catherine Engelbrecht: Blame Immigrants For Voter Disenfranchisement

SUBMITTED BY: Miranda Blue, Thursday 01/29/2015, 1:32pm

Catherine Engelbrecht, head of the “voter fraud” vigilante group True the Vote, testified this morning at a hearing on the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be U.S. attorney general. Engelbrecht discussed her claims that she was targeted by the IRS, but also criticized Attorney General Eric Holder for his work protecting voter rights. Engelbrecht said she was “extremely disappointed” to hear comments from Lynch acknowledging that voter ID laws are meant to suppress minority voter turnout and applauding the Justice Department’s work protecting voting rights. (Lynch... MORE >

GOP Picks 'Voter Fraud' Conspiracy Theorist, 'Constitutional Sheriff' To Testify In Loretta Lynch Hearing

SUBMITTED BY: Miranda Blue, Tuesday 01/27/2015, 2:17pm

The Senate Judiciary Committee has released a list of the witnesses who will testify at this week's hearings on the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be attorney general, and two of them signal the GOP’s intention to tie Lynch to their criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder’s efforts to combat racial discrimination in voting rights and law enforcement. Among them is Catherine Engelbrecht, a Tea Party activist who founded the group True the Vote to promote the myth of widespread voter fraud and who has clashed with Holder over his defense of voting rights, or what she calls his... MORE >

True The Vote's Election Day App Undercuts Its Own Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theories

SUBMITTED BY: Miranda Blue, Wednesday 11/05/2014, 2:07pm

A week before Election Day, the “voter integrity” group True the Vote released a new smart phone app to empower its army of citizen detectives to report suspected incidents of voter fraud and intimidation across the country, in the hopes of creating, as True the Vote’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht put in an interview on Monday, “an archive that will finally pull the curtain back on the myth that there is no voter fraud.” But it seems that the evidence of massive voter fraud that Engelbrecht hoped to expose failed to materialize. In the week that the app was... MORE >

Nothing To See Here: The Alternate Reality Of Voter-Suppression Advocates

SUBMITTED BY: Miranda Blue, Tuesday 10/14/2014, 4:17pm

It’s been a rough few days for voter-ID proponents. On Thursday, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office came out with a report showing that restrictive photo-ID measures had depressed turnout in Tennessee and Kansas, especially among young people and African Americans. The same day, the Supreme Court blocked the implementation of a photo-ID law in Wisconsin that voting rights advocates said there was not enough time to implement before the election and a federal judge in Texas struck down that state’s restrictive law, citing its impact on minority voters and... MORE >

How Catherine Engelbrecht Got Greg Abbott To Shut Down A Houston Voter Registration Drive

SUBMITTED BY: Miranda Blue, Tuesday 09/02/2014, 4:07pm

This weekend, the Dallas Morning News ran a long investigative piece exposing for the first time an armed raid that state Attorney General Greg Abbott's office ordered on a Houston voter registration operation, Houston Votes, back in 2010. The aftermath played out like ACORN in miniature: Despite the fact that nobody at Houston Votes was charged with any wrongdoing, the organization folded under the pressure of Abbott’s investigation. The story provides an interesting look at the mechanics of the GOP’s obsessive search for certain types of extraordinarily rare voter fraud in... MORE >

True The Vote Claims Voting Rights Act Encourages 'Race-Based Segregation'

SUBMITTED BY: Miranda Blue, Wednesday 06/11/2014, 4:22pm

In a fundraising email today, the voter-fraud mavens at True the Vote claim that a proposed bipartisan update to the Voting Rights Act is in fact a “move toward race-based segregation” that would “exclude millions of Americans from the full protection of the law — based solely on the color of their skin" and “turn our elections over to Eric Holder and Barack Obama.” The Voting Rights Amendment Act is a bipartisan bill that would replace the formula that determines which areas are subject to Justice Department preclearance for changes in their voting... MORE >

Engelbrecht: Obama 'Machine' Makes 'Watergate Look Like A Stubbed Toe'

SUBMITTED BY: Miranda Blue, Thursday 02/13/2014, 1:10pm

True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, who believes that she has been “targeted because of my political beliefs” by the IRS, told Frank Gaffney yesterday that she President Obama should be impeached because his “political machine” makes “Watergate seem like a stubbed toe.” In 2012, Engelbrecht’s group challenged the voter registrations of people it believed it was committing fraud – most of its claims were filed in heavily black and Latino districts, and many were frivolous. Speaking with Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio, Engelbrecht... MORE >

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by LOGAN CHURCHWELL17 May 2016, 2:54 PM PDT14

--> breitbart

true the vote irs suit dismissed (delay) much blazr beck coverage

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"True the Vote," the Victim? Voter Vigilante Group Says IRS Targeted Its "Verify the Recall" Effort in Wisconsin

by Brendan Fischer [1] — May 21, 2013 - 7:27am

• Topics: Election 2012 [2], Democracy [3], Politics [4]

• Projects: Wisconsin Protests [5]

Share this [6]

The Texas-based Tea Party group True the Vote is claiming they were one of the groups inappropriately "targeted" by the IRS since their application for charitable status has been delayed for years. Although many Tea Party groups were singled-out by the IRS for improper reasons, there may be good reasons for the agency to take a close look at True the Vote's application for charitable status, particularly given the group's involvement with the Wisconsin "Verify the Recall" effort.

True the Vote as a Non-Political "Charity?"

True the Vote is best [7] known [8] for hyping unfounded claims of "voter fraud" -- allegedly committed by Democrats -- to justify restrictive voting measures, and training [9] Tea Partiers to act as poll watchers, some of whom have been accused of voter intimidation.

Engelbrecht says [10] that after her group applied for 501(c)(3) charitable status in 2010, the IRS followed up with what she called a "gauntlet" of questions, and three years later has not yet acted on their application.

“This is what the beginning of tyranny looks like,” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht told Breitbart.com [10].

What has really raised Engelbrecht's hackles is the IRS asking other Tea Party groups [11] about their involvement in "Verify the Recall," a True the Vote-connected effort that recruited Tea Party volunteers from around the country to enter petitions calling for the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker into a massive online database, then analyzing signatures for "fraud."

“The Verify the Recall questions are one of the more blatant examples of what the IRS is trying to do to us,” Engelbrecht said.

Engelbrecht is trying to connect True the Vote to the IRS improperly singling-out Tea Party groups for review based exclusively on their names or political views. 

But the comparison is not accurate.

For one, in contrast with the Tea Party groups seeking 501(c)(4) nonprofit status, True the Vote is seeking501(c)(3) "charity" status, according to its website [12] and news reports [13]. The former can engage in some political activity, but the latter has an absolute bar [14] against any campaign or electoral intervention.  

Part of the reason for this restriction is that unlike donations to (c)(4)s, contributions to 501(c)(3) organizations can be written-off as a charitable tax deduction -- and Congress long ago decided that wealthy donors should not get a tax break for influencing elections.

In the case of the 501(c)(4) Tea Party groups, the IRS erred by singling-out some groups based exclusively on their names or political views, rather than evidence they engaged in potentially excessive political activity. But for the 501(c)(3) True the Vote, the IRS may properly scrutinize its application if there is evidence of any campaign or political intervention. And indeed, there is significant evidence -- and True the Vote likely knows this.

"Verify the Recall" May Have Been Political Intervention

The group's participation in the Wisconsin "Verify the Recall" effort is one example.

501(c)(3) charities may conduct [14] activities like voter registration or get-out-the-vote drives, as long as there is no bias against a particular candidate. But True the Vote's rhetoric surrounding its recall petition "verification" activities made it clear which side they supported. Blog posts [15], for example, suggested [16] "massive fraud" by Democrats in the recall petition effort and exclaimed that [17] "we should not believe the claims of union-supporters and anti-Walker operatives who say that they collected more than one million signatures on petitions to recall Governor Scott Walker."  

And the True the Vote / Verify the Recall findings [18] were, at best, extremely sloppy: True the Vote alleged that recall proponents failed to collect enough valid signatures, but even a cursory review [19] of their analysis showed that many of the rejected signatures were entirely legitimate -- perhaps indicating the true goal was to discredit the recall effort rather than "verify" anything.

After recall petitions were collected and turned in, the Walker campaign refused to challenge any signatures, and instead asked [20] the state elections board to accept challenges from Verify the Recall (which the board rejected, since there is no basis in state law for accepting such third-party challenges). 

True the Vote's position on the recall effort, and the Walker campaign essentially accepting their work as an in-kind campaign contribution, raise legitimate questions about whether this is appropriate activity for a non-partisan, non-political charity. And True the Vote appeared to recognize this and tried distancing itself from the Verify the Recall effort.

True the Vote Tried Distancing Itself from Verify the Recall

At its inception, "Verify the Recall" was described as a joint endeavour [21] between the 501(c)(3) True the Vote and two 501(c)(4) Wisconsin Tea Party groups, Grandsons of Liberty and We The People of the Republic. True the Vote appeared [22] to have a lead role and took credit [23] for much of the work. 

But in the Walker campaign's filing with Wisconsin's elections board, it described [24] Verify the Recall only with reference to the two Wisconsin-based 501(c)(4) groups: the 501(c)(3) "True the Vote," which is prohibited from campaign activity, was not mentioned.

Around this time, the description of Verify the Recall changed, with the website describing [25] the effort as a project of only the two 501(c)(4) Wisconsin Tea Party groups, which are permitted to engage in a limited amount of electoral activity. The 501(c)(3) True the Vote then became described merely as a "contracted partner [26]" that developed the database.

Because of the inherently political nature of the Verify the Recall effort -- and True the Vote's efforts to portray itself as an organization that has nothing to do with influencing elections -- the group may have been trying to cover their tracks. Still, after Walker won his recall election, True the Vote couldn't help but send a celebratory email to its supporters calling the outcome a "victory [27]."

Invitations to volunteer for the "Verify the Recall" effort appeared on Tea Party websites across the country, and the IRS apparently [28] asked at least one group, the Irvine, Texas-based North East Tarrant Tea Party, about their participation in the Verify the Recall campaign. There may be legitimate questions about whether this line of IRS inquiry was appropriate. But it certainly seems fair for the IRS to scrutinize True the Vote's eligibility for charitable status given its relationship with Verify the Recall.

Texas Judge: True the Vote's Parent Organization is a "GOP Front Group"

Questions about whether True the Vote is really a "charity" did not start with Verify the Recall: the group's partisan roots have shown almost from the beginning.

A [29] announcing True the Vote's launch begins with right-wing activist David Horowitz telling the camera "Republicans have to win by at least three percent in order to win an election," since Democrats are so likely to cast fraudulent votes.

The video, which features white activists warning of rampant voter fraud, also featured an image of an African-American woman holding a sign that had been doctored to say "I only got to vote once." In the original photograph [30], the sign read "don't mess with my vote." (The image was later cut from the video).

A few months after the video and True the Vote's launch, in the November 2010 elections, the group dispatched its "poll watchers" to districts in Harris County, Texas where most voters were African-American or Latino. They found no hard evidence of intentional voter fraud, but the poll watchers did draw accusations of voter intimidation from election officials, with volunteers "hovering" behind people as they cast their ballot, "getting into election worker's faces," [31] and blocking or disrupting lines of voters.

After those elections, the Civil Rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into the group and its alleged voter intimidation efforts.

At the time, True the Vote was described as a "project" of the Houston-based Tea Party group King Street Patriots, which was also founded by Engelbrecht; the 2010 [29] featured the True the Vote logo laid-over that of its parent organization. And the IRS was not the first to question whether the groups really qualify for nonprofit status. Based on its 2010 True the Vote voter intimidation activities and close relationship with the state Republican Party, a Texas judge called [32] the King Street Patriots a"GOP front group" [33] that had illegally provided in-kind donations to the state Republican Party.

Is the Shoe on the Other Foot?

True the Vote's profile increased in the 2012 national elections with a pledge to train over one million volunteers [34] to duplicate its Harris County activities, and by threatening lawsuits against states that didn't follow their directive to purge voter rolls. Common Cause and Demos highlighted [35] the group as a central player in the effort to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud -- and the need for restrictive voting laws -- and True the Vote was the subject of a New York Times profile [36].

Its national elections coordinator has made it clear that True the Vote's focus is on policing the act of voting itself. He has said [9] on multiple occasions that True the Vote's goal is to make exercising the fundamental right to vote feel "like driving and seeing the police following you." 

And here is the irony: a group that made a name for itself by targeting voters is now complaining about itself being "targeted." But unlike True the Vote's targeted voter intimidation tactics, the IRS taking a closer look at True the Vote's charitable status may very well be justified.

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

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Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/05/12114/true-vote-victim-voter-vigilante-group-says-irs-targeted-its-verify-recall-effort

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35275/brendan-fischer

[2] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/us-government/election-2012

[3] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/democracy

[4] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/politics

[5] http://www.prwatch.org/projects/wisconsin-protests

[6] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prwatch.org%2Fnews%2F2013%2F05%2F12114%2Ftrue-vote-victim-voter-vigilante-group-says-irs-targeted-its-verify-recall-effort&linkname=%22True%20the%20Vote%2C%22%20the%20Victim%3F%20Voter%20Vigilante%20Group%20Says%20IRS%20Targeted%20Its%20%22Verify%20the%20Recall%22%20Effort%20in%20Wisconsin

[7] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CFAQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2012%2F09%2F17%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fgroups-like-true-the-vote-are-looking-very-closely-for-voter-fraud.html%3Fpagewanted%3Dall&ei=gGabUeqeEcGgyAHb24CQCw&usg=AFQjCNEpQsatSRcm53iPIpn_icmGwRgrVg&sig2=7I_DICthHF1aDQMXZNxcfQ&bvm=bv.46751780,d.aWc

[8] http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/going-undercover-gops-voter-vigilante-project-disrupt-nov-election?paging=off

[9] http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/08/true_the_votes_large_and_growing_far-right_network.html

[10] http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/13/IRS-Scandal-Facts-Suggest-Other-Gov-Agencies-Involved

[11] http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/irs-raised-wisconsin-recall-questions-tea-party-group-says-k19vj9s-207786941.html

[12] http://www.prwatch.org/files/TTV_501c3.png

[13] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/20/texas-tea-party-founder-recounts-ordeal-irs-harassment/

[14] http://www.irs.gov/uac/Election-Year-Activities-and-the-Prohibition-on-Political-Campaign-Intervention-for-Section-501(c)(3)-Organizations

[15] http://www.truethevote.org/news/calumnies-what-the-left-is-saying-about-recall

[16] http://www.truethevote.org/news/true-the-vote-joins-effort-to-true-wisconsin-recall-vote

[17] http://www.prwatch.org/files/Wisc.pdf

[18] http://www.prwatch.org/files/walker-exec-summary.pdf

[19] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/03/11330/true-vote-or-skew-vote

[20] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/02/11322/walker-using-out-state-tea-party-group-indirectly-challenge-recall

[21] http://www.prwatch.org/files/GSOL.png

[22] http://www.prwatch.org/files/MacIver2.png

[23] http://www.prwatch.org/files/Franklin.png

[24] http://www.prwatch.org/files/Walker_challenge.pdf

[25] http://verifytherecall.com/Verify_the_Recall.html

[26] http://verifytherecall.com/News_Press_Releases.html

[27] http://www.prwatch.org/files/TTV_victory.png

[28] http://host.madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/texas-tea-party-group-says-irs-asked-about-its-connection/article_fea0d711-a4d4-56cd-bc10-fa6cc8f05930.html

[29] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb27ryiPclg

[30] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-w-smith/right-wing-voter-suppress_b_706550.html

[31] http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/the_texas_democratic_party_expanded.php

[32] http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Judge-rules-tea-party-group-a-PAC-not-a-nonprofit-3442532.php

[33] http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/20085.html

[34] http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/05/voter_suppression_groups_plot_a_million-person_army_to_swarm_polls.html

[35] http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/%7BFB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665%7D/BULLIESATTHEBALLOTBOX-FINAL2.PDF

[36] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-true-the-vote-are-looking-very-closely-for-voter-fraud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&#p%5BMGswME%5D