Konnech voting machine
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see true the vote gregg p BS
which used in antrim?
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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/election-denial-movement-and-trump-have-become-increasingly-intertwined
no lnx many vids
Media Matters for America
Research/Study
The election denial movement — and Trump — have become increasingly intertwined with QAnon
QAnon now offers a broad extremist network for election denialists to promote themselves and spread conspiracy theories to receptive listeners
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 01/26/23
Last December, while discussing supposed “election integrity” efforts, Gregg Phillips, a leader of the election denial organization True the Vote, told an attorney for former President Donald Trump that “people want to come in and help,” and “that’s what this Anon movement is about.”
And “help” it has. Five years after “Q” began a movement based on a conspiracy theory that Trump would crush his supposed enemies and a cabal of pedophiles with mass arrests, QAnon had evolved into an online anti-reality network that has shifted much of its focus to boosting other conspiracy theories, including anti-vaccine misinformation and, increasingly, election denial. It is now an online distribution system that the election denial movement and other conspiracy theorists can exploit to spread their false claims and gain attention for their organizations.
QAnon was born out of far-right message boards and grew as supporters repeatedly helped spread misinformation online during years of inaction from social media platforms. The movement became so much of a threat that multiple government agencies issued internal warnings on its supporters, who have committed multiple acts of violence, including the January 6 insurrection.
During the 2022 election cycle, the QAnon community saw a closer level of association with the election denial movement — including Trump and his associates — providing a broad extremist network for denialists to easily promote themselves and spread their conspiracy theories to people primed to support them.
QAnon influencer Juan O. Savin’s election-denial candidates coalition
Leading up to the midterm elections, QAnon influencer Juan O. Savin (whose real name is Wayne Willott) and Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant recruited election denial candidates for positions where they would be in charge of election administration. Savin boasted of his involvement, claiming that every week he would “have a call to all my candidates from around the country,” including discussing fundraising.
Savin also said he had created the “largest election integrity presentation groups in the country" -- events where denialists, sometimes including coalition members, discussed supposed evidence of voter fraud -- and that he was working “behind the scenes” and hiring QAnon sympathizer Lara Logan to “host” them.
Following the midterm elections, Savin moved to another election denial effort, teaming up with a pair of brothers to promote a long-shot challenge to the 2020 election, which the Supreme Court declined to hear.
Tina Peters
Savin detailed some of his efforts with his coalition during interviews, on QAnon-supporting shows, suggesting, for instance, that he helped convince Tina Peters — the Mesa County, Colorado, clerk who was criminally charged for a security breach of election equipment — to run for Colorado secretary of state. One of Peters’ primary opponents also revealed that Savin encouraged him to drop out of the race and endorse her.
After losing the Republican primary, Peters refused to concede, eventually becoming part of another Savin-linked coalition of Republican candidates in Colorado claiming that they lost their primaries due to voter fraud. Over the following months, these failed candidates went on QAnon shows to promote and fundraise for the coalition and amplify false claims of fraud in their primaries. A member of Peters’ coalition even invoked the QAnon slogan in a July interview on election denier Joe Oltmann’s podcast: “Where we find fraud in El Paso, we find fraud in Colorado, we find fraud nationwide. This is all national security.” “Where we go one,” she said, pausing; the other coalition members joined her in finishing it. “We go all.”
Kari Lake and Mark Finchem
Other candidates in Savin’s coalition also appeared on QAnon-promoting shows during the 2022 election cycle. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake fundraised and promoted her campaign on a QAnon-supporting show right before the Republican primary, and Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem also appeared on that same QAnon show during his campaign. Finchem also had a QAnon influencer at one of his fundraisers, which featured a performance of a QAnon song. Both Finchem and Lake also appeared with other QAnon figures during their campaigns.
Election denial groups teamed up with the QAnon community
True the Vote
The long-standing organization True the Vote — whose founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has been called “the godmother of the election integrity movement” — grew particularly close with the QAnon community in 2022, using its members and infrastructure to spread nefarious allegations about election software company Konnech.
Following the release of its debunked election denial movie 2000 Mules, True the Vote’s Engelbrecht and co-founder Gregg Phillips both began to cultivate relationships with QAnon figures, repeatedly appearing on QAnon shows. They praised the QAnon community’s “spectacularly good” “open source intelligence,” while also recruiting multiple QAnon figures to help with their efforts, such as Phillips’ podcast and “research team.” They also promised to hand off supposed information from the “Anons” to law enforcement that they had partnered with.
We The Media TTV research team chat log
Citation (Left): QAnon figure Chad Vivas (known online as "KagDrogo") alongside True the Vote's Gregg Phillips (Right): Message from Vivas from leaked internal chat logs of members of QAnon influencer collective We The Media
At a True the Vote event in August called “The Pit” — which featured QAnon attendees — the group presented allegations that the Chinese Communist Party rigged elections through Konnech. Attendees were encouraged to further research and spread the claims, which they did, earning praise from True the Vote for their “brilliant” and “great work.” According to The New York Times, Konnech’s CEO and his family were subsequently forced to go into hiding, and other Konech employees “feared for their safety and started working remotely.”
In October — less than two months after an investigator in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office attended “The Pit,” according to Phillips — the district attorney arrested Konnech’s CEO over allegations similar to True the Vote’s claims. (Charges were dropped in November.) The arrest was fodder for right-wing media to widely spread True the Vote and QAnon supporters’ claims about Konnech, calling it evidence of election fraud, and the story led to local governments announcing they would cancel contracts with the company. A Virginia county “election integrity” task force even gave some of those QAnon influencers’ materials about Konnech to its county election board. Phillips would go on to credit “the Anon community” for having “dug in” on Konnech and creating “focal points … of interest that [Konnech’s CEO is] ultimately going to have to answer to.”
Clean Elections USA
Another figure who attended The Pit was Melody Jennings, a QAnon supporter who had created a group inspired by 2000 Mules called Clean Elections USA, which focused on having people “monitor” ballot drop boxes for supposed fraud. She connected with several QAnon influencers at the event, later appearing multiple times on a show hosted by conspiracy theorists she met there. She credited those QAnon figures with helping her group and connecting her with others. Jennings regularly asked her “team” of QAnon influencers to promote her efforts, which led to complaints of voter intimidation in Arizona and landed Clean Elections USA in court there.
New York Citizens Audit
Another person who networked with QAnon figures at The Pit was Marly Hornik, who founded the election denial organization New York Citizens Audit. Hornik met the hosts of a QAnon show at the event and then repeatedly appeared on their program. There, Hornik promoted her organization and lauded what “the Anons are doing with Konnech,” calling them the “citizen intelligence army.”
Video
Citation From the October 27, 2022, edition of MatrixxxGrooove Show
Other election denial groups and activists
Election denial organizations also associated themselves with the QAnon community outside of The Pit:
Members of a Florida-based “election integrity” group called Defend Florida connected with QAnon-supporting show host Zak Paine at an event hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. The members later went on Paine’s show to promote the group and say they asked Paine if they could “come on your show” rather than appearing in mainstream outlets because of “the great work that you’ve been doing for years.”
A Florida “election integrity” activist told a QAnon influencer that he was a “big fan” of his and of Savin.
Paine also connected with a Nebraska election denial group founder at Lindell’s event.
A duo who had filed a class action lawsuit against election software company Dominion, which was a target of election denialists after the 2020 election, told Paine that “everybody loves you” and that their lawsuit would be more popular if Paine was on Twitter.
Well-known election deniers Patrick Byrne and Michael Flynn grew closer to the QAnon community
Patrick Byrne and The America Project
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who is a co-founder of election denial organization The America Project, is one of the country’s central election denial funders. Prior to the January 6 insurrection, Byrne met with Trump and fueled his voter fraud grievances. Since then, he has continued election denial activities and cultivated ties to the QAnon community. During the midterm election season, Byrne’s The America Project even funded an effort to recruit veterans to monitor polling sites for supposed fraud.
Byrne has previously suggested that he relied on the “digital soldiers” in the QAnon community and that they were his allies. He went further in 2022:
He directly invoked Q’s call in 2020 for supporters to deny that QAnon exists.
He pushed an effort to harass schools popularized by a QAnon-supporting group.
He furthered his very close relationship with Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, a QAnon influencer known online as “Tore” who ran for Ohio secretary of state. He offered to aid her activities, including monetarily, and announced that he was working with her on “election integrity” efforts and lawsuits.
Byrne and Savin — both of whom have previously mentioned being connected — disclosed their further ties over the course of the year:
Savin said they worked together in 2020, said they talked “very frequently” with each other, and suggested that Byrne had “helped us out tremendously in the election integrity stuff.”
Byrne lauded Savin as “sophisticated,” “very helpful,” and said they had spent “some good times” together. He also invoked Savin by name to promote a legal case to overturn the 2020 election.
Former Overstock CEO suggests he collaborated with QAnon influencer known for trying to elect Big Lie election administration candidates
July 24, 2022
Former Overstock CEO suggests he collaborated with QAnon influencer known for trying to elect Big Lie election administration candidates
Audio
Citation From a July 24, 2022, online stream
Additionally, some of The America Project’s work and activities during the year were explicitly tied to QAnon supporters. Byrne used multiple QAnon shows to recruit people for the organization’s plan to monitor polling sites. The America Project also brought on QAnon sympathizer Lara Logan, as well as an attorney who has represented Tore, who became The America Projects’s “chief legal strategist.”
Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn, The America Project’s other co-founder and fellow Trump voter fraud adviser, also continued to develop ties with the QAnon community:
He hung out with members of a QAnon influencer collective known as We The Media, including on a Zoom call, according to one of We The Media’s members.
Flynn’s other organization, America’s Future, recruited Liz Crokin, a fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist.
Flynn, along with Lindell of MyPillow, attorney Sidney Powell, and some members of Savin’s coalition, also appeared on a relatively new QAnon channel on Election Day 2022 to push fraud claims.
Trump and his orbit grew closer to the QAnon community, explicitly embracing and lauding the movement
Donald Trump
Trump, the leader of the election denial movement, also embraced QAnon more closely during the past year, as did some of those in his orbit — including associates of his social media company Truth Social, one of his attorneys, and his son.
Trump’s associates claimed in 2021 that they were trying “to weed out any QAnon influences — both adherents and postings — getting close to him,” but the former president and now-2024 presidential candidate only stepped up his association with the QAnon community. (He had also publicly and privately praised QAnon supporters multiple times during his presidency.)
According to a Media Matters count, Trump amplified QAnon-promoting accounts nearly 400 times on Truth Social in 2022 — far outpacing the pace of his QAnon account amplifications when he used Twitter. That Truth Social activity included repeatedly amplifying explicit QAnon content.
Trump Truth Social QAnon content amplifications
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Citation Explicit QAnon content amplified by Donald Trump on Truth Social in 2022
Trump met withCrokin, the QAnon influencer, at Mar-a-Lago, and another QAnon influencer claimed to have met with Trump while visiting Mar-a-Lago.}:
Trump used a song associated with QAnon on his social media and at multiple rallies. During some of the rallies, people would hold up one finger in the air in response, possibly referring to the “one” in “Where we go one, we go all.” Trump would continue to use the song at rallies even after media and others flagged its background.
Truth Social and its leadership
Truth Social also came to embrace QAnon as part of its business model. One of the first accounts to reportedly sign up on the platform, which launched in February, was an account called “@Q” that tied itself to the conspiracy theory. Kash Patel,a former Trump administration official and member of the platform’s board of directors, and Devin Nunes, the platform’s CEO, repeatedly amplified the “@Q” account. The platform also featured QAnon ads and verified QAnon influencers. And the CEO of a shell corporation formed to merge with the company running the platform even went on a QAnon show to advocate for his own shareholders to delay the merger. The platform also helped QAnon figures and election denial activists network.
Patel also went on numerous QAnon shows on behalf of Truth Social, telling the community that “we try to incorporate” QAnon “into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences” and praised the “good” coming from it. He also signed copies of his book with the QAnon slogan, asking, “What's wrong with it?” and he said he and Trump were “blown away” by the “acumen” of some QAnon supporters.
Video
Citation From the June 16, 2022, edition of The Patriot Party News
A Trump attorney and Eric Trump
One of Trump’s attorneys, Peter Ticktin, repeatedly went on QAnon shows to push election fraud claims. On one of those shows Ticktin even asked the audience to send him “evidence in regard to January 6,” the “fake election,” and “the election fraud.” He also seemingly invoked Q’s 2020 call for supporters to deny that QAnon exists.
Trump’s son Eric Trump, who had posted a QAnon image on social media in 2020 — also went on multiple QAnon shows, and a QAnon show host Eric Trump met with claimed that Trump told him that “his Dad loves what we’re doing.”
Increasingly, where election denial goes one, QAnon goes all
Savin’s swing state coalition members failed to win election and the GOP had disappointing midterm results, but that did not deter the growing bond between the QAnon community and election denial movements. The connections reached a new level this past year, even after the midterms.
The movement continues to grow and metastasize beyond the original Q and its focus, even when Q resumed posting during the year after an 18-month absence. And with the rise of platforms like Truth Social, and Twitter increasingly reversing its QAnon crackdown under Elon Musk, the QAnon community could become even more interconnected with election denialists and other conspiracy theories. That could help grow the dangerous and antidemocratic denialist movement, making it easier to spread its misinformation faster and more broadly.
In This Article
QAnon Conspiracy Theory Voter Fraud and Suppression
Voter Suppression
Related
In 2021, people thought QAnon would go away -- instead, it continued to fuel attacks on democracy
12/31/21
In 2020, QAnon became all of our problem
12/31/20
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/
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an 9 22 colo
...Tina Peters, Mesa County’s Clerk, was not a cultish election denier immediately before or after 2020’s presidential election. She did not make any accusations that her voting system’s computers had been secretly sabotaged when Sandra Brown, Mesa County’s back-office election manager, mistakenly double-counted 20,000 ballots in late October 2020—a procedural error during preprocessing ballots that Brown repeated in Mesa County’s municipal elections in April 2021.
But soon after April 2021’s elections, where a slate of conservatives who skipped a candidate forum all lost, the first of what became a parade of pro-Donald Trump, self-proclaimed election IT experts began telling Peters about anomalies with her county’s voting system computers. The anomalies were the same clichés about illegal voters and forged totals that had been put forth by Trump diehards in other states. Except the allegations were dressed up as statistics and technicalities. Peters, a businesswoman turned public official, was more than impressed.
As March 2022 indictments by Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein, a Republican, and a recent New Yorker profile recount, Peters used a standard update of election software in late April 2021 to make unauthorized copies of her election system’s hard drives, software, and data. The apparent goal was gathering intelligence to show that the technology—made by Dominion Voting Systems—could not be trusted to produce accurate vote counts.
Trump’s lawyers and partisan IT specialists had made copies of computer drives, software and data in December 2020 in Antrim County, Michigan, after a former state GOP leader turned state judge allowed it. The copies, of another Dominion system, were not to be shared. But they were soon leaked in Trump circles.
That effort, nonetheless, produced no evidence for any of Trump’s failed post-election lawsuits. Still, one day after January 6, 2021’s pro-Trump insurrection, some of the same data miners went to Coffee County, Georgia. There, an election official let them copy their Dominion system’s drives, software and 2020 data. Members of this loose cadre of IT experts showed up in Mesa County in late April—several weeks after back-office manager Brown again erred in using a computer as it was compiling vote subtotals in its municipal elections.
What happened next in Mesa County gets complex. It also reveals how a rare but recurring trend among a handful of local election officials—mistakes with setting up or using their system’s computers—can be exploited by partisans who claim that invisible forces are secretly stealing votes if their candidates lose.
In every cycle, there are some election officials who do not properly set up or use these computers—errors that usually are caught and corrected, but initially produce incorrect election results. This trend has been overlooked in the press coverage of the interstate plot by Trump’s IT gurus to steal election software and 2020 data.
The operational problems, however, are among the findings by the Independent Media Institute’s Voting Booth project, which has co-written a forthcoming guide about how election systems work. The co-author is Duncan Buell, a computer scientist who has studied voting systems, software, and data for more than a decade, and was an election official in Richland County, South Carolina, home to the state’s capital, Columbia. These errors recurred in each cycle that he studied.
In 2020’s general election, the programming, and operational mistakes were few and far between. Nonetheless, the errors that Trump’s IT squads seized upon—errors that were corroborated by post-election inquiries by other government bodies—helped fuel the lie that the presidential election was stolen.
Moreover, some of the election workers who made these mistakes—such as Mesa County’s Brown—and their elected superior—such as Peters—then fell under the spell of Trump’s conspiratorial IT squad—producing fodder for more false claims.
These trends—mistakes with programming or using election computers and rogue officials who abuse the public trust by making unfounded claims—offer warnings before 2022’s general election. Many 2020 election-deniers are candidates seeking state and federal office this fall. A few already have shown in their primaries that they will attack the process and technology if they fear they may lose.
Before 2020’s election, virtually all of the members of Trump’s IT squads did not know much about voting system computers or election administration safeguards. But they eagerly presented their credentials and claimed, that election computers had been hijacked, and, moreover, that no Dominion system should be trusted. Their unproven accusations became, and remain, fixtures in Trump circles.
“It wasn’t just Colorado,” said Walter Daugherity, a recently retired University of Texas lecturer in computer science and engineering, on an August 22 televised panel sponsored and hosted by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has spent millions to promote the stolen election fiction and whose actions are under investigation by federal authorities. “Everywhere across the country that had a Dominion trusted build [software] upgrade had the same thing happen.”
Daugherity was one analyst who received Mesa County’s pilfered data. He and Jeff O’Donnell, an IT analyst whose moniker in Trump circles is “the Lone Raccoon,” co-wrote a series of reports concluding that Mesa County’s computers mysteriously allowed 20,346 presidential ballots to be counted twice. The double counting was not the fault of election officials, specifically back-office election manager Brown, they wrote, positing that an “external trigger,” “signal,” “software algorithm” or “pre-programming” had caused “unexpected voting patterns.”
Their speculation was one of many similar pronouncements in Trump circles. They accused Dominion of complicity in a scheme that would be illegal, if it were true.
“The report made claims which, if true, would indicate a crime was committed related to election fraud,” Mesa County District Attorney Rubenstein said via email on August 25. “I stand by the investigation that we conducted and am confident that there is no evidence of a crime being committed.”
Inside One Disinformation Bubble
Mesa County was among a handful of counties across America’s 8,000-plus election jurisdictions where Trump allies discovered glitches in administering the 2020 election. The glitches, which produced incorrect initial vote counts, were signs that Trump lost due to a vast conspiracy, they asserted.
That narrative, which continues today, ignores the banalest explanation of what happened in Mesa County and in jurisdictions such as Antrim County, Michigan. In both locales, county election officials erred with setting up or using their voting system’s computers, mistakes that initially were not noticed but were later caught and corrected.
The operational errors were recorded by the system’s computers, which keeps logs of every action—from ballot paper jams to vote counts. The errors were confirmed by other evidence, such as, in Mesa County, police investigators reconstructing the mistakes on the same equipment, parsing video footage from security cameras in the room where they occurred and interviewing witnesses. But conspiracy-minded Trumpers, including O’Donnell and Daugherity, went looking for incongruities in computer logs and vote count databases, which, they said, masked programming that reassigned votes from Trump to other presidential candidates.
“The findings in this report were prepared by the authors as consultants to the legal team representing Tina Peters, the Mesa County Clerk,” the executive summary of their March 19, 2022 report said. “The findings provide evidence of unauthorized and illegal manipulation of tabulated vote data during the 2020 General Election and 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election. Because of this evidence, which led to the vote totals for those elections being impossible to verify, the results and integrity of Mesa County’s 2020 General Election and the 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election are in question.”
Among the incongruities they cited are batches of ballots that were not sequentially numbered in a results database. That can occur, several election experts explained, when batches of ballots with sloppy ink marks (made by voters) are detected by the software and set aside until the voter’s intent is determined. That process, called adjudication, is done in Colorado in the presence of political party observers. The batches are added to the database after the voter intent issues are resolved. (It was at this step where Brown failed to correctly use the system’s computers).
The Mesa County prosecutor took the duo’s report seriously and investigated. On May 19, 2022, Rubenstein sent a 24-page letter to Mesa County Commissioners and the Grand Junction City Council summarizing the investigation and debunking the vote-padding claims in the most pedestrian way. Two initial miscounts had occurred. The first was in 2020’s general election. The second was in municipal elections in April 2021. Both were “caused by direct action of the former Back Office Election Manager Sandra Brown.”
Investigators found that Brown had stopped and then restarted the computer during the adjudication process, including replacing one computer—without resetting the system. Brown did not call the vendor for assistance, the county prosecutor’s letter said. She was confused, tried to fix things, and erred—essentially double-counting votes at this stage in the process. Election judges from political parties witnessed this, as did an overhead video camera.
“No evidence exists that would indicate that Ms. Brown had any nefarious or criminal motive in those actions, but rather appears to have been trouble-shooting problems in the flow of the adjudication process,” Rubenstein wrote.
Human error in configuring and running election computers also sparked stolen election allegations in Antrim County, Michigan. There, the initial results in the conservative northern Michigan county were incorrect because one contest had been omitted on the ballots when configuring the system’s computers. Nobody caught the error until suspicious vote totals surfaced on Election Night. (Because one race was left out, votes were assigned to the wrong candidate in a tabulation spreadsheet, essentially bumping Trump votes down one line, where they were assigned to Joe Biden.)
In both counties, Trump supporters said that the entire state’s election apparatus was corrupt and demanded that the state’s certified results be thrown out. Beyond such hyperbole, a key observation emerges. Trump’s self-declared election experts were not looking at, nor may not even be aware of, the array of data sets, election records and administrative protocols that catch and correct the errors that occur. In Mesa County, for example, the district attorney’s report made this point.
“These actions were verified to have been done by her [Brown] through video evidence, corroboration of records, audit of randomly selected ballot images [created by ballot scanners], interviews with witnesses and experts, and recreation of certain scenarios using a test environment and prove that the conclusions of Report 3 [O’Donnell’s and Daugherity’s report] are incorrect claims of what may have occurred,” Rubenstein said. “At this time, no evidence suggests that these actions negatively impacted the election.”
In contrast, what the pro-Trump duo used as the basis for their inquiry—analyses built on Peters’ pilfered computer drives—is a thinner evidence base.
The pair, who were reached by email after their August 22 presentation at Mike Lindell’s “Moment of Truth Summit,” sent a rebuttal to Rubenstein’s summary where they rejected numerous assertions and questioned the district attorney’s expertise, evidence, and methods. (Rubenstein also noted they had lied about interviewing 11 people who had been in the room when Brown messed up.)
When asked by this reporter why they did not mention the DA’s review in their presentation at Lindell’s August 2022 forum—where O’Donnell said, “There is still no evidence that this was ever or even could have been something that was done by the clerk at the time”—O’Donnell replied that the DA’s investigation was a sham and said that my questions were “insulting.”
“We did not mention the DA’s report because it is such a sloppy ‘investigation’ that it deserves no recognition other than derision,” the “Lone Raccoon” said. “It is sad to me that somebody who is a ‘national political reporter’ would blindly fall fort the propaganda put by a small-time DA instead of actually doing their own research. However, that seems to be the rule these days.”
“Doing Their Own Research”
Perhaps my e-mail was too blunt when asking the pair if they were aware of other evidence that explained Brown’s incompetence (she was fired and faces charges related to the data breach); and what was their response to the D.A. saying they lied when they said they had talked to the party observers present (who spoke to police investigators) when Brown erred?
But I had done my “own research.” When reporting on the Cyber Ninjas’ review in Arizona in 2021, I had repeatedly seen the disinformation dynamic that I saw here. Partisans with forgone conclusions started to parse election records. Lacking prior experience in studying election systems, they did not understand where what they were seeing in the electronic records related to wider contexts and protocols. That didn’t stop them from putting forth doubts about the results. And I’d also heard about the duo’s missteps from a lifelong Republican and credible election data analyst.
Benny White, a former fighter pilot and lawyer who lives in Tucson, Arizona, has been an election observer and data analyst for the Arizona Republican party for years. He became a persona non-grata in Trump circles for analyses in early 2021 that found tens of thousands of ballots cast by otherwise loyal Republicans in the greater Phoenix area had not voted to re-elect Trump. (The voting patterns were found in the final spreadsheet of every vote cast in every race.)
Reached by phone, White said that the duo called him as they were parsing Mesa County’s tabulation-related databases. White recalled that he told them where their assumptions were mistaken, and what they were not considering because they were not familiar with election administration and safeguards that find and fix errors.
“These folks have no understanding or appreciation of election administration,” he said. “They’re looking at everything from a sterile, mechanistic perspective. There are problems that can be caused because of human interface in the system design where operators can make mistakes. And for that reason, I am always an advocate of having an independent body, whether it’s a knowledgeable person or a bipartisan group of overseers, that is present at all times to watch what’s going on and ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’”
For example, White recalled that the duo claimed that the county’s voting system “had done something nefarious because these ballots [during adjudication] weren’t all tabulated in sequence.” But that circumstance occurs if the voter’s intent on a ballot is in question, White said, in which case Dominion’s software “will hold that batch [of 1,000 ballots from] being included in the aggregate results… That was another thing that it seemed to me that Daugherity failed to understand.”
“He bases a lot of his conclusions on statistics, statistical analysis,” White said of Daugherity. “There have been single instances where he would tell me something, and I would say, ‘Walter, you’re not considering this other facet of what was going on in that particular election… You have to know more before you reach these conclusions.’”
Election administration is not simple. It takes years to understand election law, varieties in state rules and procedures, the voting system technology and all of the subsets of data created and compiled that add up to winners and losers. Trump’s IT squad might be forgiven for misunderstanding and misinterpreting what they saw, if they had been more humble and fair-minded. But they weren’t.
Their mindset is to create chaos and doubt, while claiming they are seeking the truth. The clearest evidence of that mindset is how they exploited human errors by election officials by not accurately contextualizing those mistakes, but repeatedly overclaiming that an entire jurisdiction’s votes were suspect, and that the same election technology deployed nationwide must be rejected.
With scores of 2020 election-denying candidates running for state and federal office in 2022’s general election, this deceitful pattern is likely to recur.
Author Bio: Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/how-true-vote-cultivated-relationships-qanon-influencers-target
no lnx many, vids
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
no lnx
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 Localsthat 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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