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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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lately trump unhinged rants he preface the worst with my staff does not want me to say // i won’t say then immediately/inevitably DOES // they go crazy when i say X some racist lie [jdv PR joke, gee humorless PC cannot take joke b/c snowflakes [feminist no sense of humor?]

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October 29, 2024, edition of WZFG The Flag's What's On Your Mind?

CLETA MITCHELL (ELECTION INTEGRITY NETWORK): And so there have been a lot of different changes that have been made in legislation and in statutes around the country. And that's a good thing but it's not enough. We have to do more.

But the biggest thing I think is that the RNC, to their credit, have filed a lot of lawsuits. They haven't won as many as I would have liked but at least they've been aggressive before the election and the other thing is we have citizens, we have so many volunteers who are trained who now know the election code better than most lawyers in their state and they are involved and they're engaged and they're working as poll observers and many of them have become election board members and election officials and so we have a presence and we have eyes on the process that we really didn't have in 2020And of course it makes the left's collective head explode. They hate it. They hate me, they hate the Election Integrity Network, and they hate everything that we're doing which tells me we're on the right track.

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October 18. 2024 edition of Newsmax's Newsline

KERRI TOLOCZKO (GUEST): There are two kinds of noncitizen voters. Ones are – one group who are the people who are here completely illegally. 19 states give them drivers licenses and DC. Then there are people that are noncitizens who came here lawfully. God bless them. They came to the country, filled out the paperwork, may want to be a citizen one day and to me the most egregious part of the DOJ trying to push noncitizen voting because that’s basically what they’re doing is it is a felony for those folks to vote.

And if they do vote and they are found out when they apply for citizenship they can be immediately deported in their application for citizenship even if they’ve been here for forty years, is completely thrown out. And that’s just taking advantage of those people in a way that should never happen.

Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky attacks court decision about officials being required to certify Georgia's election

10/18/24

2. ### Election denier and January 6 supporter Jenny Beth Martin describes her group’s GOTV efforts in Georgia and other swing states

10/18/24

3. ### Media Matters weekly newsletter, October 18

10/18/24

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October 16, 2024, Rumble livestream of the Election Security Call with Steve Stern and Raj Doraisamy

KERRI TOLOCZKO (ELECTION INTEGRITY NETWORK): We have a sign that says if you are not a citizen of the United States, it is illegal for you to vote and there's the code. Our activists are using these everywhere. We have one in red too if you like red better than you like yellow. We have a bunch here as well. You can see that's in English. Stop, you can't vote here if you're not a citizen. And we have that in Spanish.

We have activists, grassroots activists, so we're handing these out in churches, in parking lots, in voting centers. Please, please make sure you know your state and local law on how far you can get away from the voting station before they start yelling at you and then add another 10 feet to that.

This goes back to what I was saying earlier about these people being taken advantage of and abused. Number one, on one side of the equation, we don't want noncitizen voting. I mean, this is like the hugest given in this whole call. The second part of it is they don't - they shouldn't be doing it either because it really harms them. And so our position is, you know, we're here to protect you against these things.

...

So, no matter what you're accused of in this noncitizen thing, number one, you're protecting noncitizen from themselves and not having them commit a felony that can come back and bite them later. You are protecting lawful citizens because if I - I live in Collier County Florida, if I have a noncitizen come in here and vote not the way I vote, guess what happens to my vote, it's gone. Right?

So, it's protecting lawful voters to make sure that their votes and their political voices are not, canceled out and you know, the notion that it's somehow racist and suppressionist is just ridiculous. We joke often that it is suppressionist. We're trying to suppress the people who are trying to vote unlawfully.

As Media Matters previously reported on Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network:

Mitchell is an election denier and former Trump attorney who leads the Election Integrity Network — which is a “coalition” of right-wing, election-denying activists that has reportedly recruited and trained poll watchers to seemingly monitor elections for alleged fraud. According to The Intercept, Mitchell “played a central role in the effort to stop the certification of the election in Georgia and beyond.”

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editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect that the cancellation of 400,000 Pennsylvania voter registrations was due to normal list maintenance, not challenges from outside groups.*

A collection of GOP-aligned organizations are already hard at work planning to make it harder for predominantly Democratic constituencies to cast their ballots this November.

According to a Wednesday report in tech publication Wired, groups like True The Vote, the Election Integrity Network, Check My Vote and the Nevada-based Pig Pen Project are planning to blitz urban voting precincts in some of the more competitive battleground states this November like Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This initiative is likely to create headaches for voters who may show up to their polling place this fall only to find that their registration was removed due to challenges from one or more of these groups.

“These groups and the broader election denial movement have been building these structures, building these projects, over the course of many, many months and years, in preparation for this moment,” Brendan Fischer, who is the deputy executive director at Documented, told Wired. “And the pieces are finally falling into place, where they can begin to file these mass challenges for voter eligibility.”

READ MORE:Lara Trump says Republicans plan to 'strike' at 'major polling locations' and 'hit things'

"Staffing poll observers, both during early voting and on election day, in addition to mass voter challenges, in addition to conducting citizen research about election conspiracy theories, these are all priorities for them," he added.

Republican National Committee (RNC) co-chair Lara Trump — who is former President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law — has previously hinted at a well-funded infrastructure put in place to both challenge voter eligibility and to challenge election results themselves. During a Fox Business interview in May, Lara Trump told host Maria Bartiromo that the RNC is ready to engage in a campaign of mass disruption in the weeks following the November election.

"We plan on having attorneys in all of these major polling locations across the country," she said. "We can't wait to litigate something weeks after it has happened. We need to strike at a moment's notice. We want people there on the ready to hit things and hit the ground running when they happen so that we are never seeing 2020 happen ever again."

Pennsylvania Secretary of State press secretary Matt Heckel told Wired that election officials are already constantly working to keep voter lists accurate and up to date, saying that 400,000 registrations were removed in 2023 due to regular list maintenance. He warned that a wave of superfluous challenges from outside groups would only add to what is already a considerable workload.

READ MORE:'Carry that with me for the rest of my life': PA election worker lives under constant threat

"Challenges which seek to remove voters on the basis of unverified information or a timeline inconsistent with federal law will lead to disenfranchisement, unnecessary litigation, and a harassing diversion of already-stretched county resources," Heckel told Wired.

After losing the 2020 election, former President Trump filed more than 60 legal challenges to election results in various states. He lost all but one of those challenges, and the sole victory involved a negligible number of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that were rejected on a technicality. Those ballots did not have an impact on the final tally.

READ MORE:Election workers 'scared to death' of threats from 'volatile' conspiracy theorists in 2024

{Click here to read Wired's report in full (subscription required).

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Election denier and Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin — whose group sponsored a pre-insurrection rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021 — appeared with right-wing media host Steve Bannon and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk this week to discuss her group’s strategy ahead of the 2024 election. During her interviews, Martin claimed that her group is working with election denier and Trump-allied lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s activist group and training thousands of poll workers.

During the January 29 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Martin told Kirk that Tea Party Patriots is working alongside Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, a group of right-wing, election-denying activists who “monitor elections” for alleged fraud.

:{Video

CitationFrom the January 29, 2024, edition of Salem Media's The Charlie Kirk Show

“In Georgia and other states around the county we’ve been working very closely with Cleta Mitchell’s organization, Election Integrity Network, building election integrity task forces in the states that had the most trouble around the country,” Martin told Kirk. “Those groups are looking at how to clean the voter roles, they’re making sure that poll watchers are recruited and trained, they’re deploying poll workers, making sure people go work the polls.”

Cleaning voter rolls is an “often-flawed” process of deleting the names of ineligible voters in specific elections from registration lists, which the Brennan Center for Justice notes has the potential to “disenfranchise legitimate voters.”

Martin appeared alongside Bannon and Kirk at Turning Point USA’s Restoring National Confidence conference, an event held to counter the Republican National Committee’s annual winter meeting. Both events are currently occurring in Las Vegas. Turning Point’s decision to host an opposing event comes as RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel faces scrutiny from far-right and anti-establishment figures, including both Bannon and Kirk. Kirk and Turning Point USA are also under pressure from reporting on questionable spending at the organization and criticism of Kirk’s antisemitism.

The next day, during an interview with Bannon, Martin bragged about the amount of poll watchers her group has trained in recent years.

“When it comes to securing the election, we’re in a much better position right now in 2020 — I mean in 2024 than we were in 2020, way better,” Martin said. “In 2022, we trained 20,000 people who went on to be part of the 80,000 people that the RNC placed as poll watchers. That is massive.”

:{Video

CitationFrom the January 30, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

The right-wing organizing and poll watcher recruiting that Martin described have previously led to widespread voter intimidation.

Later in the interview, Martin explained that her group has partnered with Kirk and Turning Point Action’s Tyler Bowyer to create an app for “relational organizing,” to get out the vote to family and friends.

Bowyer has previously pushed election fraud conspiracy theories and acted as one of former President Donald Trump’s fake electors from Arizona during his push to overturn the 2020 election results.

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Pro-Trump Republicans aiding Georgia company seeking to 'aggressively cancel voter registrations': report

Brandon Gage August 14, 2023

A private company aided by Republican "election integrity activists" is "attempting to sell software to Georgia election officials and residents that would enable them to aggressively cancel voter registrations," Mark Niesse reports in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday.

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EagleAI's "software could be used by local governments as well as individuals who have challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters since the 2020 presidential election," Niesse explains. "EagleAI's sales pitch has alarmed voting rights organizations that say it could be abused to attempt to disenfranchise legitimate voters."

Niesse finds that those efforts are compounding on former President Donald Trump's unsuccessful attempt to overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 victory in the Peach State. "Since then," Niesse reveals, EagleAI "filed challenges to nearly 100,000 Georgia voters' eligibility, in some cases forcing legitimate voters to defend their right to vote."

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Niesse points out that despite Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defending "Georgia's voter lists" as "the cleanest in the nation,'" EagleAI's "presentation alleges the state's voter rolls are bloated with people who have died or moved away."

Raffensperger's spokesman, Mike Hassinger told Niesse that "EagleAI data offers zero additional value to Georgia's existing list maintenance procedures," adding, "We already utilize the most accurate death data through our Department of Public Health and the Social Security death master list. We already check for duplicates."

Moreover, Niesse questions EagleAI's non-partisanship because Chief Executive Officer Rick Richards "frequently speaks during Zoom calls hosted by Cleta Mitchell,an attorney who supported efforts to overturn Trump's loss and participated in the former president's call to Raffensperger asking him to 'find' enough votes to reverse the outcome."

Niesse notes that "the Zoom calls, which bring together members of Mitchell's Election Integrity Network group, also included Jason Frazier, a Republican Party nominee to the Fulton County election board who has challenged the registrations of almost 10,000 people since last year."

READ MORE: Fani Willis’ 'entire career has been preparing her' to prosecute Trump: report

EagleAI "is negotiating with Columbia County's election board and has discussed working with a dozen more Georgia counties, according to emails obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution under the state's open records law," Niesse writes.

Meanwhile, Niesse continues, "EagleAI says it plans to start its voter registration list efforts in Georgia, then expand to other states, including Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Texas."

READ MORE: Trump’s 'demographic war' is 'far more dangerous' than 1930s American fascism: report

Niesse's report is at this link (subscription required).

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...This instance of a CPI- and GOP-linked Fairfax County group sending material from QAnon influencers to the county board of elections further demonstrates the connections between the QAnon and election denial movements. Media Matters has previously documented True the Vote’s collaboration with QAnon figures, major election denial funder Patrick Byrne’s significant connections to the QAnon community, and a QAnon influencer’s involvement with a coalition recruiting and aiming to elect election-denialist secretary of state candidates. And according to Nevada Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant, the leader of that coalition, he had been “working very close” with Mitchell and CPI.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/fallout-how-trumps-big-lie-is-threatening-the-future-of-elections/

...This strategy to attack and replace local election officials with Trump loyalists is one we’re seeing play out from Fulton County, Georgia, toYavapai County, Arizona, with the full weight of the Republican Party behind it.

The Republican National Committee—which aided Trump in his plot to stay in power—has spent millions on17 states to recruit more than 14,000 poll workers and 10,000 poll watchers already, according to theWashington Post.

Working with the RNC is Cleta Mitchell, a Trump lawyer who was on the infamous call on which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 more votes. Mitchell is leading the so-called “election integrity” effort by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which seeks to bring together local right-wing groups with established conservative behemoths like the Heritage Foundation. The Brennan Centerdescribes CPI as such: “The network has published mater­i­als and hosted summits across the coun­try with the aim of coordin­at­ing a nation­wide effort to staff elec­tion offices, recruit poll watch­ers and poll work­ers, and build teams of local citizens to chal­lengevoter rolls, ques­tion postal work­ers, be ‘ever-present’ in local elec­tion offices, andinund­ate elec­tion offi­cials with docu­ment requests.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, CPI became home to other Trump allies who had a role in the months-long effort to overturn the election, including Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows (who sat scrolling through his phone when he heard about threats of violence on Jan. 6), Trump’s former social media director Dan Scavino (whospread voter fraud conspiracies on behalf of the tweet-happy president), andEd Corrigan (who**appeared to be busy**behind the scenes encouraging Vice President Mike Pence to buck his constitutional duty and overturn the election).CPI enjoyed a$1 million boost from Trump’s Save America PAC. 

CPI and organizations like it are finding success. One in 5 local election administrators say they are likely to leave their jobs before the 2024 presidential election, according to asurvey by the Brennan Center for Justice. These public servants cite politicians attacking “a system that they know is fair and honest” and the stress of the job as the top two reasons for their planned departures.

Meanwhile, other politicians are running for secretary of state to gain control of their states’ elections. Arizona’s Mark Finchemstood outside the U.S. Capitol’s east steps as the anti-government extremist Oath Keepers—of which Finchem claims to be a member—stormed the building. Three months later, he announcedhis bid for Arizona’s secretary of state and earned Trump’s endorsement. In Michigan, Kristina Karamano, also blessed with a Trump endorsement for her voter-fraud conspiracy theories, became the Republican nominee in the race for secretary of state. And in Georgia, Rep. Jody Hice tried to best Trump nemesis Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger out of the Republican nomination to no avail. ...

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BANNON (HOST): [Steve] Cortes, and he and I didn’t talk, we talked about his segments and how we’re going to go through the economic data. We always talk beforehand about what's the best way to lay that out. But we didn’t talk about what he brought up, which was the Politico piece. I saw it I think at zero six hundred or seven, whenever it popped, and it was their lead story and they meant it as a hit piece. And I’m reading this thing, the RNC is working with these new groups, and it’s Cleta Mitchell, she’s been on the show many times talking about it, but the RNC, and they meant it as a hit piece and Cortes said, hey this thing was like a paid advertisement cause it shows you the quality of training they’re getting and now the RNC is getting involved. I said hey, I think they’re sending it out to the - to make sure the RNC donors see it, that they’re now working with the crazies.

Cleta Mitchell, tell us about the piece and particularly what you guys are doing now in conjunction with the RNC cause every time you have these summits, we send people, I get tremendous feedback of people that now are going to get engaged now and be part of it, it’s changed their lives. The comradery. But most importantly is the technical details, not war stories, you teach them technical details about how to be election officials, how to be poll workers, right? Not just poll watchers. So walk us through why did Politico try to take you out this morning ma’am?

CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): Well, thank you for having me Steve, you’re always so great to help us tell our story. Politico got a tape, an audio tape, from our Arizona summit in which I was presenting to the group there about how the Biden administration is using our tax dollars to turn every federal agency into a Democratic political operation. And I used the language that they use, which is their new Democratic majority, that this is language of the left and I just traced their language showing that that’s what they're doing with our tax dollars.

Biden issued an executive order based on a plan that was put to him by a left-wing organization, Demos, if you want to find out about it just go to Demos dot org and you can look it up. They’re the ones who sold this to him. They’ve got Susan Rice in the White House running the program. And it’s an executive order that orders every federal agency to develop a voter registration and turnout program and then they’re going to give grants to approved groups. Guess who’s going to approve those groups? Susan Rice. Excuse me. And so I talked about this at the Arizona summit, I went through the language and so we’ve decided to put that out there. We’re putting it on our website today, the entire audio.[tucker perm dem maj?]

…

MITCHELL: So, they're going to do with our tax dollars what they did with Zuckerbucks in 2020. And that's what I was teaching. I was giving the presentation in Arizona –[how to gerry?]

BANNON: Yes.

MITCHELL: – showing what they were doing. And they are saying, the Politico article says that I was complaining and I was engaged in voter suppression because I didn’t want these groups to be registered and mobilized. No! If those people are going to be registered and mobilized, let the Democratic Party pay for it. Let the candidates pay for it.Don’t use my tax money to register and turn out people to vote because they’re the most vulnerable in our society.[acorn-y?]

BANNON: K. We're going to have you on to go through actually the presentation.

...

We need the army of the awakened to get this information that Cleta and her team puts out all over the country.

...

BANNON: Democrats, if they can't steal, they can't win. Let me just be blunt.

MITCHELL: That's right.

BANNON: They can't steal, they can't win. They know it. That's why they're so upset aboutMAGA getting to the bottom of this.

...

MITCHELL: Let me tell you what, Steve. It is a real serious problem what's going on with this vote by mail. This avalanche of mail voting. I call it unsupervised voting.

It's happening in Florida, where in Florida they have sent the wrong ballots, they sent out tens of thousands of ballots that have been voted and come back into Broward county, Palm Beach county, Orange county – which is Orlando. And they have the wrong races or they don't have the school board races. And it's happening right now and it's all because of this bad voting.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/02/rnc-stop-the-steal-advocates-poll-workers-00049109

heidi p

no lnx

Republican National Committee has been relying on a stable of the party’s most prolific spreaders of false stolen-election theories to pilot a sweeping “election integrity” operation to recruit and coach thousands of poll workers in eight battleground states, according to new recordings of organizing summits held this spring in Florida and Pennsylvania obtained by POLITICO.

On the tapes, RNC National Election Integrity Director Josh Findlay repeatedly characterizes the committee’s role as supporting in-state coalitions — delivering staff, organization and “muscle” in key states to the person they identify as the quarterback of the effort to create a permanent workforce: Conservative elections attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a central figure in former President Donald Trump’s legal strategy to overturn the 2020 election.

“Cleta Mitchell, she’s like the best election and election law expert out there. We’re not going to tell her what to do,” Findlay told a March 31 Pennsylvania session organized by Mitchell.

Publicly, the RNC has insisted its goal is to ensure there are enough trained poll workers to protect the electoral process and ensure partisan parity at polling centers. The recordings, however, indicated that the RNC is relying heavily on people who have spread false or unproven claims of irregularities and conspiracies. The recordings feature Findlay speaking at a number of Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network” summits, which her group has hosted in battleground states including Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The RNC is just “part of the team,” he told a Florida summit the same month.

While Republicans have said the aim of their “election integrity” effort is to ensure there are well-trained poll workers during the next election, the recordings also feature Mitchell speaking openly about the need to challenge efforts by nonprofit groups aligned with Democrats to create a “new American majority” of young voters, people of color and unmarried women.

“It’s a place the left sees as a great target of opportunity, and we have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” she said, referring to Democratic efforts to register voters from traditionally underrepresented voting blocs.

Mitchell was on Trump’s post-election phone call directing a Georgia elections official to “find” him 11,700 votes after losing the state, and is she among those currently under subpoena in a criminal investigation by the Fulton County district attorney. Days after the 2020 election, she was exploring ways to keep Trump in power via a slate of fake electors from several battleground states. White House call logs show she is also among a handful of individuals with whom Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, the day the Capitol was attacked, and she is suing to block the House Jan. 6 committee from obtaining her full phone records.

Mitchell, in a response to POLITICO, said her comments about the “new American majority” were referring to an executive order by the Biden administration directing federal agencies to help citizens register to vote and to educate them on how to do so. The effort amounts to turning “every federal agency into a Democratic turnout machine — using our tax dollars in the process,” said Mitchell.

[Cleta Mitchell testifies.

Cleta Mitchell was on former President Donald Trump’s post-election phone call directing a Georgia elections official to “find” him 11,700 votes after losing the state. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo]

The RNC says its poll watching and working program has been in place for recent primary elections in Georgia and Texas, where “turnout has risen, reported issues have been resolved and elections have run smoothly,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick.

“The RNC works with other groups who have an interest in promoting election integrity, but the party’s efforts are independent from any outside organization,” said McGavick. “Fearmongering stories like this undermine confidence in elections and unfairly smear Americans who are simply getting involved in the civic process,” he said.

The RNC, in its email response, said Democrats also have a major Election Day operation through their national party and noted that the Democratic National Committee’s website features a webinar on how to become a poll worker. The RNC also disputes that it trains poll workers. It calls sessions in which statewide “election integrity” directors coach recruits on how to challenge votes and voting processes “workshops,” and all poll workers must attend separate trainings by county clerks.

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Yet the DNC’s “voter protection” program is different because it focuses on expanding voting access, including through more locations and through mail-in voting. The webinar does not train poll workers, rather informs them how to apply, and the DNC says it does not have a national initiative to train poll workers. [so projection]

‘Number one goal’

RNC chair Ronna McDaniel has walked a fine line in calling for robust election security measures in response to Trump’s unproven claims of voting irregularities in the 2020 election, while avoiding fully embracing more sensational allegations there was widespread fraud and the election was “stolen” from him.

The approach around placing partisan poll workers is similar: steering clear of any public statements expressly supporting the “Stop the Steal” wing of the party while collaborating with some of its leading advocates around what the RNC considers, according to minutes of a spring training meeting in Memphis provided by Documented, its “number one goal” of building a permanent army of 15,000 GOP poll workers.

In workshops hosted by the RNC, GOP activists behind the party’s “election integrity” drive have primarily emphasized rooting out voting fraud — including “ballot stuffing” through the mail for which no evidence exists — as their key goal.

The recordings suggest the goals are broader. At an April 5 Arizona summit, Mitchell spoke mostly about an emerging “new American majority” of people of color, young people and unmarried women that could make conservatives “obsolete.” Her private comments are significant because Democrats have long insisted it is these fears of displacement — and not legitimate election administration concerns — behind the GOP drive to tighten access to voting for certain groups, including through mail.

POLITICO obtained the recordings from Documented, a non-partisan investigative watchdog that says it believes “corporations and wealthy donors have far too much power and influence” and that “democracy itself is under attack.”Documented got the tapes from attendees.

Other major summit partners include conservative grassroots organizations Heritage Action for America and Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, who became part of Trump’s legal team in Georgia, where there is a criminal investigation into Trump and his top legal advisers. Toni Shuppe, who led a far-right effort to “audit the vote” in search of fraud in Pennsylvania, is leading that state’s coalition. In Arizona, Gina Swoboda, a former Trump campaign official who runs the Voter Reference Foundation, is heading the effort. Her group has continued to spread claims about voting discrepancies and published millions of voters’ names, birthdates and addresses.

None of these coalition partners responded to requests for comment.

The recordings feature keynote speakers continuing to push Trump’s false election claims.

“They [Democrats] know they can’t win unless they cheat,” Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator who chairs the Conservative Partnership Institute, the activist group that houses Mitchell’s initiative, said at the Florida gathering.

POLITICO previously documented the RNC’s efforts to build “an army” of poll workers prepared to challenge elections clerks in primarily Democrat-dominated precincts in Michigan and keep them in constant contact with roving party attorneys. In its email response, the RNC also said its staff training and recruitment of volunteers focuses on the “need to comply with federal and state laws protecting voting rights” and any individual who “does not follow the law will be promptly dismissed.”

‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections

BY HEIDI PRZYBYLA

Shipping volunteers

Findlay, in his summit appearances, repeatedly makes clear Mitchell and in-state coalition leaders are the braintrust of that effort. “When we started this (election integrity) department, we said, ‘Well, what can we do? Cleta knows more about election integrity than anybody in the country … What can we do to participate,’” he said in Florida on March 25.

Findlay was referencing Mitchell’s activities around the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, which saw thousands of Trump loyalists enlist as poll watchers and which the RNC considers a model for upcoming elections. He’s made similar remarks in Pennsylvania and other states about the RNC taking its lead from Mitchell.

“We can recruit. We can train, we can ship volunteers,” he said in Florida.

In Pennsylvania, the statewide coalition director is Shuppe, who has also promoted QAnon conspiracies that the online furniture retailer Wayfair was selling trafficked children on its website and Pizzagate, an unfounded theory that prominent Democrats were running a pedophile ring.

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Another speaker at a March 31 Pennsylvania summit was CPI’s Ned Jones, who during his remarks floated conspiracies about “rogue” postal service workers tampering with mail-in ballots. Kerri Toloczko, who is atop the Florida coalition, suggested during the same gathering that Wisconsin service union workers may have been involved in casting votes for nursing home residents with dementia.

Toloczko did not respond to a request for comment.

A growing force

The summits, organized by Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network,” are largely kick-off events. They are followed by regular calls, meetings, and other organizing efforts involving several grassroots conservative groups.

CPI is a conservative think tank funded in part by Trump’s political action committee and run by DeMint and Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff. In its annual report, CPI states that it is aiming to create “permanent election integrity coalitions” in eight target states. “Cleta, her full time job at CPI is to do nothing but this,” Meadows told a Georgia summit in February.

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A former associate general counsel for the Trump campaign, Findlay has also been caught up in investigations around the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. In late July, the Washington Post reported Findlay is among those for whom the Department of Justice has issued subpoenas seeking any communications regarding a scheme for GOP state lawmakers to overturn the will of the voters by submitting slates of alternate electors.

“They bring democracy to your doorstep. I wanna pause right here. We don’t live in a democracy. ... We live in a constitutional republic.”

Cleta Mitchell, conservative elections attorney

Texts the Jan. 6 committee obtained from Meadows show lawmakers referencing meetings at CPI in the post-2020 election period. Two days after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, it was Mitchell who contacted Trump lawyer John Eastman, the legal mastermind of Trump’s failed strategy, and encouraged him to engineer a legal argument to challenge electoral vote certification in Congress.

A transcript shows Mitchell played a major role in a conversation in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him additional votes. Amid the controversy, Mitchell resigned from her position as a partner with the law firm Foley & Lardner and landed at CPI shortly thereafter.

CPI is a growing force: According to its annual report, the group raised $19.7 million in 2021, which includes a $1 million grant from Trump’s Save America PAC, which raised millions by fanning Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

Not ‘a democracy’

While training sessions previously published by POLITICO show Republican recruits overwhelmingly concerned about election fraud, Mitchell’s remarks in Arizona focused primarily on what many Democrats have long insisted is the real motive behind the entire GOP effort: targeting certain groups.

She made extended remarks about Democrats’ goal, since former Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Push” coalition of the 1980s, to register more people in minority communities to vote and create a new American majority of young people, people of color and unmarried women. “There was a book ‘Brown Is the New White’ talking about changing demographics in America was going to render conservatives obsolete,” she said.

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“That is their goal,” she said of Democrats and outside groups aligned with them like unions. “They believe you can expand access to democracy by underrepresented populations.” Mitchell said they “target the most vulnerable people of our society,” citing the story of an allegedly elderly woman with dementia who allegedly obtained a voter registration form at a health clinic.

“You see it all over,” she said, as she decried the availability of information on voter registration at public venues like health clinics and universities. “We see people who are in need, who are hurting, who need help,” she said, referring to elderly, disabled, low-income Americans and students in need of financial aid receiving “education” on how to vote from outside groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the availability of voter registration information on government websites or venues serving the needy.

In her response to POLITICO, Mitchell said: “I showed the attendees the language taken from left-wing sources,” adding that President Joe Biden and “left-wing” groups are conspiring to use federal resources to “register and turn out the vote of the most vulnerable people in our society and pressure them to vote for Democrats.”

“That sort of enterprise should be paid for by candidates or political parties,” Mitchell said, without offering evidence any agency is pressuring individuals to vote for a particular party by providing them with registration materials.

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In the tapes, Mitchell also disparaged the Democrats’ recent warnings about threats to democracy.

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“They bring democracy to your doorstep. I wanna pause right here. We don’t live in a democracy,” Mitchell said, to a round of applause from the crowd. “But to the left, everything is about democracy, the democracy fund, the democracy this, the democracy that.”

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“We live in a constitutional republic,” she said. [real am = wht xian?]

FILED UNDER: GOP, ELECTIONS, RNC, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE,

https://documented.net/investigations/recordings-reveal-whats-really-going-on-cleta-mitchell-election-integrity-network

a $19.7 million DC-based organization led by former Trump officials who worked to overturn the 2020 election is "recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections," according to the New York Times.

Documented has obtained hours of audio and other materials outlining this effort.

The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) is working to build what it calls a “permanent election infrastructure” in eight swing states staffed with people fully committed to election conspiracies. The project is led by Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who played a key role in plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The goal is to build in-state coalitions focused on recruiting election conspiracy theorists to interrogate local election offices and to become poll workers and watchers. Ultimately, if CPI and its allies are successful, then those who falsely believe that the 2020 election was stolen could be in a position of real power and authority over future elections. The risk is that conspiracy theorists who see fraud around every corner are going to disrupt voting and the administration of elections.

CPI is working closely with the Republican National Committee (RNC) in the effort. As described by POLITICO, the collaboration means that the RNC "has been relying on a stable of the party’s most prolific spreaders of false stolen-election theories to pilot a sweeping 'election integrity' operation to recruit and coach thousands of poll workers in eight battleground states."

As Mark Meadows recently said of the project, "this fight is not just about what happened in 2020. This fight is about every future election, whether it is at a state level or a federal level or the highest office in the land."[aud]

no lnx aud

cPI’s Election Integrity Network

CPI, which raised $19.7 million in 2021, is led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and was seeded with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. CPI has launched a number of projects led by former Trump administration officials and allies, including Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation and Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America,and is staffed with individuals who played a key role in laying the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection.

CPI’s “Election Integrity Network” project is led by Cleta Mitchell,the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including joining the infamous call when the then-President urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes. Mitchell was also responsible for contacting John Eastman and asking him to engineer a legal argument to challenge electoral certification in Congress. Amidst the controversy, in January 2021 Mitchell abruptly resigned from her longtime role as a partner with the law firm Foley and Lardner and joined CPI.

Mitchell played a key role in promoting false claims of election fraud, and is now channeling that misplaced anger into mobilizing conspiracy-minded MAGA activists to enter the election administration infrastructure.

“The vision I have for everyone is thousands of little brush fires all over the state. They can't put them all out, folks.”

CAROL DAVIS, FREEDOMWORKS

“Permanent Election Integrity Coalitions”

In 2022, CPI held summits in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. These are not one-day summits to simply rile up the base and build email lists—these are kick-off events to launch in-state election integrity coalitions, and are followed by regular calls, meetings, and other organizing efforts. The summits and in-state coalitions include the participation of other election denialist groups like Tea Party Patriots, Heritage Action, and Turning Point USA.

“The goal of what we're trying to do at this meeting today is to build a permanent election integrity infrastructure here in the state of Pennsylvania, and that infrastructure includes a statewide coalition,” said Tea Party Patriots’ Jenny Beth Martin at the Pennsylvania summit.

“The vision I have for everyone is thousands of little brush fires all over the state,” said Carol Davis of FreedomWorks during the Pennsylvania summit. “They can't put them all out, folks.”

“Become a Presence in the Local Election Office"

Members of the CPI-led coalitions are encouraged “to become a presence in the local election office.”Activists are directed to regularly show up to elections offices in groups of two to ask questions, to attend election board meetings, to get involved with cleaning voter rolls, to file searching FOIA requests, and to scrutinize vote-by-mail procedures.

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These activities can contribute to an atmosphere of hostility that drives dedicated election workers out of public service.

A test drive of CPI’s strategy in the Virginia governor’s race in 2021 highlighted how these activities—carried out by people who believe in the myth of widespread fraud—led clerks to feel as if they were being accused of malfeasance simply for doing their job.

The CPI-led coalition in Virginia claims to have trained 4,500 poll watchers and election workers and organized 18 local task forces, and to have covered 85% of polling locations on Election Day 2021 and in the 45 days of early voting that led up to it.

At CPI summits, Mitchell holds up Virginia, and Fairfax County in particular, as a model for coalitions in other states. But as the New York Times reported:

"In Fairfax, a Democratic bastion outside Washington, about three dozen activists associated with the coalition and the local Republican Party rotated through election offices, combing through voter registration applications, undeliverable mail and other materials. Christine Brim, the task force’s leader, appeared in person or emailed staff nearly every day, according to Scott Konopasek, the registrar at the time. The operation ate up county workers’ time with dozens of information requests, as well as informal interrogations, Mr. Konopasek said.

'Everything they saw that they didn’t understand was fraud in their minds and that’s how they would frame the questions,' he said. 'It was always accusatory.'"

The Fairfax County election registrar resigned in large part because coalition members were making his job so difficult. In states like Arizona, where CPI has more recently created a coalition, accusations and harassment are also causing election professionals to leave their jobs.

Recruiting Poll Workers and Poll Watchers

A primary goal of the CPI-led coalitions is to recruit poll workers and watchers—with an emphasis on poll workers, because they have more authority. As a Heritage Action representative said at CPI’s Florida summit, poll workers can act as the “referee on the field” policing voters:

"We really do need poll workers. We need watchers, we need both. But the way I like to look at it is if you're a poll worker and you're the one handling, you know, the situation. I like to think of it as you know, you're the referee on the field rather than being someone sitting on the stands watching conservatives cry 'foul, foul.'"

A former Trump campaign lawyer, Linda Kerns, similarly emphasized at a CPI summit in Pennsylvania that “we do have to put poll watchers in, but election board workers are the most important and high value person that we can have in the polling place”:

"I’m going to repeat because its so important: election board workers they are, they're actually employees of the county for the day. They are more important, or they're higher value than poll watchers because election board workers actually sit at the election table. They're part of the process. And the poll watchers are in there, but they can only observe. So in Philadelphia, sometimes what most of the time, we can't find election board workers because we can't find Republicans in a lot of the precincts. We do have to put poll watchers in, but election board workers are the most important and high value person that we can have in the polling place."

Kerns also described how poll workers and poll watchers could support litigation:

"OK, so all we really have to say about poll watchers and election board workers is, and as a lawyer, I cannot do anything unless I have poll watchers and election workers in the polling place. If I'm an election court in Philadelphia and there are no Republicans in polling places or people in polling places telling me what's going on, I have nothing to bring to the judge."

FOIAs for Phantom Voters

CPI sessions have been a clearinghouse for conspiracy theories about “leftwing entities” allegedly colluding with election officials to facilitate fraud. In addition to conspiracies about “Zuckerbucks”—the theory that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg somehow corrupted the 2020 election by supporting groups that supported local election authorities during the pandemic—CPI officials have floated wild theories about a range of established nonpartisan groups that allegedly are involved with election fraud.

For example, CPI’s Ned Jones has posited that so-called “phantom voters” were somehow inserted into Pennsylvania’s voter record by a nonpartisan voter registration organization, the Center for Voter Information. At CPI’s Pennsylvania summit, he said:

“Number one is the Center for Voter Information.What they do is they do mass mailings to what they claim are commercially available lists in the spring, trying to sign up new voters. And in the fall, during election time, they sent out absentee ballot applications that are partially filled out.Now we've learned they had a special arrangement with the Postal Service. And I'll talk more about them in the next panel. But when their mailings are undeliverable, that is no one's at the address address that it's sent to. They don't get that mail back. What they get is a list from the Postal Service of undeliverable mail, and that's mailed to a voter who is no longer at their address. And we believe that somehow they use that information to create the phantom voters that we're all very familiar with right now.”

Coalition members are encouraged to investigate these conspiracy theories in their state and local election offices. One CPI document obtained by Documented

instructs state coalition members to “Document the relationship between the state and local election offices and the leftwing entities that are intent upon skewing and manipulating the 2022 elections....from the INSIDE.... by obtaining and documenting where these leftist entities are, and what they are doing with local and state election offices and officials.”

CPI instructs coalition member to question elections officials, file open records requests, attend public meetings, and review meeting minutes in order “to learn if election offices in your state have had contact with and/or applied for participation with the leftist groups” identified by CPI, and to then share research findings with Jones and CPI.

“We need citizen eyes on every election office!,” the CPI document states.

RNC Election Integrity Program and CPI

CPI is working closely with the RNC in these efforts. RNC officials have been speakers at several CPI summits, and RNC state election integrity directors are taking part in state-wide election integrity efforts spearheaded by CPI.

The RNC created a permanent election integrity program in early 2021, following Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. The RNC's national election integrity director is Josh Findlay, who was associate general counsel for the 2020 Trump campaign, and claims to have "run the President's national war room out of the White House." The RNC has hired state election integrity directors in 16 key states.

Findlay has addressed multiple CPI summits, where he characterizes the RNC's election integrity efforts as focused on supporting CPI, helping with organization and staffing, and deferring to Cleta Mitchell—which is notable, given Mitchell’s role in pushing the big lie and in seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

At CPI’s Florida summit, Findlay described how the RNC engaged in the 2021 Virginia elections by taking its lead from Cleta Mitchell and others in the CPI-led coalition:

"When we got on the ground in Virginia, we said "Cleta, Lynn [Taylor, of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy], what can we do?" They were already doing trainings, they'd hit the ground running. Our state director's first day was the day of the summit in Virginia and they said, Well, look, we got a lot of materials done, but we've got to shift massive amounts of people for 45 days of early voting. We said, "well, your poll workers and poll watchers have gotta get credentials through the party. We're good at providing muscle. Let's contribute we'll help out with that." And we saw the great things that happened in Virginia, and we're just really excited to be part of that."

At CPI’s Pennsylvania summit, Findlay similarly described how the RNC supported the CPI-led Virginia coalition by helping to organize poll watcher shifts: “Cleta Mitchell, she's like the best election and election law expert out here. We're not going to tell her what to do.”

The RNC’s election integrity program is also playing a formal role in these CPI-led coalitions. In Pennsylvania, for example, the RNC election integrity state director, Andrea Raffel, worked directly with Cleta Mitchell to plan the summit, presented at the event, and is helping to lead the statewide coalition.

“Lying Is Their Native Language”

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CPI president Jim DeMintpresented the goals of the organization’s election effort in stark terms. “Everything we love and care about this country goes down the drain if the election system continues the way it is,” he said at a CPI election integrity summit in Arizona.

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DeMint also brushed off accusations that CPI was helping to promote the “big lie” about the 2020 election being stolen, declaring instead that "climate change was a lie" and that "much of what they told us about covid was a lie:”

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“And what we're doing today is what the left says is ‘the big lie.’ You're involved with the big lie. We know who lies. We know that Hunter's laptop was a lie. We know that climate change was a lie. We know much of what they told us about covid was a lie. We know telling us the borders are secure is a lie . . . Lying is their native language."

DeMint also declared that Democrats “want to cheat” and that “they know that they can’t win unless they cheat:”

"So we can't run a country, a free country, if people don't have any confidence in their elections, and that's where we are right now. And the only reason that they don't want you to ask questions is because they know they're lying. And they know that they can't win unless they cheat. I guarantee you.Anybody who doesn't want a photo I.D. is not worried about voter suppression. They want to cheat. We need to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

More recordings from the CPI-organized events are on file with Documented. If you are a reporter and would like to discuss, get in touch.

https://newrepublic.com/article/166778/cleta-mitchell-trump-lawyer-2022-midterm-elections

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Peter Stone/June 29, 2022

Ballot Boxer

This Former Trump Lawyer Wants You to Disrupt the 2022 Midterms

Cleta Mitchell desperately tried to undo Trump's loss in Georgia in 2020. Now she's using the Big Lie to recruit conservatives as poll workers for the November elections.

A spacious ballroom at the Arizona Grand Resort in Phoenix was packed the weekend of March 11 with scores of Donald Trump loyalists still fuming about widely debunked claims that Joe Biden won the 2020 election thanks to rampant fraud. Dubbed an “election integrity summit,” the gathering was the handiwork of Trump’s former legal adviser, the veteran conservative activist Cleta Mitchell. And while Mitchell has garnered national attention for riling up Trumpists with false claims of election fraud in Georgia after the state was called for Biden, she’s now quietly channeling that anger into mobilizing activists to aggressively combat the specter of voting fraud in the next battle: the 2022 midterm elections.

Mitchell organized the Arizona summit on behalf of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit that raked in $1 million from Trump’s leadership PAC last year. Founded in 2017 by former South Carolina SenatorJim DeMint, CPI has become a hub for the Big Lie in exile, with former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows signing up as senior partner shortly after leaving the White House last year, and Mitchell joining in March 2021 as senior legal fellow. CPI boasted revenue of $5.3 million in fiscal 2019, has arranged D.C. internships for young conservatives, and has worked with other right-wing groups to push conservative goals.

But central to the institute’s current mission is Mitchell, who leads its self-styled “election integrity network.” She has engineered a roaming series of summits this year in states Republicans hope to swing back in 2024: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, and Nevada—along with the perennial battleground Florida, which Trump won. Mitchell has sold the network as a way to create state and local election “infrastructure,” which includes advocating unorthodox surveillance tactics of election officials and operations to ferret out any hints of fraud—real, or more often hypothetical.

One notable speaker at the summit, whom Mitchell interviewed on a stage, was Karen Fann, the Arizona state Senate president and 2022 national chairwoman of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that promotes model laws for states to adopt, and that Mitchell has previously advised. Arizona has already passed one anti-voting law this year, imposing onerous restrictions to prove citizenship before registering to vote, and the state legislature is currently considering a raft of other measures that would empower state officials to conduct further reviews of elections.

One attendee of the Phoenix summit, who asked for anonymity, told me that “the event definitely used the false allegations of fraud in 2020 as a call to action to rally support for vigilant engagement this year in the election process,” to spur more robust monitoring of polling sites. The attendee added: “There was a large focus on recruiting precinct officials to watch the polls and all of the other processes associated with elections.”

To voting rights advocates, the campaign looks like a recipe for voter suppression and intimidation, especially of minorities, and could incite harassment against election officials. At these summits, the 71-year-old Mitchell, members of conservative groups such as Tea Party Patriots, GOP elected officials, and Republican National Committee staffers have delivered a blunt message: Conservatives ought to expand poll watching and “clean up” voter rolls—often by working as precinct and poll officials—in order to curb any voting fraud and bolster their electoral chances in 2022.

Mitchell hails from Oklahoma, where she began her career as a Democratic member of the state legislature before moving to D.C. and switching parties in the 1990s. Since then, she has amassed an extensive résumé of conservative clients: Mitchell has done legal stints advising the National Rifle Association (where she was once a board member), numerous GOP campaigns, and several dark-money nonprofit groups.

Some veteran conservatives who know Mitchell’s work say that her advice often pushed the legal envelope. “You tell Cleta where you want to end up, and she will come up with a way to get you there, whether it’s legal or not,” one former senior NRA official told me, quipping that she’s the “fringe of the fringe.” And a GOP election lawyer who has known Mitchell for years, and requested anonymity, added: “Cleta was sort of a classic lawyer for Donald Trump because she told Trump what he wanted to hear, as opposed to what he ought to hear from his lawyer.”

Mitchell started as a volunteer legal adviser to bolster Trump’s fraud claims in Georgia. She was recruited by Meadows the day after the 2020 election and eventually emerged as part of the core group of Trump lackeys attempting to subvert the results. She participated in Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, wherein the president attempted to coerce the state official to “find” the extra 11,780 votes he needed to win the state. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is currently conducting a wide-ranging probe into that call, examining whether Trump and the other participants broke state laws. A special grand jury was impaneled in early May.

Mitchell has also been subpoenaed by the House panel probing the January 6 insurrection, as she was in contact with Trump that day. In response, Mitchell filed a lawsuit to block the subpoena. When reports of her role on Trump’s call with Raffensperger quickly surfaced in 2021, Mitchell resigned from her two-decade career with the law firm Foley & Lardner—as it was conducting an internal review—and joined CPItwo months later. (Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“Cleta Mitchell allied herself with Trump’s election conspiracy theories on the infamous Trump-Raffensperger call,” Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, said, adding acidly: “If that makes one an advocate for election integrity, Charles Ponzi was a champion of investment integrity.”

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In loose alliance with other conservative groups such as Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks—where she was tapped in March 2021 to lead a “National Election Protection Initiative” with a multimillion-dollar budget—Mitchell and CPI have worked with gusto to tighten voting laws: That campaign helped spur at least 19 states in 2021 to pass more stringent voting measures, including voter identification mandates and curbs on absentee ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.}:

Mitchell’s cachet among the right’s big donors is considerable: She sits on the board of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to conservative election integrity and legal groups, including the Public Interest Legal Foundation, where Mitchell chairs the board. To help Trump overturn his loss in Arizona, Mitchell raised about $1 million in funds for a partisan audit of the state’s largest county—which wound up backfiring when the audit confirmed Trump’s loss there.

The programming at the CPI summits this year has partly overlapped, and included participants from an RNC election integrity drive that has recruited directors in 18 states and thousands of poll watchers, as The New York Times revealed in late May. To tutor activists at the summits about how to create local and state task forces, Mitchell and CPI have distributed a 19-page manual dubbed “The Citizens Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure.” The manual suggests some traditional poll monitor methods, but takes an ominous tone, urging activists to follow “every step” of vote-by-mail operations and advising them to “be ever-present” inside election offices.

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AMAC Action, a conservative grassroots arm of the Association of Mature American Citizens that boasts over two million members, has co-sponsored several CPI summits}:. “We don’t want to see the kinds of shenanigans in 2020” again, Bob Carlstrom, AMAC Action’s president, told me. Carlstrom, a veteran D.C. lobbyist who expected to attend his first summit in North Carolina in June, added thatAMAC Action has encouraged its volunteers to be poll workers, election officials, and poll watchers. His group also has “been quite active in working on legislation” in Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania, and other states where CPI and allied groups have spent millions promoting new laws that have curbed voting rights.

Such multifaceted conservative efforts by Mitchell and CPI have prompted concern from election watchdogs worried about the false narrative of major fraud leading to voter suppression and intimidation targeting Black and other minority voters. “These lies are then used to justify restrictive policies that make it harder for people to vote, particularly in communities of color,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He added, “It is also important to remind voters that there are laws prohibiting the intimidation of voters and election officials. We cannot let the threat of intimidation alone prevent anyone from participating in our democracy.”

According to Mitchell’s blog and radio interviews she’s done this year—including an April one with Trump uber loyalist Steve Bannon—the CPI summits are building a state-based “movement.” Mitchell now hosts a podcast, dubbed Who’s Counting, where she speaks with like-minded conservative activists in states such as Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The podcasts tend to hype allegations of improper voting and election practices. Mitchell bluntly told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker last year that the goal of her post-2020 work has been “to make it harder to cheat,” without a nod to former Attorney General William Barr’s acknowledgment in late 2020 that there was no significant fraud in Biden’s win by over seven million votes nationally.

Since the first meeting in 2021, the summits have drawn several conservative and political bigwigs, including Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth Martin and CPI chair DeMint. Meadows was a keynote speaker at a CPI summit in Georgia, but his public role has diminished following the disclosure in March that North Carolina was investigating whether he committed voter fraud. The inquiry was prompted by a New Yorker report that in 2020 Meadows registered to vote using an address where he’d never lived—a potential rare instance of actual voter fraud. Shortly before the probe became public, Meadows quietly dropped out of CPI’s Phoenix summit, where he was supposed to be a keynote speaker, and he does not appear to have been at any other public CPI events.

The “election integrity” agenda advanced by CPI and Mitchell has set off alarm bells for Democratic SenatorSheldon Whitehouse. “From Cleta Mitchell’s dark-money group to Heritage Action, we see dark money crawling everywhere behind voter suppression and election subversion,” Whitehouse told me.

Looking ahead, the Brennan Center’s Morales-Doyle is worried that the summits could “increase the risk that vigilante actors will engage in intimidation and harassment of voters and election workers. In short, the people promoting these lies about so-called election integrity are doing serious harm to our democracy.”

Peter Stone is a Washington-based investigative journalist who has covered a wide array of lobbying, legal, and campaign finance issues, working for National Journal, McClatchy newspapers, and Legal Times, among other publications. As a freelancer, his work has also appeared in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books Daily, Mother Jones, The Intercept, and many other news outlets. He is the author of Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies and the Buying of Washington.

Read More: Magazine, July-August 2022, State Of The Nation, Politics, The Soapbox, Midterm Elections, Republican Party, Donald Trump, Arizona, Georgia

raw story tom b, an 5 22

wow not much hunker?

with the midterm election just months away and Donald Trump still eyeing a third presidential run in 2024, the New York Times is reporting that one of the architects of the former president's attempt to throw out the results of his 2020 loss is currently working on recruiting conspiracy-minded poll workers and watchers that have state election officials fearful of future chaos and disruption.

According to the report, attorney Cleta Mitchell who rose to fame as a participant on Trump's infamous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where the former president demanded the Georgia Republican "find" 11,780 votes, is working with the Election Integrity Network which has financial ties to Trump's still-thriving political operation.

As the Times' Alexandra Berzon writes, Mitchell has been busy traveling the country and meeting with far-right activists, instructing them on how to get deeply involved with the election process in their states, putting them in a position to challenge election results and disrupt certification of the votes.

According to Berzon, no position at the state level is considered too small by Mitchell, who recently told over 150 conservatives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, "We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again.”

Pointing out that Mitchell was a participant in multiple lawsuits by Trump to challenge election results at the state level -- none of which succeeded -- Berzon writes that she is undeterred as her conspiracy theories are debunked and that she has the financial backing of several conservative groups.

"In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work," the Times report states, adding that an examination of her efforts reveals " a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures."

Her supporters "include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as theHeritage Foundation’s political affiliate [action? ], Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation."

With the Times reporting, "Ms. Mitchell’s trainings promote particularly aggressive methods — with a focus on surveillance — that appear intended to feed on activists’ distrust and create pressure on local officials, rather than ensure voters’ access to the ballot," Philadelphia Republican and former election board member Al Schmidt expressed concern about what is to come next.

“I think it’s going to come down to whether they are truly interested in knowing the truth about elections or they’re interested in propagating propaganda,” he admitted.

Notably, the report adds that attorney Mitchell "has worked closely with Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, on organizing through the Council for National Policy, a national coordinating group for conservative leaders."  Virginia Thomas is currently being scrutinized by the Jan 6th House select committeeafter it was revealed that she had been texting former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows with advice on how to overturn the 2020 election results.

You can read more here.