Category Archives: fraudulent fraud squad

“RNC to add new lawyers focusing on claims of election fraud – including one key figure from 2020 challenges”

CNN:

The Republican National Committee, now under the control of former President Donald Trump and his campaign, is bringing on a slate of new lawyers both internally and externally who will focus intensely on election fraud, an issue Trump has remained fixated on.

The lawyers “will initiate battle on election integrity from an offensive instead of defensive posture,” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager and newly instated RNC Chief of Staff, told CNN.

LaCivita will bring on Charlie Spies, an experienced GOP lawyer, to take over as chief counsel at the RNC.

Trump attorney Christina Bobb, a former correspondent at the Trump-aligned One America News Network, will join as senior counsel for election integrity. Bobb was very active in promoting Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen and authored a book called “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024.”

“I’m honored to join the RNC and thrilled the new leadership is focused on election integrity. I look forward to working to secure our elections and restore confidence in the process,” Bobb said in a statement to CNN.

Bobb was directly involved in two separate Trump controversies that led to the former president’s federal indictments in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, as well as the 2020 election subversion case. She has not been accused of any crimes.

In June 2022, while federal authorities were still trying to recover classified documents that remained at Mar-a-Lago, Bobb signed a sworn affidavit on Trump’s behalf, inaccurately telling the Justice Department that there weren’t any classified files left at the club. Special counsel Jack Smith later charged Trump with lying to the FBI and accused Trump of illegally causing Bobb to submit this false declaration even though he knew it was untrue.

She also played a key role in the Trump campaign’s fake electors scheme after he lost the 2020 election, working closely with Trump advisers to organize the plan in seven battleground states. The scheme formed the basis of parts of Smith’s election subversion indictment against the former president, which says Trump and his allies created “fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding” in Congress on January 6, 2021, and “disenfranchise millions of voters.”

Trump has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

Bobb was also a correspondent during the 2020 election for the fringe pro-Trump network OAN, where she promoted false claims that the election was rigged. The voting technology company Dominion sued Bobb and OAN for defamation in 2021. Some of her on-air segments were also referenced in a separate defamation case against OAN filed by Smartmatic, another aggrieved voting company. OAN and Bobb have denied wrongdoing in these civil cases.

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“Conservatives are warning about noncitizens voting. It’s a myth with a long history”

Miles Parks for NPR:

For those looking to raise doubts about American elections, it’s becoming clear that a key 2024 voting boogeyman will be immigration.

The false notion that undocumented immigrants are affecting federal elections has been floating around for over 100 years, experts say, but this year, due in part to an increase in migrants at the southern U.S. border, the idea could have new potency.

The narratives are being pushed by prominent right-wing figures including Cleta Mitchell, a former adviser to Donald Trump, along with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee himself.

NPR acquired a two-page memo Mitchell has been circulating laying out “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024.”….

“Allegations of vote fraud were the main stated justification for imposing restrictive practices,” Hayduk said.

And in the century since then, he said, every time the country has seen an influx of immigrants, a loosening of immigration policy or an expansion of voting access, accusations of voter fraud have followed.

Mitchell’s memo about the risk of noncitizen voting touches on two of those things. Migrant encounters at the southern border hit an all-time high in December, and the document focuses mostly on the implementation of a 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act, that made registering to vote easier.

The NVRA does not require proof of U.S. citizenship for people to register to vote, only that potential voters fill out a form and attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens. A federal voting law passed in 2002 also required applicants to provide a unique identification number to register, like a driver’s license or Social Security number, which election officials say effectively serves as a citizenship check since both of those forms of ID involve the government checking whether someone is a citizen or not.

But Mitchell’s main hope, according to the document, is to spur Congress to require documentary proof of citizenship as part of registration.

Experts say that sort of change would have a drastic negative impact on many eligible voters, like naturalized citizens, without solving any real problem.

“If you make [registering] harder, there will be students, young people, elderly people, poor people and other groupings of people who would just not bother,” said Daniels, of the University of Baltimore. “This whole document is [saying] we don’t want the NVRA or any other piece of legislation to do what it’s supposed to do, which is register people to vote.”

Mitchell did not respond to an email from NPR requesting comment

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“Trump’s Man at the R.N.C. Will Face Pressure to Satisfy His Election Lies”

NYT:

After the 2020 election, one story out of North Carolina had a powerful effect on Donald J. Trump.

A proactive Republican, the story went, had worked behind the scenes to stop Democrats from stealing the election in the state and helped secure Mr. Trump’s victory there.

That Republican was Michael Whatley, the chairman of the North Carolina G.O.P. He had pushed the state party to recruit what he described as thousands of poll observers and hundreds of volunteer lawyers as part of an election-protection program. Mr. Trump called Mr. Whatley after the election, and Mr. Whatley boasted to him about that program’s success.

“That’s great,” Mr. Trump replied, as Mr. Whatley recounted the conversation in a speech to North Carolina Republicans last year. “Why the hell didn’t they do that in Arizona and Georgia?”

Mr. Whatley, who became the Republican National Committee’s general counsel last year, is now poised for a far bigger and more consequential role: Mr. Trump handpicked him to succeed Ronna McDaniel as the committee’s chair. Ms. McDaniel is expected to step aside Friday.

Mr. Trump’s selection of Mr. Whatley, whose appointment still awaits a formal vote, sums up the former president’s vision for the new R.N.C. He wants it to share his obsession with the false idea that President Biden and Democrats stole the 2020 election from him and are working to do it again in 2024. Mr. Trump believes Mr. Whatley is more in sync with his views about voter fraud than Ms. McDaniel, and he has insisted that Mr. Whatley will stop Democrats from “cheating” in November, according to two people who have spoken to Mr. Trump and who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

But the story that stuck with Mr. Trump — that his victory in North Carolina had hinged on Mr. Whatley’s election-watchdog work — was just that: a story, based only loosely on reality….

Moreover, Mr. Whatley himself has a more mixed record than Mr. Trump may realize on the former president’s No. 1 issue. While he often sounds like a loyal soldier in the effort to falsely discredit Mr. Biden’s win, at other times he has distanced himself from the most extreme conspiracy theories promoted by Mr. Trump and his allies….

On the campaign trail Mr. Trump has praised a plan — first pushed by his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn — to “guard the vote” during the 2024 election, with an emphasis on heavily Democratic cities with large Black populations.

“Michael Whatley will bring in active leadership in the form of election integrity, as opposed to a passive slash reactive approach,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump campaign adviser who is expected to soon move over to the R.N.C. to run its operations in the general election.

A spokesman for Mr. Whatley declined to answer questions for this article.

If there’s another tight race in swing states this fall, the R.N.C. will be far more active after Election Day than it was in 2020, said Steve Bannon, the far-right podcast host and former chief strategist to Mr. Trump.

“It’s the MAGA takeover of the R.N.C.,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview….

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“Mark Harris is GOP’s 8th District nominee six years after election fraud prompted do-over”

Charlotte Observer:

Mark Harris on Tuesday won the Republican nomination in North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District six years after a ballot-harvesting scandal resulted in an election do-over….

Political operative McCrae Dowless, who worked for Harris in his campaign for NC’s 9th Congressional District in 2018, was awaiting a trial on charges of illegal ballot handling, conspiracy and obstruction of justice in relation to the scandal when he died in 2022. The State Board of Elections voted 5-0 in favor of a new election after Harris dropped his bid and called for a new election, the Associated Press reported in 2019. Bishop won that election re-do.

But in Harris’ candidate announcement last year he took aim at what he called the “manufactured scandal” that ended with the State Board of Elections “not certifying our victory in 2018.”

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“Trump-allied election groups burned through millions with no evidence of widespread fraud”

CNBC:

Several groups founded by allies of former President Donald Trump to combat alleged “voter fraud” now have little money or results to show for their efforts.

Trump’s false claims that he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden only as the result of widespread ballot fraud and other irregularities were the impetus for the creation of those nonprofit groups and political action committees.

But a glaring problem for those groups has been the fact that federal and state officials have repeatedly debunked Trump’s claims of fraud.

Another problem that doomed some of the groups was their failure to secure any fundraising help from Trump, the de facto leader of the Republican Party, who remains the chief promoter of false claims of widespread voter fraud in the United States.

New tax and campaign finance records reviewed by CNBC reveal that pursuing “election integrity” has not paid off for several groups in Trump’s orbit.

And in some cases, the groups’ stated missions on their public tax returns were opaque when they launched.

Other records raise questions as to what funds were used for at several entities.

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“20 years of data shows no link between mailed ballots and illegal voting”

Steven Rosenfeld for The Fulcrum:

It is an article of faith among those who do not believe Donald Trump lost in 2020 that mailing ballots to voters increases illegal voting — often called voter fraud.

“Before the machines were introduced, vote riggers needed a way to cheat and it always involved generating LOOSE BALLOTS,” read a recent post on a pro-Trump Telegram “election education” channel. “It’s possible and therefore it happens,” said a nearby post.

It is understandable why disappointed Trump supporters are wary of mailed-out ballots. The Covid-19 pandemic led to a historic expansion of their use as a way to protect voters and election workers. By the time the 2020 election ended, 73 million Americans — 46 percent of all voters nationwide — had voted with a mailed-out ballot. That volume was nearly triple the voters who received a ballot by mail in 2018’s general election.

But articles of faith are not facts. As the 2024 presidential cycle revs up and Trump, the likely GOP nominee, keeps attacking elections, it is worth revisiting the most extensive national study by political scientists that looked at whether mailed-out ballots have any relation to voter fraud. In a word, their answer was “no.” That conclusion was based on comparing incidents of illegal voting during the two decades before the 2020 presidential election to the increasing use of mailed-out ballots during that time.

“If voting by mail creates more opportunities for fraud, those opportunities do not appear to have been realized in the data,” George Mason University assistant professor Jonathan Auerbach and Stephen Pierson, director of science policy for the American Statistical Association, wrote in their 2021 analysis for ASA’s journal, Statistics and Public Policy.

The statisticians are not saying voter fraud does not exist. They are showing — with state-by-state data from 2000 through 2019 — that it is exceptionally rare. When illegal voting has occurred, their charts reveal, it usually involves no more than several dozen ballots. That volume is nowhere near the thousands of votes that would have been needed to alter the closest recent presidential election margins…..

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Wisconsin: “Assembly leaders concede Michael Gableman violated records laws during fruitless 2020 election review”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:’

 Assembly officials have admitted former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman violated public records laws while taxpayers paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars to probe the 2020 election — an investigation that did not turn up any evidence to question President Joe Biden’s victory.

The acknowledgment by Assembly leaders was part of an agreement to settle a lawsuit filed against the Assembly’s Office of Special Counsel when Gableman occupied the office. It was filed by liberal watchdog American Oversight after Gableman testified he routinely deleted records during a hearing in another lawsuit over Gableman’s record keeping.

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“My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell must pay $5 million to election data debunker, federal judge confirms”

CNN reports.

My Pillow owner and right-wing conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell will have to pay $5 million because of a contest he initiated at one of his “cyber symposium” events after the 2020 election, a federal judge confirmed Wednesday.

Robert Zeidman, a software developer, took Lindell up on a so-called “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge at an event the election-denier hosted. Participants in the challenge could win $5 million if they proved data Lindell provided about the 2020 election wasn’t real election data, according to rules the participants agreed to. The contest allowed participants to arbitrate if needed.

Zeidman responded in the challenge with a 15-page report saying that the data Lindell put forth wasn’t complete or representative of possible data that had been captured in real time from the internet, according to a federal court decision Wednesday.

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“True the Vote fails to reveal evidence of Georgia voting fraud claims”

AJC:

Bombastic claims of voting fraud in the right-wing conspiracy movie “2000 Mules” sounded alarming, and Georgia election officials wanted to get to the bottom of it.

If there really was a massive plot to stuff ballot drop boxes and rig the 2020 presidential election, wouldn’t the conservative organization behind the allegation, True the Vote, help investigators prove it?

Instead, True the Vote said in a recent court filing it doesn’t know the identity of its own anonymous source who told a story of a “ballot trafficking” scheme allegedly organized by a network of unnamed groups paying $10 per ballot delivered.

True the Vote also told the court last month it doesn’t have any documents about illegal ballot collection, the name of its purported informant, or confidentiality agreements it previously said existed. The records were subpoenaed by the State Election Board in 2022.

Georgia election officials and voters are left to wonder whether True the Vote and “2000 Mules” told the truth — or if they were drumming up outrage based on vague suspicions and an unnamed whistleblower, fueling suspicions about Democrat Joe Biden’s win over Republican Donald Trump.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” said Matt Mashburn, a Republican former acting chairman of the State Election Board. “It’s odd to have someone make an allegation and then fight so hard to hold onto the truth of that allegation.”

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“This Pa. activist is the source of false and flawed election claims gaining traction across the country”

VoteBeat:

On Jan. 6, 2021, as former President Donald Trump rallied his supporters, he used a statistic that, though false, was making the rounds: “In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters,” he screamed, throwing his arms wide open in front of thousands of angry followers. “This is a mathematical impossibility unless you want to say it’s a total fraud.”

The number appears to be the work of Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania-based “election integrity” investigator whose research has achieved a remarkable level of national salience among the far right, despite being replete with errors. The 205,000 figure, for example, is “false” according to the Department of Justice, and was based on incomplete data the state says can’t be used for this type of analysis. Honey herself has revised the discrepancy downward. While Honey’s current estimate is almost half of what it once was, it’s still inaccurate and the original number is also still routinely cited as fact.

“There were 202,377 MORE ‘votes’ cast, than actual REAL VOTERS THAT VOTED,” reads a November 2023 post on X from a popular rightwing account. It was reposted more than 13,000 times.

Honey has been among the most effective advocates for right-wing election talking points. Time after time, her research has fed into viral allegations about election integrity, fueling conservative pressure campaigns, forcing fact-checkers and public officials to attempt to piece together a more accurate picture and undermining confidence in long-trusted election practices. Often, her conclusions are misleading or based on incomplete information.

In the past year, working with a network of election integrity groups organized by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, Honey has had perhaps the most success with her latest research: A 29-page report on the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, sent to Republican secretaries of state and legislators. Her information appears to have influenced the decision of several member states to withdraw from ERIC, an interstate program that election officials widely regard as the nation’s best tool to keep voter rolls up-to-date and free of bloat.

An analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found the report’s conclusions are false, often based on out-of-context examples, and that her sweeping generalizations are frequently not backed by the data she presents. Presented with Votebeat’s and Spotlight PA’s findings — the product of redoing her many calculations and fact-checking the analysis she has offered to public officials — Honey defended her work.

Despite how widespread her research has become, Honey described herself in emails to Votebeat and Spotlight PA as “an ordinary citizen working hard to do what I can to restore confidence in elections.”

When asked for a final comment, she accused Votebeat of “slander” and personal attacks. “Who is pressuring you to write this hit piece? What is your goal?”

The way that Honey relies on real-but-incomplete data is a hallmark of those who spread misinformation, experts say.

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“James O’Keefe and Project Veritas settle suit over bogus voter fraud claims cited by the Trump campaign”

Ryan Reilly:

Conservative provocateur James O’Keefe and his former organization Project Veritas have settled a lawsuit filed by a Pennsylvania postmaster after the group spread a Postal Service worker’s false claims of voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

A lawyer who represented Robert Weisenbach, the Erie postmaster who filed the lawsuit in state court, confirmed that it had been settled on undisclosed terms.

“The only comment I’m allowed to make about it is that the case was filed, was litigated, and settled to the satisfaction of the parties,” attorney David Houck told NBC News.

O’Keefe, who was removed as head of Project Veritas in February 2023, said in a brief statement Monday that he was “aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie Post Office during the 2020 Presidential Election.”…

O’Keefe and Project Veritas had boosted the claims of Richard Hopkins, a Trump supporter who worked as a mail carrier at the time and claimed that he’d heard Weisenbach make statements about illegally backdating mail-in ballots. Hopkins retracted his statement after Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., cited it in a letter to the Justice Department in 2020.

In a statement O’Keefe and Project Veritas published Monday, Hopkins said he “only heard a fragment” of a conversation between Weisenbach and another supervisor but had “reached the conclusion that the conversation was related to nefarious behavior.” Hopkins now says he was wrong.

“As a USPS mail carrier at the time, I was on heightened guard considering many allegations of ‘widespread fraud’ plaguing the 2020 Presidential Election,” Hopkins said in the statement. “As I have now learned, I was wrong. Mr. Weisenbach was not involved in any inappropriate behavior concerning the 2020 Presidential Election. The [Postal Service Office of the Inspector General] investigated and found that neither Mr. Weisenbach nor any other USPS employee in Erie, Pennsylvania engaged in election fraud or any other wrongdoing related to mail-in ballots.

“I apologize to Mr. Weisenbach, his family, the employees of the Erie Post Office, and anyone that has been negatively impacted by my report,” Hopkins continued. “I implore everyone reading this statement to leave the Weisenbach family alone and allow them to return to their normal, peaceful, lives.”

Former President Donald Trump, in a tweet a week after the election, called Hopkins a “brave patriot,” and the Trump campaign cited his claims in litigation.

O’Keefe wrote Monday on X that he had “reported that election fraud had occurred in Erie, Pennsylvania during the 2020 Presidential Election,” saying the story “was based on Richard Hopkins’ claim that he had overheard Robert Weisenbach, the Erie Postmaster, direct another USPS supervisor to illegally backdate mail-in ballots.”

“Mr. Hopkins has since come to learn that he was wrong — neither Mr. Weisenbach nor any other USPS employee in Erie, Pennsylvania engaged in election fraud or any other wrongdoing related to mail-in ballots,” O’Keefe said.

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“‘Serious consequences’: Company warns Johnson County sheriff over election investigation”

KC Star:

The election software company at the center of Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden’s long-running elections investigation hit back on Monday, warning the sheriff that a baseless investigation results in “serious consequences.”

“I fully recognize that Sheriff Hayden has placed himself and his department in the awkward position of conducting a baseless investigation for the past several years into nonexistent election fraud in Johnson County,” attorney Rick Guinn, representing the company Konnech Inc. and its CEO Eugene Yu, wrote in a Jan. 29 letter to Hayden obtained by The Star.

“Sheriff Hayden should be very careful about making public statements concerning Konnech and Mr. Yu to somehow justify his obvious waste of taxpayer dollars.”

Guinn sent the letter to Hayden less than a week after Los Angeles County agreed to pay $5 million to Yu, who sued over civil rights violations after he was arrested there in 2022 on accusations that he illegally stored poll worker data in China. The case was dropped a few weeks later, with the district attorney citing “potential bias” in the investigation.

The attorney wrote in Monday’s letter that the multi-million settlement “should send a strong message to Sheriff Hayden of the serious consequences that result from a baseless investigation into nonexistent election fraud.”

Through his office’s spokesperson, Hayden declined to comment on Monday.

Hayden, a Republican, faces re-election this year if he chooses to run. He has so far not filed for reelection but his office has indicated he plans to do so. He would face a primary challenge from Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff, in the race that so far has drawn one Democratic candidate, Prairie Village Police Chief Byron Roberson.

Yu, the Chinese-American founder of the Michigan-based company, sued L.A. County and its district attorney’s office in September. His lawyers said in a news release that Yu was subjected to a wrongful, “politically motivated arrest” that was “based solely on utterly false conspiracy theories about Chinese election interference espoused by discredited, far-right extremists.”

Yu’s arrest in Los Angeles fueled right-wing conspiracies of election fraud across the country. And it propelled Hayden’s ongoing elections investigation in Johnson County, which afterward stopped using Konnech in 2022. Johnson County had used the software only to help manage election workers; the program had nothing to do with voting or voting information.

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