poll watcher

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sadly primary 10 24

see cleta election integrity BS

BANNON SEND ICE NAT GD POLLS 2026 LA PRIMARY BS

SEE GOP STEAL ELECTION BIG LIE

includes rw poll workers elected and appt officials

merri ok

see local takeover

see vote roll purge

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Genevieve Peters ?

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And just last week, one leader of Trump’s Pennsylvania Election Day effort had to be escorted out of a satellite election office in Philadelphia's City Hall. Elections officials there accused James Fitzpatrick of causing a "disturbance," a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Sheriff's office told ABC News.

Philly Election Official says City Hall is NOT a public building!! TRUMP observer thrown out of City Hall! what are they doing?? pic.twitter.com/QufmAfdSIA

— Mike Roman (@mikeroman) September 30, 2020

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an 11 24

bRYAN, Texas — At election time, Trudy Hancock spends a lot of time in her car, delivering equipment to polling sites scattered around Brazos County and visiting poll workers who need her help in the field.

She keeps the car radio on, and always tuned to Christian music.

Recovering from a tiring Election Day last week, the longtime county election administrator recalled hearing one song that resonated with her. It’s called “The Truth,” and opens with the lyrics:

*How many times can you hear the same lie

*Before you start to believe it?

At her desk that morning, she recited a version of those lyrics as best as she could remember them, softly, haltingly.

“But I know the truth,” she added, as she tried to hold back tears. “It gets hard.”

There are reasons why the song hit home. After decades of working in elections, and years of hearing people lie about them, Hancock and her staff members are starting to sometimes doubt themselves. Like election officials around the country, they’ve repeatedly tried to reassure a small group of right-wing skeptics that the county’s elections are safe and secure. They’ve tried to answer their questions, accommodated their demands, educated them about the law, and offered them opportunities to see firsthand how the process works.

“They won’t accept our answers, because it’s not the answers that they want,” Hancock, 60, said. “There’s just no end to it.”

Election Day in Brazos — a Republican stronghold around 100 miles northwest of Houston, and home to Texas A&M University — went pretty smoothly this time. Minor technical issues were resolved early on. Few locations had long wait times.

Hancock knows the truth. But she also knows that it won’t be enough to quiet the skeptics, who were questioning election processes right up to the start of early voting this year, and haven’t stopped.

Now that the 2024 election is over, Hancock is about to decide whether she can keep doing the job.

The requests keep coming

Since January, Hancock and her staff have hosted at least three public meetings where they’ve gone over, in detail, how the voting equipment works, and every single step of the election process. They’ve explained to the group of concerned residents that voter roll maintenance is done daily by staff members whose sole job is to make sure such lists are accurate.

Following the March primary election, Hancock invited some residents who have been coming to Commissioners Court to take part in the state-mandated partial hand count, which is done by every county after each election to check the accuracy of the voting equipment. The Secretary of State’s office selects the races to be hand-counted.

In an effort to increase transparency, Hancock got state permission to hand-count additional races. One of the critics of her office, resident Catherine Viens, participated in the count, which took a few days to complete and showed no discrepancies.

But the requests kept coming. They asked Hancock to guard against double voting — though there’s no evidence of that happening at large scale — by purchasing special ballot paper that’s preprinted with sequential serial numbers, starting with 1.

The paper cost taxpayers $14,000 and, according to Hancock, doesn’t really improve security. It creates waste, because leftover ballots can’t be reused in the next election. On top of that, the county workers have to spend more time and resources redacting the printed numbers to protect voters’ ballot secrecy.

Hancock agreed to it anyway for the presidential election. But it didn’t seem to bring anyone peace of mind.

During a state-mandated logic and accuracy test of the electronic equipment, which is open to the public, the group repeatedly asked, “Are the machines connected to the internet?” And each time the answer was the same, “no,” said Thomas Cavaness, the Brazos County Democratic Party chair, who participated in the test.

The testing should have taken 45 minutes to an hour, Cavaness said, “but instead it took us three hours to finish, because they kept asking questions.”

False claims fly at an October meeting

The questions have been pouring in for at least a year now, from several Republicans in Brazos who speak out regularly at Commissioners Court meetings. They’ve urged elected officials to take steps that include eliminating the use of electronic voting equipment like ballot-marking machines and electronic poll books. They have falsely claimed the equipment is connected to the internet and vulnerable to hacking.

At an October meeting, days before the start of early voting, four people spoke, asking commissioners again to endorse their efforts. Brazos resident Cynthia Wiley expressed her frustration with what she said was a lack of action.

“You’re our only recourse to express our concerns,” Wiley told the commissioners, citing voter registrations she’s unsuccessfully challenged. “And you guys have direct authority over the election administrator.”

Hancock has said her office is following the legally mandated procedures. Federal law prevents election officials from systematically removing people from the voter rolls 90 days ahead of a federal election. In addition, state law requires election officials to notify voters and give them a chance to respond and correct any errors before they can be removed from the rolls, but Wiley said she wanted the elected officials to instruct Hancock to investigate the registrations of the voters she had challenged right away.

At the same meeting, Viens asserted that the county had no emergency plan in case the power went out. Hancock said that’s false: The county has for years been prepared to handle power outages, violence, or natural disasters on Election Day, and Hancock had generators and other materials ready to go in case something went wrong. Viens has requested a copy of the plan.

Another resident who frequently speaks at the meetings is Walter Daughterity, a retired computer science professor at Texas A&M. Daughterity often appears on the video platform of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, well-known as a promoter of election conspiracy theories, and at other venues pushing for hand counting of ballots. Daughterity has asserted that Brazos’ voting machines are connected to the internet and not certified by federal officials. County and state officials have said those assertions are not true.

At the October meeting, he listed six urgent priorities for the Commissioners Court. He did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

Mark Holtzapple, a chemical engineering professor at Texas A&M, has echoed Daughterity’s claims. At that meeting, he claimed that “ballot boxes are insecure,” because “the hinge on the locked box is on the outside, and all you have to do is unscrew one bolt” to get around the lock and security seal on it.

In an email to Votebeat, Holtzapple said he and the other residents are “not accusing anyone of anything. Rather, we are simply concerned citizens who want to improve election security, an essential condition for a properly functioning republic.”

The professors’ advocacy has spurred pushback from some of their colleagues at the university. Hank Walker, a computer science and engineering professor, wrote an email to Hancock in August to thank her and the staff for “performing so professionally with people who question your integrity.”

“I have known Walter and Mark for 30 years,” he said in an email to Votebeat. “They have good intentions, but they are wrong.”

Days after the public meeting where the activists spoke, Brazos County Judge Duane Peters asked Hancock to publicly respond. But when Hancock presented at the following Commissioners Court meeting, none of the residents who had complained were there.

The four residents later requested a separate in-person meeting with Peters and Hancock. She repeated what she had explained earlier. Holtzapple told Votebeat that the hourlong meeting “was not sufficient time to fully resolve the issues and generate an action plan.”

The residents compiled a 50-page document that lays out the issues they brought up at the meeting and how the county responded. They expect another meeting.

Viens said in a text message to Votebeat that her confidence in the process “will not be restored until the county complies with the Texas Election Code.” She specifically wants to see the county eliminate countywide voting, and use only hand-marked paper ballots.

Wiley, who along with Viens worked as a polling place supervisor during elections this year, including during the presidential election last week, said she does not trust the electronic voting equipment. “Once you click or insert your choices on paper into the machinery, who or what is really casting our votes?” she wrote in an email to Votebeat. She also echoed Viens’ request to help restore her confidence in the election process.

Holtzapple acknowledged that Hancock and her staff have made efforts to address the concerns he and others have raised, but said he still wants a more extensive dialogue, more substantive responses to the questions he’s raising about election security, and more responsiveness directly to the people who raise concerns.

For example, when a resident challenges a voter registration, “there should be a closing of the loop, that there should be respect shown from the government to the citizens for taking that time to identify people who possibly should be removed from the voter rolls.”

Peters, the county judge, described some of the residents’ actions and comments as a “constant barrage … I catch it, too,” he said. “And they expect me to change the system and go to something that I think is way less secure than the system we’ve got.”

“So I can understand why Trudy and her staff would be stressed to the limit,” Peters added. “It hasn’t impacted their work ethic, but I know it gets discouraging.”

A demanding Election Day: ‘They don’t understand’

Hancock was born and raised in neighboring Robertson County, and still lives there with her husband. Her first experience in elections was as a poll worker in her community back in the late 1980s, she said.

She spends her free time scrapbooking and screenprinting T-shirts. She often makes those for her staff, featuring messages such as “election squad,” and also makes them for friends and family at their request.

“It’s a fun outlet for me,” Hancock said.

She’s most proud of her two teenage grandchildren. On the night before Election Day, she was exhausted, but agreed to have them over for dinner. She made them pumpkin bread and brought some to the office the next day.

In the early morning hours of Election Day, Hancock had already answered dozens of phone calls from election workers at polling places who needed her help. If they were short on election supplies, she hopped in her small red SUV to deliver them herself, toting extra yellow traffic cones and curbside voting signs. Technical issues with the equipment? She knew whom to call. There was no problem Hancock and her staff did not resolve quickly.

Krystal Ocon and others in Hancock’s office fanned out across the county, and fielded questions from election workers in a text thread that kept her phone dinging throughout the day.

Ocon, 39, is the Brazos County elections coordinator, and unofficially Hancock’s second in command. She was born and raised in Brazos. For the past 20 years, she’s worked on every aspect of elections in the county. She knows the process thoroughly.

Throughout the day, Hancock relied on Ocon to give voters and election workers direction, and to help when needed, such as when a line of college students began to form outside of the polling location at the elections department. Many of them hadn’t updated their voter registration and would have to cast a provisional ballot, which takes more time. There was only a couple of hours left before polls were set to close.

“Look at that line!” Ocon said, before swinging into action.

She quickly gave the waiting students directions: where to stand, what type of ID they needed to have ready, the forms they might need to fill out if they weren’t registered in the county. She told them what their options were and what would happen next.

Collectively, the Brazos County elections department staff has more than 60 years of experience. So Ocon is frustrated by the constant requests and skepticism from the activists. She worries that it could discourage the staff and weaken the department.

“They don’t understand how much time and care it takes to do this job,” Ocon said.

She points out that she’s had to miss Halloween events with her daughter multiple times over the years in order to manage early voting and meet state-mandated election deadlines.

“Do they honestly think that I am going to take time away from my family to hack the machines, change votes, and go to jail?” she said. “Heck no. So yeah, I take all of this very personally.”

Poll watchers act ‘like detectives’

The tension between the small group of Republican activists and the county elections department penetrated decisions over how to best manage polling place staffing during this year’s elections.

Hancock said the Republican Party in Brazos, now led by Ross Ford, refused to collaborate with her staff to assign work sites for election judges, who supervise polling locations.

In the past, Hancock and her staff were able to assign workers appointed by the party to locations where they’d be a good fit. “For example, a location that gets a lot of voters needs an experienced team, and so we’d assign workers based on that,” Hancock said.

This year, the party made those placement decisions on its own, which by law, it’s entitled to do. In some cases, it assigned inexperienced workers to locations staffed only by other inexperienced workers, which led to some delays on Election Day. At one location, election judges were unsure how to process voters with out-of-state IDs or how to process provisional ballots.

And Republican poll workers said they were struggling to deal with the party’s own poll watchers.

“These poll watchers feel more like detectives than observers,” said Bill Edison, a Republican election judge in Brazos who has been a poll worker for more than a decade.

“Nearly all the poll watchers, except for one I had on Election Day, were from the Republican Party. And they’re trolling Republican judges, in a town basically where they own the county politically,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Ford, the party leader, said the party has been unhappy with Hancock’s staff’s previous placement of workers at polling sites. “I know she’s very dedicated, but we feel like we need to assert ourselves and make sure that we’re doing things right,” Ford said.

The activists say they’re working on behalf of voters who lack confidence in the process. Most voters Votebeat spoke with on Election Day didn’t express such doubts.

At the Brazos Center, one of the busiest polling locations in the county, voters cast their ballots within minutes. Voters walking out and back to their cars said they had confidence in the election process. They were unaware of any issues between conservative activists and the elections department, they said.

“Things are working the way they’re supposed to,” said Brazos voter John Borden.

“The process was smooth and fast. The workers are friendly,” said Omero Lara.

Amanda Cross, who said she hasn’t always had confidence in the outcome of past elections, said she trusts how the process is handled locally. When asked if she’d heard of any problems with the elections office or anyone questioning the reliability of the voting equipment, she said “never.”

It was Donald Trump who helped fuel a movement of election suspicion after his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Hancock doubts his 2024 victory will slow that movement down. Just the day after the election, Hancock was hearing more questions from Daughterity.

“This is the new normal, and that scares me,” Hancock told Votebeat that day. “The distrust in our process and our people. The distrust in everything.”

When asked how she planned to move forward, she said, “by retiring.”

The timeline for that will depend on the results of a stress test she had scheduled for this month, after the election.

“No matter how much I love this job, you’ve got to decide whether it’s worth risking your mental and physical health,” she said. “And that’s where I am.”

*Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia atncontreras@votebeat.org

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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mma

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. T. hey 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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mma

October 8, 2024, Rumble livestream of Steve Stern's Election Integrity call

CLETA MITCHELL: I want to talk about noncitizen voting. We have absolutely been working since the early part of this year to raise awareness about the threats of noncitizen voting. And that is something that we have - we built a website. It's www.onlycitizensvotecoalition.com, onlycitizensvotecoalition.com.

And go to that website. Look at the resources. 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. But raising awareness, until we can get these laws changed, raising awareness is about all that we can do at this point, but it's really important. And so anything that you can do to try to raise awareness in your communities about the threat of noncitizens voting, please do that.

mma 10 24

On War Room, “Fight Voter Fraud” founder offers MAGA audience voter data for mass eligibility challenges in Georgia

Linda Szynkowicz: “You can have a list of people in your county that we believe should not be voting”

Written by Madeline Peltz

Research contributions from John Knefel

Published 10/07/24

On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Fight Voter Fraud founder Linda Szynkowicz encouraged her MAGA audience to request voter data so they can challenge the eligibility of people they believe should not have ballot access in Georgia.

Szynkowicz’s call to action comes amid a wave of harassment against election officials — and could potentially turn this tactic on the general voting public.

Video

CitationFrom the October 7, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“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,” Szynkowicz said during the October 7 episode. “Do your due diligence. We’ll even teach you how to do it.”

Szynkowicz specifically singled out Georgia, where county election boards across the state are dealing with large batches of these voter challenges. From The Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Mass voter challenges have become a new front in the battle between partisan activists and local election boards. State laws passed in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election have empowered activists to contest an unlimited number of voters within the same county.

But a majority of challenges are rejected by county boards. Election officials often say the challenges lack credible evidence to prove that the challenged voter moved to a new state or jurisdiction, died or broke some other rule making them ineligible to vote.

“Over 350,000 voter challenges have been lodged since 2020,” the article continues. “County election officials have rejected the vast majority.”

Voter challenges in Georgia have been a tactic of national election denial groups. Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump lawyer and founder of the Election Integrity Network, developed software called Eagle AI that empowers “MAGA activists to generate mass voter challenges.” According to Documented, “Activists affiliated with EIN in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida are already testing the Eagle AI system, and setting up meetings with election officials to normalize the program and encourage them to accept voter challenges generated by the platform.”

The Brennan Center for Justice notes that these types of challenges can be “intimidating” and “spread disinformation” when they are cited “as ‘proof’ that ineligible people are voting.” Former President Donald Trump, right-wing media, and GOP Congress members have fearmonged about the imaginary threat of mass noncitizen voting to create a cloud of doubt around November’s presidential election results.

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mma 10 24

...Trump Force 47’s URL has also been shared in other far-right online spaces, like among QAnon figures and users on the far-right forum TheDonald.

Far-right media figures, including Roseanne Barr, Jack Posobiec, and Rogan O’Handley — who have promoted QAnon, pushed various conspiracy theories, and spread misinformation, respectively — have taken part in Trump Force 47 training events. Posobiec’s trainings were reportedly “touted as a way to ‘receive insider insights from Jack Posobiec on the campaign’s efforts.’”

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Analysis reveals Trump loyalists have 'infiltrated' election boards in key states

Edward Carver Common Dreams an 9 24

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an 9 24

Former President Donald Trump has more than his share of outspoken critics within Christianity, from the Rev. Raphael Warnock (a Democratic U.S. senator via Georgia) to devout Catholics like President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California). His Democratic opponent in the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a Baptist with a fondness for Hinduism (her mother was from India).

Yet Trump continues to be extremely popular within a certain area of Christianity: far-right evangelical Christian nationalists, who see a second Trump term as God's will. One of them is Joshua Standifer, founder of the group Lion of Judah.

In an article published on September 4, The Guardian's Alice Herman details Standifer's efforts to recruit Christian nationalists as election workers.

READ MORE:['Droves of' childless Americans and adoptive parents are still raging at JD Vance

"A Christian political operative has teamed up with charismatic preachers to enroll election skeptics as poll workers across the country, using a Donald Trump-aligned swing state tour to enlist support in the effort," Herman explains. "Joshua Standifer... describes the effort as a 'Trojan horse' strategy to get Christians in 'key positions of influence in government like election workers,' which will help them identify alleged voter fraud and serve as 'the first step on the path to victory this fall,' according to his website."

Standifer, Herman adds, "has been on the road with a traveling pro-Trump tent revival featuring self-styled prophets and Christian nationalist preachers that has made stops in key swing states, including Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin."

"The Lion of Judah’s election worker training program, which The Guardian has reviewed, features a series of modules titled 'Fight The Fraud: How to Become an Election Worker in 4 Easy Steps,'" Herman reports. "Standifer's project has so far largely flown under the radar."

But Matthew D. Taylor of the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies has been sounding the alarm about Standifer's efforts.

READ MORE:**Ginni Thomas privately praised group working against Supreme Court reform: 'Thank you so, so, so much'**

In a thread posted on X, formerly Twitter, Taylor warned, "Standifer's organization Lion of Judah represents an urgent & unrecognized hazard to our democracy this fall. It's targeting election workers. I was at this event on Monday. I talked to Standifer himself…. Lion of Judah poses as a Christian ministry aimed at assisting Christians to register as election workers. That might sound mostly innocuous-albeit strange-but you have to look at the context in which they're doing it & how they go about it."

Taylor tweeted video of Standifer speaking in Wisconsin, where he said, "What if we had Christians across America, in swing states like Wisconsin, that were actually the ones counting the votes? ... They don't see it coming."

READ MORE:**Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools**

*Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

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an 8 24

A new report is sounding the alarm about Republican election officials in Colorado who will likely protest the 2024 election results.

Colorado's election certification system is run by local canvassing boards that feature one Democratic appointee and one Republican, along with an elected elections official, USA Today reported. In the past few elections where the GOP appointee has protested certification, the Democrat and the elected official have outvoted the Republican.

In Jefferson County, which is the western and southwestern part of Denver, **Republican representative Nancy Pallozzi has spent the last three elections refusing to certify results, but critics say that she hasn't ever raised any legitimate reasons to call the results of the election into doubt.

“We’ve worked with Nancy many times, and every election, she sends us a letter with some sort of reason for not certifying the election, and none of it is ever coherent,” wrote Jefferson County Clerk spokesperson Sarah McAfee. “It seems to be some sort of political statement.”

Pallozzi's actions are part of a broader trend of Republican elections officials refusing to sign off one elections where Democrats win. While these objections so far haven't blocked elected officials from taking office, they could nonetheless create chaos and delay the certification of the electoral college this November.

“I think the powers driving the election denial movement have been using the last three years as a testing ground for different techniques, different strategies to see what they can do to create confusion and cause chaos in the process,” Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, told USA Today.

Professor Rick Hasen, from the University of California Los Angeles, who runs ElectionLawBlog.org, said that those local officials could stop the final result if they have enough allies and the election is close.

“It’s a kind of strategy, if it’s a close election, to find a way to slow things down or provide a path for changing election outcomes,” said Hasen.

See the full report and other concerning elections canvassing board officials here.

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:{May 13, 2024 rww

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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mma 1 24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Armed Enforcers for the Anti-Democracy Coalition?

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Mack speaks at CSPOA press conference on election fraud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspired by Lies: ‘2000 Mules’ as Political Warfare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conspiracy Theories as Spiritual Warfare

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheriffs: The Law or a Threat to the Law?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://www.mediamatters.org/jack-posobiec/fbi-warns-threats-state-poll-workers-right-wing-media-and-denialist-groups-spread

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a combination of local election denialist groups and national conservative media figures are driving conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Pennsylvania — the same falsehoods and misinformation that are putting election workers at an increased risk of violence, according to the FBI and Department of Justice. Pennsylvania is one of several states that have seen increased threats of violence toward election officials, driven by false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that future voter fraud is likely.

Nearly all of the groups and media figures pushing these narratives in Pennsylvania support the gubernatorial campaign of Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who helped to incite the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, and has embraced numerous extremist positions. Mastriano also unsuccessfully used his position to attempt to overturn Pennsylvania’s presidential election results, ingratiating himself to some of the state’s most extreme conservative activists.

Against this backdrop, former President Donald Trump has already begun organizing attempts to challenge the results of the state’s midterm elections, according to Rolling Stone.

Trump has been briefed on plans in multiple states and critical races — including in Georgia. But Pennsylvania has grabbed his interest most keenly, including in the Senate contest between Democrat John Fetterman and the Trump-endorsed GOP contender Mehmet Oz. If the Republican does not win by a wide enough margin to trigger a speedy concession from Fetterman — or if the vote tally is close on or after Election Night in November — Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the “election integrity” of Democratic strongholds such as the Philly area.

Already, MAGA activists and Republican Party officials are creating the conditions that make voter suppression and violence against workers more likely. Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee's director for election integrity in Pennsylvania said on a conference call with election denialist group Audit the Vote PA that they’d filled “6,000 poll watcher positions in the state this year, compared with 1,000 in 2020,” according to Reuters, which noted that “election conspiracy groups also often appear at events with Republican officials, focused on recruiting volunteers to help watch the polls, according to the groups themselves and county officials.”

Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state recently told PennLive that “a lot of these threats are fueled by mis- and disinformation,” emphasizing, “It’s important to get out accurate information about the election process in Pennsylvania so voters and the public know that when there are delays in counting, it doesn’t mean anything nefarious happening.”

The deep connections between these denialist influencers, their groups, and right-wing media outlets illustrate the extent to which conspiracy theories about voter fraud have become a unifying principle in conservative organizing. Now, those same false claims are potentially driving threats and harassment against election workers across the country.

Right-wing media champion Doug Mastriano’s campaign

Mastriano rose to prominence challenging Biden’s win in Pennsylvania in 2020, and election denialism has been at the forefront of his campaign for governor. He has spread these conspiracy theories across conservative media while rejecting mainstream interviews. He’s a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, which has become a hub for election denialists from all over the country.

One of Mastriano’s top champions in conservative media is neo-Nazi collaborator and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who has appeared at campaign events for Mastriano as recently as this month. Posobiec is another War Room mainstay and occasional guest host,often using Bannon’s platform to praise Mastriano’s campaign, including in an interview in July

CitationFrom the July 20, 2022, edition of War Room: Pandemic, streamed on Rumble

"The question on everybody’s mind I believe, certainly for this audience, the War Room audience, and if Steve were here right now he’d be asking the same exact question, is voter integrity,” Posobiec said near the beginning of the segment, focusing on the false idea that Pennsylvania's elections are insecure. “What can be done between now and November for the current election that you are in to preserve that idea of voter integrity and fight back against some of these issues that we’ve brought up in the past?” (Bannon was not on his show that day because he was in court unsuccessfully fighting his contempt of Congress case for refusing to testify before the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.)

“We’re going to have to have eyeballs on all the election stations,” Mastriano responded. “I need 20,000 poll watchers to cover the state.”

He then implored War Room listeners who were interested in volunteering “instead of complaining” to go to his website and sign up. To underline the point, Posobiec closed the interview by reminding the audience where they could go to volunteer to become a poll watcher.

More recently, Posobiec told War Room viewers that the governor’s race in Pennsylvania is even more important than in many other states, stating that whoever controlled that office would determine the state’s electoral votes in two years.

“If you’re looking at 2024, you have to understand that Pennsylvania is the keystone,” Posobiec said on October 1. “I railed on this in 2020. The secretary of state in Pennsylvania is an appointed Cabinet position of the governor. It is not a separately elected office.”

“That means the 2022 race for governor is the presidential race, because that determines who your secretary of state is going to be in a state which gives you 20 electoral votes,” he continued. “We’re going to make sure everybody understands the stakes that are at play here, because this is the game for our republic.”

Posobiec’s comments illustrate how Mastriano’s allies in right-wing media continue to shore up his conservative bona fides, even as his campaign attempts to obscure his extremist views. After winning the Republican gubernatorial primary in May, Mastriano or his staff apparently began deleting some of his more controversial videos and social media posts from his official accounts. These actions follow a pattern; as Media Matters previously reported, Mastriano has also posted and deleted more than 50 tweets in support of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

He may now be attempting to downplay his rampant election denialism in the weeks before the midterms. On the morning that Bannon was sentenced for contempt of Congress, Posobiec sat in as a guest co-host to interview Mastriano, and the two avoided the topic completely.

The previous evening, Mastriano appeared on conservative YouTuber Tim Pool’s show, further illustrating the candidate’s total enmeshment in right-wing media. Over the course of that more than two hour-long interview, Mastriano largely avoided pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories as well. Yet even when he seemingly attempts to moderate his position, Mastriano still perpetuates the idea that elections are fundamentally insecure and voter fraud is rampant.

“We’re working real hard to get at least one trained poll watcher in every polling station for transparency and accountability,” he said on Newsmax on October 24.

“Merely asking questions about the elections — it does not make me an election denier,” he said on One America News the same day.

But Mastriano had struck a very different tone immediately after the 2020 election. “We're going to take our power back,” he said on Bannon’s War Room on November 27, 2020, promising to “seat the electors" from a fake pro-Trump slate instead of recognizing Biden’s victory in the state.

A web of election denialist influencers

War Room has also been a platform for some of Pennsylvania’s most active conspiracy theorists, includingToni Shuppe, who heads denialist group Audit the Vote PA.Shuppe has argued that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory – which purports that high-ranking Democrats were involved in a child sex trafficking ring – is “absolutely real.” She also claimed that QAnon, which has many of the same themes as Pizzagate, is a “very valuable resource.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Posobiec also pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and created disinformation about the origins of QAnon in an apparent effort to save the Trump campaign from embarrassment.

In August, Shuppe appeared on War Room to advocate against using machines to count and tabulate votes, based on the debunked theory that voting machines were used to rig the 2020 election.

“We have a massive grassroots movement in Pennsylvania,” Bannon said. “It’s essentially what got President Trump elected in 2016, and to be brutally frank, it’s real votes, certifiable votes, it’s what got him to win Pennsylvania in 2020.” (In reality, Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020.)

“We’re dealing with a weaponized government, which, I don’t have to tell you or anybody that watches your show that that’s what we’re dealing with,” Shuppe told Bannon. “So there’s a risk there, but there’s nothing in the law that says we can’t make these changes in our report that’s on our website.

[vid CitationFrom the August 29, 2022, edition of War Room: Battleground, streamed on Rumble

in addition to appearing frequently on War Room and failing Fox News competitor One America News, Shuppe hosts her own streaming show, also called Audit the Vote PA. The show serves as a combination of propaganda outlet and organizing space to enlist new adherents and keep those already engaged active in the run-up to the midterms.

In July, Shuppe interviewed election denialist and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis, who reportedly recently met with Trump to lay out plans for challenging the midterm results in Pennsylvania.In that segment, Faddis promoted an upcoming rally he was participating in with election denier Catherine Engelbrecht,whose group True the Vote has become a leading voice in the nationwide denialist movement. Faddis also defended Mastriano, and cautioned that conservatives should not become demoralized at the prospect of needing to overcome stolen elections.

“And just in case you’re thinking about staying home and not voting, I get the frustration around 2020 isn’t fixed, we still have what appears to be an illegitimate president, and it is very tempting to throw in the towel and say, ‘What’s the point of voting?’” Shuppe said. “But I strongly encourage you otherwise because November 2022 in Pennsylvania is going to be a pivotal election, not just for our state, but I believe for the rest of the country.”

Shuppe also interviewed Posobiec earlier this month and the two pushed conspiracy theories about the state’s supposed election vulnerabilities.

“If you can get everything right in terms of turnout, if you get everything right in terms of integrity, then you get Pennsylvania back, you flip Pennsylvania,” Posobiec said. He later added, “In order to do that, you need to lay the groundwork out years ahead of the race. And that’s what Sen. Mastriano provides.”

Shuppe responded by claiming Democratic gubernatorial nominee and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro is “ultimately afraid that we’re going to get a transparent, free and fair election process with a Gov. Mastriano and they won’t be able to stuff ballots and cheat the way they did in 2020 [vid CitationFrom the October 5, 2022, edition of Audit the Vote PA, streamed on Rumble

on October 19, Shuppe interviewed local denialist activist Bill Borton, who opposes the use of drop boxes on the false grounds that they have been used to perpetuate widespread ballot stuffing.

“I am reasonably certain there hasn't been a free and fair election in the United States in over 20 years,” Borton said. “Maybe longer.”

“I would agree,” Shuppe responded.

Borton is a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by America First Legal (AFL), a conservative legal group founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller,against Chester County, Pennsylvania, over allegations that ballots had been dropped in unmonitored drop boxes in violation of state law. Borton, who helped obtain the footage, hopes the case or others like it will bring an end to ballot drop boxes altogether.

“Me being the eternal optimist that I am, this could conceivably mean that a day or so after the drop boxes open, we nab a couple people, have proof of it, and they all get shut down for the rest of the time leading up to the election,” Borton told Shuppe.

Though the complaint alleges that surveillance video shows “over 300 individuals” dropping off more than one ballot, which is against Pennsylvania law, some extremist media figures have exaggerated this case as an example of verified, intentional voter fraud and pressed that this exemplifies the need for physical monitoring at drop boxes.

Infowars’ resident insurrectionist Owen Shroyer opened his September 19 discussion of the subject by complaining that the media is “demonizing conservatives, demonizing Republicans for staking out polling locations and drop boxes,” citing evidence from the AFL that allegedly “found individuals stuffing ballot boxes, same people showing up multiple times with dozens of ballots.” Shroyer asked his audience, “Why don’t Democrats want you watching drop boxes? Because Democrats are using drop boxes to cheat and steal an election.: judge in a similar case brought by AFL in Pennsylvania ruled that in-person monitoring was not necessary.

“Since mail-in ballots have been in use, no fraud has been detected in Lehigh County with the mail-in ballot process,” Judge Thomas Capehart wrote.

Fox News hosts amplify bogus ballot stuffing claims

[vid]

Borton has played an outsized role in some of the national media attention on Pennsylvania’s elections. Most of the national conservative media coverage centers around mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes, both of which have been identified, incorrectly, by Pennsylvania election deniers and the Republican Party as previous sites of voter fraud.

Fox host Mark Levin celebrated AFL’sChester County complaint as a win, adding, “I suspect there's a hell of a lot more than one.”

Separately, a long-running legal fight over undated mail-in ballots came to a head on October 11, when the Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling that allowed undated ballots to be counted in a 2021 local county judge election. Pennsylvania law requires that mail-in ballot envelopes be hand-signed and dated, though both the state’s Commonwealth Court and 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that this provision was designed to unfairly throw out ballots. Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman issued guidance that same day directing counties to continue to count undated mail-in ballots, as the Supreme Court’s decision was not relevant to midterms.

On his radio show,Fox host Sean Hannity pressed that Chapman’s guidance was an excuse for Democrats to give their voters an advantage: “Of course, Democrats, they don't want to follow laws. They want to make them up as they go along and, you know, make everything work to their advantage.”

Levin was more direct, arguing that this shows “they're trying to steal the election for” Democratic Senate nominee and current Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. According to Levin, “This is the sort of thing that changes election results.”

On a previous show, Levin accused Democrats of “causing all this anguish, this anarchy,” as “the Republicans aren't in there trying to change state law through well-placed Republican officials. It’s the Democrats.”

Of course, as Posobiec outlined above, this is exactly the election denialist plan for 2024: Disrupt midterms, get Republicans elected, and lay the groundwork for an easy 2024 Trump win.

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mma 10 22

...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.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/alex-jones-tells-steve-bannons-war-room-audience-they-should-be-documenting-everything

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

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

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

TO

By Tess Owen

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

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

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

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

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

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

News

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

GREG WALTERS

10.05.22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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mma 10 22

election denier Cleta Mitchell appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic to once again call on the audience to become poll watchers for the 2022 election, this time suggesting viewers volunteer in counties where they do not live.

During an appearance on the October 10 edition of War Room, Mitchell laid out her recruitment efforts to get conservatives to volunteer at polling places across the country, including Maricopa County, Arizona; DeKalb County, Georgia; the Detroit area precincts; Washoe County, Nevada; Wake, Durham, and Mecklenburg Counties in North Carolina; and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.

Most concerning is her call to action in DeKalb County, Georgia, and Maricopa County, Arizona, as those jurisdictions were previously targeted in 2020 election fraud conspiracies. During her appearances, she informed the War Room audience: “You can be from anywhere in the state in Arizona or anywhere in the state in Georgia and you can go to DeKalb County or you can go to Maricopa County — you don’t have to be from that county.” Mitchell also listed precincts around Detroit as needing more volunteers and stated, “Look, these are not great places to be, but we need to be there."[vid]

deKalb County, Georgia, is one of four counties that make up the metropolitan Atlanta area and has the second largest population of Black voters in the state behind Fulton County. The county was one of many that former President Donald Trump targeted with accusations of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, though no evidence of fraud was discovered. In 2021, DeKalb sued Trump for legal fees over his unfounded objections to the 2020 election, which the county recovered.

Maricopa County has also been the focus of election fraud-related conspiracy theories since the 2020 election. The conspiracy theories led to a baseless audit of votes in the county promoted by right-wing media and QAnon-connected influencers. The results of the audit not only reaffirmed President Joe Biden's victory in the county, but showed that he won by a larger marginal than originally recorded.

During a previous appearance with Mitchell, Bannon labeled the efforts a “call to arms” for conservatives.[vid]

on October 11, Bannon brought up Mitchell’s recruitment efforts in a conversation with Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who then promoted the RNC’s recent lawsuits against Maricopa County, which have angered state level officials who claim the RNC is promoting misinformation about the upcoming election.

Mitchell is a right-wing lawyer who worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election. She has since begun an effort called the Election Integrity Network, a part of the Conservative Partnership Institute, training and mobilizing conservatives to monitor elections across the country. Mitchell has described her work as creating “a volunteer army of citizens.” The Conservative Partnership Institute, where Mitchell is a senior legal advisor and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is a senior partner, has received $1 million in donations from Trump’s super PAC Save America. CPI has also been linked to Jim Marchant, a QAnon-connected candidate for Nevada Secretary of State.

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6 22

wiith President Joe Biden continuing to suffer from weak approval ratings and voters expressing considerable frustration over inflation, Democratic strategists fear that the 2022 midterms could bring a major red wave like the red waves of 1994 and 2010. To make matters worse, Republicans have been ramping up their voter suppression campaign. And according to reporting from journalist Heidi Przybyla in Politico, part of the GOP game plan is looking for ways to challenge votes in Democratic-leaning areas.

Politico, Przybyla reports, has obtained “video recordings” of “Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists” that “provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts.” The plan, according to Przybyla, is to “install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys.”

Przybyla writes, “The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.”

The RNC staffer in Michigan that Przybyla is referring to is Matthew Seifried. In a recording of a training session held on October 5, 2021, Seifried told his colleagues, “Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than (as) a poll challenger…. It’s going to be an army. We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”

Seifried, according to Przybyla, “also said the RNC will hold ‘workshops’ and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day.”

Przybyla notes that “election watchdog groups and legal experts say many of these recruits are answering the RNC’s call because they falsely believe fraud was committed in the 2020 election.”

Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of the election watchdog group Issue One, told Politico, “This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together. It looks like now, the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself — and that should concern everyone.”

Penniman believes that the RNC strategy is to “create massive failure of certification” in Democratic precincts.

“The real hope is that you can throw the choosing of electors to state legislatures,” Penniman told Politico.

Law professor Rick Hasen, an expert on election law who also teaches political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, is quite critical of the RNC plan to install poll workers in heavily Democratic precincts.

Hasen told Politico, “You shouldn’t have poll workers who are reporting to political organizations what they see. It creates the potential for mucking things up at polling places and potentially leading to delays or disenfranchisement of voters.”

That is especially true, Hasen added, “if (the poll workers) come in with the attitude that something is crooked with how elections are run.”

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Right Wing Watch noted in May:

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Catherine EngelbrechtDinesh D'SouzaJames Boppconspiracy theoriesDisinformationElection 2020True the Vote

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hnn 1020

trump's Call for Freelance Poll-Watchers Summons a Dark History

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In 1981, the Republican National Committee used threatening signs and deployed off-duty officers to polling places in Black and Latino neighborhoods to help win the New Jersey governorship. This is the first presidential election year since the decree expired, making Trump's call for supporters to "watch the polls" ominous.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/experts-warn-of-danger-posed-by-armed-pro-trump-poll-watchers/

no lnx

Experts warn of danger posed by armed pro-Trump poll watchers

Kenny Stancil October 11, 2020

Following President Donald Trump's refusal last month to denounce white supremacists along with his longstanding pattern of undermining democratic norms—and in the wake of the FBI's interception of a plot by right-wing domestic terrorists to kidnap Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government—fears are mounting about the danger posed by far-right paramilitary groups heeding Trump's call to "go into the polls and watch very carefully."

Two weeks after Donald Trump Jr. took to social media in an attempt to recruit an "army for Trump's election security," and with early voting already underway, Republicans this week have begun dispatching thousands of volunteers to in-person voting locations and mail-in ballot drop boxes, part of a desperate "effort to find evidence to back up Trump's unsubstantiated complaints about widespread voter fraud," Reuters reported Thursday.

According to more than 20 officials involved in the effort, "the mission... is to capture photos and videos Republicans can use to support so-far unfounded claims that mail voting is riddled with chicanery, and to help their case if legal disputes erupt over the results of... the contest between Republican incumbent Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden."

But critics of the Trump campaign's operation—which revolves around baseless presumptions of fraudulent electoral activity committed by supporters of Democratic candidates—argued that the president's "call for his supporters to serve as self-appointed" poll-watchers "sounded more like an incitement to voter intimidation and violence than an endorsement of the role election observers play in protecting democratic norms."

Given the White House's alarming normalization of violence against political foes, voting rights experts, civic officials, and citizens are increasingly concerned about the negative consequences that could ensue if tensions escalate and the president's most militant supporters—white nationalist gangs, so-called "patriots" donning Confederate and Nazi regalia, and other heavily armed pro-Trump factions—follow his authoritarian cues.

Steven Gardiner, a scholar at the progressive think tankPolitical Research Associates, told The Guardian on Friday that "the militias will absolutely seize on" Trump's comments.

"The possibility of armed factions with military-style rifles showing up at polling places is very troubling," Gardiner added.

When Devin Burghart—director of the anti-hate organization theInstitute for Research and Education on Human Rights—heard Trump endorse voter intimidation at last month's debate, his "first thought was, 'Here we go.'"

"This is the stuff of our worst nightmares," Burghart said.

As Common Dreams reported on Thursday amid the revelation that 13 suspects had been arrested on kidnapping and terrorism charges after law enforcement officials foiled a right-wing plot to attack the Michigan State Capitol and hold Gov. Whitmer hostage, many observers have made connections between Trump's demagogic rhetoric and his followers' violent actions.

"I wonder where they got their motivation from," Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) noted sarcastically on social media, referring to an incendiary message Trump shared in April—during the height of anti-lockdown protests in the state—to "Liberate Michigan!"

"This is a pattern: Trump paints a target. An attack or plot follows," tweeted Washington Post national security correspondent Greg Miller.

Gardiner told The Guardian that "the relationship between the militias and the current administration is call and response."

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"It's not always clear who's leading the chant," he added. "Sometimes it's coming from the militias, sometimes it's coming from the president."

Another worrisome development is that gun sales nearly doubled between summer 2019 and 2020, meaning that the U.S. is further arming itself with "deadly weaponry [that] is increasingly finding its way onto the streets, borne by self-styled private militias, and culminating in violent clashes that have caused bloodshed in several U.S. cities," as The Guardian explained.

The New York Times estimated last month that the number of active militia members hovers around 20,000 people in 300 groups, with military veterans constituting one-fourth of those. But a new investigation by The Atlantic magazine into the Oath Keepers, one of the most prominent far-right paramilitary groups, revealed a list of nearly 25,000 current or former members, two-thirds of whom had military or law enforcement backgrounds, suggesting that the number of Americans with ties to extremist factions is larger.

As Common Dreams reported last month, armed white supremacists pose the greatest domestic terrorism threat in the U.S., according to the FBI, despite efforts by the Trump administration to downplay the risks associated with right-wing militias.

According to Gardiner's research, many of the violent incidents committed by far-right vigilantes against anti-racism and anti-police violence protesters this summer were carried out by uncoordinated groups of individuals, with no known involvement of established militias.

"There have been almost 240 incidents [this summer] where small and entirely leaderless bands of extremists coalesced online and then proceeded to take their armed fantasies on to the streets of America," The Guardian reported.

Burghart's team "has been tracking the escalation of militia activity," particularly in key swing states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where "groups have been detected discussing what they call 'voter integrity' efforts" on Election Day.

"We're paying close attention," Burghart said. As a result of Trump's "call to arms" at the first presidential debate, he anticipates that "we'll see a lot more activity from here."

Rachel Carroll Rivas, co-director of the Montana Human Rights Network, told The Guardian that online monitoring conducted by her organization has been "picking up intensifying conversation among militia groups about the legitimacy of the November 3 ballot and of the integrity of mail-in voting."

Rivas explained that "militia groups such as the Montana branch of the United States Freedom Protectors were positioning themselves to be vigilante outriders of law enforcement on Election Day," and that "the possibility of interventions by armed members of the group had to be taken seriously."

"They present themselves as protectors of property and law and order, and are now starting to talk about the election," Rivas said. "They may show up at polling places claiming to want to protect voting rights, but their impact will clearly be intimidatory."

Instilling fear and harassing voters is Trump's goal, according to voting rights advocates. Nina Jankowicz, a political scholar at the Wilson Center, wrote in The Atlantic that "confrontations between unorganized, self-appointed poll watchers and individual voters are a recipe for trouble—and a threat to a fair election."

Jankowicz stated that "if voters encounter any group discouraging or preventing others from casting a ballot, they should immediately inform a poll worker and call a nonpartisan election-protection hotline (866-OUR-VOTE is one example)."

"Election officials across the country should know they have the right to eject poll watchers for disruptions and intimidation, and can call the police if unrest develops outside the station," Jankowicz said. "And police themselves should be reminded that their job is to protect people's ability to vote, no matter their personal political preferences."

Rivas stressed that the threat of voter intimidation "really is top down." Far-right paramilitary groups "are repeating word for word what they hear from President Trump," she said.

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https://www.facingsouth.org/2020/10/institute-index-confronting-gops-poll-watcher-threats

Hours after the start of the Sept. 29 presidential debate betweenPresident Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden — in which Trump refused to condemn white supremacists, made false claims about voter fraud, and urged his supporters to "go into the polls and watch very carefully"— that Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring issued a Tweet saying "voter harassment and intimidation will not be tolerated" in his state: 14 also CA

Number of days before the debate that Herring issued an advisory opinion outlining protections in both state and federal law against voter intimidation in response to reports of activity near polling places that led some voters to fear for their safety: 5

Date on which a group of Trump supporters waving campaign flags disrupted early voting in Fairfax County, Virginia, by rallying near the entrance to a polling place following a "Trump Train" parade led by Republican National Committee (RNC) Co-Chair Thomas O. "Tommy" Hicks Jr. of Dallas: 9/19/2020

Year in which the RNC, after a lawsuit over its hiring of off-duty police to monitor polling places in Black and Latino communities in New Jersey as part of a so-called "ballot security" operation, signed a consent decree pledging to end intimidation of Democratic voters though admitting no wrongdoing: 1982

According to RNC officials, number of voters another one of their 1980s-era so-called "ballot security" efforts was expected to kick off Louisiana's rolls in an effort the officials said was designed to "keep the Black vote down": 60,000 to 80,000

Year in which the consent decree expired despite Democrats' attempts to get it extended, making the 2020 presidential election the first without its protections in 40 years: 2017

Date on whichPresident Trump, in a private meeting with civil rights leaders at Trump Tower, acknowledged that lower turnout among Black voters helped him defeat Hillary Clinton: 1/16/2017

Year in which Justin Clark, an attorney and Trump reelection campaign official, was recorded telling Republican lawyers that the expiration of the consent decree was a "huge, huge, huge, huge deal": 2019

Number of people the Republican Party is now aiming to recruit to serve as what it calls "poll watchers" to look for election problems, raising concerns about possible voter intimidation: 50,000

Date on which Roger Stone — the longtime Trump confidant convicted of felonies for witness tampering and lying to investigators in the Russia election interference case and whose sentence was commuted by the president — appeared on the radio show of Dallas-based far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and said the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory: 9/10/2020

Date on which, Stone, who has Proud Boy ties, organized what became known as the "Brooks Brothers riot" — a violent protest involving George W. Bush campaign operatives who targeted a meeting of election canvassers in Florida's Miami-Dade County during the 2000 presidential recount and succeeded in shutting it down, ultimately leading Al Gore, who won the popular vote, to concede: 11/22/2000

Of the 50 states, number with statutes regulating poll watchers, also known as "partisan citizen observers": 45

Of the 13 Southern states*, number with poll watcher statutes: 13

Number of provisions of federal law that also bar voter intimidation, some of which impose lengthy prison sentences: 6

Factor by which the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a voting rights advocacy group, has boosted its squad of attorneys who'll be on call to help voters who experience intimidation or other problems at the polls this year: 4

Number of attorneys now helping that effort nationwide: more than 21,000

Phone number that voters who experience problems can call to get help from those attorneys: 866-OUR-VOTE

* Facing South counts among the Southern states Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

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