Not Just MAGA/QAnon Candidates Threaten Our Elections, But MAGA/QAnon Election Worker Insider Attacks

Reuters has been doing a yeoman’s job of reporting on how MAGA/QAnon Republicans are trying to corrupt our electoral system from the inside by placing “Big Lie” election deniers inside election boards and electing them to  secretary of state and governor positions to disrupt and undermine our elections.

The latest Reuters report, ‘Stop the steal’ supporters train thousands of U.S. poll observers:

Inside the El Paso County clerk’s office in Colorado, where officials had gathered in July to recount votes in a Republican nominating contest for this year’s midterms, dozens of angry election watchers pounded on the windows, at times yelling at workers and recording them with cell phones.

In the hallway a group prayed for “evil to descend” on the “election team,” said the county’s Republican clerk Chuck Broerman. “It’s astonishing to me to hear something like that.” The election watchers had showed up to observe a five-day recount of votes for four Republican candidates who claimed the primary was fraudulent in a contest where they faced other Republicans.

Protesters had mobilized outside the clerk’s office, holding signs with the signature “Stop the Steal” slogan of former President Donald Trump and demanding the county get rid of its voting machines.

As the United States enters the final stretch to November’s midterm elections, Reuters documented multiple incidents of intimidation involving an expanding army of election observers, many of them recruited by prominent Republican Party figures and activists echoing Trump’s false theories about election fraud. The widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election as alleged by Trump and his supporters was never proven.

Interviews with more than two dozen election officials as well as representatives of groups driven by false theories about election fraud, and an examination of poll-watching training materials, revealed an intensifying grassroots effort to recruit activists. This has heightened alarm that disturbances in this year’s primary contests could foreshadow problems in November’s local, state and national races.

Officials and experts worry the campaign will deepen the distrust about America’s election process and lead to further harassment and threats to already besieged election workers.

Election officials in three other states — North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada — reported similar incidents. In 16 North Carolina counties alone, officials noted unusually aggressive observers during May’s primary elections, according to a state election board survey. Some attempted to take photographs of sensitive voting equipment or intimidated voters at polling places, in violation of North Carolina’s election laws.

During early voting in Arizona’s Pima County, an election observer was told to put away binoculars; another was caught looking at private voter data, and another was asked to stop making comments about “fraudulent elections,” according to a September report by the county recorder’s office reviewed by Reuters. State law forbids voter intimidation and obstructing election workers.

Pima county recorder Gabriella Cazares-Kelly said her election staff received multiple complaints from voters that individuals were shouting at them from outside the 75-foot circumference around polling stations, where interaction with voters is banned. “The concern is it makes them feel unwelcome,” said Cazares-Kelly.

In Nevada’s Washoe County, people with night vision goggles stood outside the registrar’s building and aimed their cameras at election workers counting votes on primary night in June, two Washoe County officials told Reuters.

Poll watchers have been a feature of American democracy since the 18th century, recruited by parties and candidates and regulated by state laws and local rules. People from both parties keep an eye on the voting – and each other – to make sure things go smoothly. In some places, poll “watchers” are different from “challengers,” who can point out people they suspect aren’t legal voters. In other states, poll watchers also do the challenging.

Groups that question the legitimacy of the 2020 vote have helped recruit thousands of observers who support dramatic changes to how Americans vote, including doing away with voting machines and returning to hand-counted paper ballots.

Officials say they are concerned observers intent on rooting out so-called voter fraud could cause unnecessary disruptions and long lines at polling places on Election Day.

“It’s a real concern,” said Al Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city commissioner who received death threats after the 2020 election for refuting false claims of voter fraud. “If these people show up to the polls with the intention of disrupting voting from taking place, then I can’t imagine a worse threat to democracy than that.”

Sandy Kiesel, who heads the Election Integrity Force in Michigan, said her poll “challengers” will be trained to be “polite, respectful and to obey the law.

“We’re not about trying to hassle poll workers,” Kiesel told Reuters. “It’s about transparency. If we can all see what’s going on, maybe we wouldn’t have these arguments whether elections are free and fair.”

REPUBLICAN SUPPORT

In early October, an election-denying group called Audit the Vote PA held a Zoom meeting with almost 80 people that was billed as a “deep dive” poll watcher training session. The Pennsylvania group says Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 win in the state was illegitimate.

During the call, which Reuters attended, participants compared notes on how to observe the testing of voting machines and when a hand count of votes can be requested, and discussed the legality of taking photographs in polling locations.

Toni Shuppe, Audit the Vote’s CEO, declined multiple requests for an interview with Reuters, but confirmed the group is “focused on encouraging people to become poll watchers in the upcoming November midterms elections.”

Andrea Raffle, the Republican National Committee’s director for election integrity in Pennsylvania, told participants on the call they had already filled 6,000 poll watcher positions in the state this year, compared with 1,000 in 2020. Raffle referred a request for comment to the RNC’s national office.

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. The Republican Party said it welcomes volunteers from many different groups, expects them to respect the law and to follow the party’s training. “Our program is independent of anything else,” said RNC spokesperson Danielle Alvarez.

The RNC has been pouring resources into recruiting observers and workers since being freed from the restrictions of a court-ordered consent decree in 2018. It expects to have trained over 52,000 poll watchers and workers between November last year and the coming election; it said comparative numbers for past elections were unavailable. The consent decree, which sharply limited the party’s ability to challenge voters’ qualifications, was put in place after the RNC, during a 1981 governor’s race in New Jersey, engaged in intimidation tactics targeted at minority voters.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said they did not have a national number because state party offices manage their poll watcher recruitment. But the DNC says it has hired five staffers to work in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Texas to counter efforts to subvert the electoral process, including ballot counting and the certification of results.

Five staffers? Seriously? I can tell you from years of experience doing this that it is going to take an army of lawyers to keep an eye on these MAGA election deniers threatening to subvert our elections. Lawyer up, do it now!

GROWING NUMBERS IN NORTH CAROLINA

In North Carolina’s rural Henderson County, as voters cast ballots in May’s primary elections, aggressive groups turned up.

Observers demanded to inspect voting machine tabulators in violation of state election laws. Others repeatedly grilled poll workers or demanded to take pictures inside voting stations. [All of this is illegal.] When told to stop, they said they were following guidance from a Republican Party lawyer, said Henderson County Election Director Karen Hebb.

“It was stressful,” she said. “If we refused to let the observers do something, they said you know you can be sued if you don’t allow us.”

She contacted the sheriff’s department after an observer trailed a poll worker’s car from a polling site to the election board. She said the sheriff’s office told her no laws had been broken. The Henderson County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.

In typical years, eight to 10 observers each from the Democrat and Republican parties would observe the county’s elections, Hebb said. This year, she had nearly 30 Republican Party observers alone, compared to the usual number of Democrats.

Some of the Republican observers later identified themselves as members of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a group linked to a nationwide effort led by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican election lawyer and promoter of voter fraud theories who joined Trump’s legal team in his effort to overturn the result of the 2020 elections.

As head of the Election Integrity Network, Mitchell is training election observers and is trying to build grassroots networks of conservatives ahead of the midterms. In the first six months of 2022, her network hosted a series of training sessions for activists in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona.

Although Mitchell and other activists say the effort is nonpartisan, the project is funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Washington nonprofit organization with deep ties to Trump’s political network. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is listed as the organization’s “senior partner.” Trump’s political action committee, Save America, gave the group $1 million in 2021, campaign finance records show. Meadows and Mitchell did not return requests for comment.

The prospect of scores of unofficial observers turning up at polls already convinced the election system is rigged and assuming election officials are corrupt is a “tinder box” that could easily explode, said Chris Harvey, Georgia’s election director in 2020.

“People are passionate about politics, and if there’s anger and confrontation at the polls, it gets ugly and really dangerous really quickly,” he said.

There is a link between Cleta Mitchell’s RNC-approved Election Integrity Network of MAGA/QAnon election deniers and the Republican Party’s outsourcing voter suppression organization, True The Vote.

Now the Arizona Attorney General’s office is investigating True The Vote. Arizona Attorney General’s Office asks FBI, IRS to investigate group behind ‘2000 Mules’:

[Big Lie election denier] Republican candidates for top statewide offices in Arizona have said they believe what they saw in the election-conspiracy movie “2000 Mules.”

Now, the state Attorney General’s Office is asking the FBI and IRS for investigations of the group behind the movie, True the Vote, noting that it has repeatedly rebuffed all requests to share the documentary’s alleged evidence and has raised “considerable sums of money” based on claims of having that evidence.

“Given TTV’s status as a nonprofit organization, it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted,” wrote Reginald “Reggie” Grigsby, chief special agent of the office’s Special Investigations Section.

The film, released in May and thoroughly debunked by experts and media organizations, claims mobile-phone data obtained by the group shows a coordinated effort by hundreds of people around the country — deemed “mules” — to stuff election drop boxes with ballots for candidate Joe Biden in 2020. True the Vote’s representatives said they would use their findings to make elections more secure.

But the moviemakers have since refused to release any of their supposed data to law enforcement groups even after promising to do so, the Attorney General’s Office said in the two-page letter Friday.

Grigsby’s letter accuses True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and its contractor Gregg Phillips of providing misleading information to his office and other law enforcement groups. He also mentions some of the bogus information the group has previously put out related to the movie, such as the false claims that the group helped solve a murder in Atlanta and break a ballot-harvesting case in San Luis, Arizona.

.@GeneralBrnovich’s office tells FBI & IRS that True The Vote, the group behind the debunked “2000 Mules” movie, lied about providing evidence to the AG’s Office, & says a “review of its financials may be warranted” due to all the money it raised off its election fraud claims. pic.twitter.com/9CRcmiIqUK

— Jeremy Duda (@jeremyduda) October 15, 2022

In sum, the information points to “potential violations” of tax code given True the Vote’s 501(c)3 nonprofit status, the letter states.

True the Vote didn’t respond to an email Friday from The Arizona Republic seeking comment.

Candidates promoted film’s claims

Many Republican politicians have pointed to the movie as proof that fraud caused former President Donald Trump to lose in 2020, despite the lack of verification of any of its claims.

Republican gubernatorial candidate [and “Big Lie election denier] Kari Lake has said the movie’s producer, [convicted felon pardoned by Donad Trump] right-wing activist Dinesh D’Souza, is a “patriot” and that the movie showed how the conspiracy worked.

“There’s no way they can discount what is in this movie,” she said on Newsmax in May. “It is in black and white.”

Lake said in the same interview she believes the May leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was a conspiracy timed to turn the public’s attention away from what she called the “shocking” facts of the movie.

During the only televised debate in the race for secretary of state, Republican candidate Mark Finchem pointed to “2000 Mules” as one example of election fraud, noting that it provided “visual evidence” of ballots being stuffed into drop boxes.

Abe Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for state attorney general, has also portrayed the film as truthful.

“Isn’t it sad that it required a documentary filmmaker to expose the crimes and fraud of 2020?” he told Trump lawyer Christina Bobb in July.

Numerous other candidates and lawmakers have either praised the film or publicly shown interest in it.

At this same hearing Townsend called on "vigilantes" to watch drop boxes, Kari Lake made claims about fraudulent ballots and AZGOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward called journalists covering the hearing "terrorists." https://t.co/xwn5YsU6ei https://t.co/kPOe59f6Km

— Jerod MacDonald-Evoy (@JerodMacEvoy) October 18, 2022

In late May, about 200 people attended a presentation on the film at a state Senate committee room by Phillips and Engelbrecht. The event featured a panel of state senators and other politicians, including Congresswoman Debbie Lesko and Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb. The next month, Finchem hosted a screening of the film and question-and-answer session in Sedona.

Critics have ridiculed the movie, which claims to have video evidence it never shows and fictionalized some scenes.

Group refuses to share data

Phillips, who claimed publicly — and falsely — in 2017 that “millions” of noncitizens voted in 2016, told the Arizona Senate panel in May that the group turned over a “disk” of its findings to the state.

However, as The Republic reported last month, records obtained from the Attorney General’s Office show that officials tried repeatedly to obtain the alleged findings, but True the Vote never followed through.

In Friday’s letter, Grigsby said Phillips’ claim that he turned over the findings was “patently false.”

True the Vote representatives subsequently told the Attorney General’s Office that it turned over its findings to the Phoenix FBI office and that since the FBI now considered the conservative activists’ “informants,” they didn’t think they could give the state the same information. That wasn’t true, either, according to Grigsby.

Phoenix FBI officials told the state investigators that the representatives were not informants and that they had only turned over an audio and video recording of someone alleging ballot harvesting in San Luis.

The group also told another unnamed law enforcement agency that it had turned over its findings to the state Attorney General’s Office, Grigsby reported.

The San Luis case involves real ballot harvesting; the small town’s former mayor was sentenced to 30 days in jail Thursday for collecting four ballots that weren’t hers. Though the case dealt only with the 2020 primary election, conspiracy theorists have misleadingly tied it to the general election that Trump lost.

There is going to be insider intimidation of poll workers and election officials, and there is going to be voter suppression and intimidation. These people have demonstrated that they are unhinged, and inclined to political violence. Their “Big Lie” election denier slate of MAGA/QAnon candidates have already said that they will not accept any result in which they lose. This will only incite more threats, imtimidation and violence from unhinged MAGA/QAnon cult followers as we saw after the 2020 election. Fair warning.