Far-right groups are amping up their efforts to potentially interfere in November’s elections.
According to a new report in Wired, several groups with ties to both former President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are already organizing on a “hyperlocal level” to get supporters to monitor polling places and ballot drop boxes and potentially intimidate voters and election officials. More than one group is also deploying technology to challenge voter registrations and purge those deemed ineligible.
Related:
Right-wing activist Catherine Engelbrecht has been spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud since at least 2010, when she founded her organization True the Vote. The group has begun holding webinars on “election integrity” ahead of the 2024 presidential election, instructing supporters on how to monitor polls and check voter rolls.
The group is also set to launch a new version of its IV3 software tool, which is intended to allow users to challenge voter registrations anywhere in the country by comparing information on voter rolls to a U.S. Postal Service database. But Wired reported in 2022 that the software used unreliable data to challenge hundreds of thousands of voter registrations.
Georgia-based firm EagleAI NETwork has also developed a database of voter information intended to “fast-track” the deletion of “ineligible” voters, and at least one Georgia county has agreed to use it. According to Wired, voter rights groups warn that insignificant errors in voter info like that collected by EagleAI can lead to eligible voters being disenfranchised.
Election conspiracist and former Trump advisor Cleta Mitchell is one of EagleAI’s key backers, and her Election Integrity Network has also held election monitoring seminars both in-person and online. It’s “Soles to the Rolls” initiative aims to increase voter registration challenges, Wired reports.
Former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn’s group, America Project, also held a recent webinar reportedly aimed at giving attendees “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” using “state-of-the-art election tools.” Christina Bobb, a former Trump lawyer, far-right TV personality, and prominent 2020 election denier who was recently appointed to run the RNC’s “election integrity unit,” was scheduled to appear at the America Project’s webinar, and the group has said she will be involved in future sessions.
As Wired notes, Bobb’s involvement indicates how intertwined groups like America Project have become in the Republican National Committee (RNC). An internal memo obtained by NPR revealed that under Bobb the RNC’s election integrity priorities include “a broader effort over the coming months to [legally] challenge voter identification and signature verification rules which were put into place for the 2020 election.”
Andrew Garber of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program said that groups like America Project and True the Vote “are trying to lay the groundwork to potentially make later claims about the election that very well may be false.”
“The more chaos that can be caused along the way will give more fodder to that disinformation,” Garber told Wired. Mass voter challenges won’t just result in many eligible voters being kicked off the rolls, he explained. It will also mean that election conspiracy theorists can point to evidence, however dubious, of supposed voter fraud, further fueling misinformation about and distrust of elections.
And it’s not just the presidential election we need to be worried about, according to Garber.
“These groups have a playbook nationally that they tend to deploy locally,” Garber said. “Some of these playbooks that have an intended national reach are then deployed through local activists, and it’s concerning because it’s the voters at the local level who suffer the effects. It’s the election officials at the local level trying to keep order at the polls, trying to make sure their voter rolls are up to date, who have to deal with this stuff.”
