Category Archives: fraudulent fraud squad

“Pa. election conspiracy activist appointed to election integrity role at Department of Homeland Security”

election subversion risk, fraudulent fraud squad

WITF:

A Pennsylvania-based activist tied to President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election is now overseeing election security matters for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 

Heather Honey, of Lebanon County, is serving as the deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity, a political appointment in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans, according to the department’s website. 

The office is responsible for leading, conducting and coordinating “Department-wide policy development and implementation and strategic planning,” according to its page. 

DHS did not answer questions about Honey’s responsibilities, or whether she will still be able to both work in government and hold positions in several advocacy groups that push conspiratorial election claims….

Votebeat had an earlier profile of Honey, This Pa. activist is the source of false and flawed election claims gaining traction across the country. MORE from Democracy Docket.

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“Trump seeks to ban the mail voting system that Republicans built in Arizona to boost turnout”

absentee ballots, fraudulent fraud squad

Arizona Mirror:

The vast majority of Arizonans who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 cast their ballot by mail — a system ushered into existence and expanded by Republican lawmakers in the Grand Canyon State. Trump says he wants to ban it nationwide. 

Despite calls to ban it from far-right lawmakers, political candidates and their supporters, casting a ballot by mail is the most popular way to vote in Arizona — and has been for decades. In the 2024 presidential election, around 75% of voters in the state cast their ballot by mail, even after Trump urged them to head to the polls instead. The number of Trump voters in Arizona who mailed their ballots outstripped those who showed up to the polls on Election Day 2024 by more than 4.5 times, according to data from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office. 

On Monday, Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social that he planned to rid the country of voting by mail and the machines that count ballots before the 2026 midterms. Later that day, he promised to issue an executive order banning no-excuse mail-in ballots, which he called “corrupt.” 

“And it’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it,” Trump said. “It’s the only way they can get elected.”…

In 1991, it was Republicans who brought no-excuse vote by mail to Arizona, in part as a way to increase turnout when voter apathy was at an all-time high. And the move worked: turnout in the 1988 presidential election in Arizona was 67%, but in jumped to 77% in 1992. 

Republican Gov. Fife Symington signed the bill into law in July 1991 that allowed voters to request an early ballot without having to provide an excuse. The Republican-controlled Arizona House of Representatives approved the bill 53-0 and the Senate, which had a rare Democratic majority, voted for it 21-9, with opposition from conservative Republicans. 

Then-Republican National Committeeman Mike Hellon told the Pima County Rotary Club that their vote-by-mail outreach in the 1992 presidential election was so bad that he considered it “criminal negligence,” according to a Nov. 15, 1992 article in the Arizona Daily Star. 

He said he particularly resented that Democrats “cleaned our clock” because “it’s our program.” 

The state’s Republican-controlled legislature continued to vote to expand no-excuse vote by mail over the next two decades, including with the creation of the active early voting list in 2007. 

The push to eliminate voting by mail is new, and It is only in the past 10 years that far-right Republicans began a true campaign to rid the state of no-excuse voting by mail. And while heading to the polls to cast a ballot in person has become more popular for Republicans during the past two election cycles, the effort to nix early voting by mail has failed to garner mainstream support due to its popularity among Democrat, Republican and independent voters. 

The most extreme Republicans in the Arizona legislature have tried to pass laws banning no-excuse mail voting since 2020, after Trump falsely claimed that it was rife with fraud and blamed it for his loss that year to Joe Biden. So far those efforts, including a lawsuit from Arizona’s most infamous election deniers Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, and bills to change voting laws proposed by members of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, have failed. 

Trump-backed candidates who lost their elections for statewide office in 2022 were quick to praise Trump’s demonization of voting-by-mail on Monday. 

“This is the best news I’ve heard in years!” Lake, who lost her bid for governor in 2022 and was defeated in the U.S. Senate contest in 2024, posted on the social media site X, formerly Twitter. “The people demand honest elections.” 

Lake spent the two years following her narrow 2022 loss to Katie Hobbs attempting to convince Arizona courts to overturn the results. 

“President Trump is going to fix our broken election system and I will be there to help all the way,” U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh posted on X. Hamadeh lost the race for Arizona Attorney General in 2022 to Democrat Kris Mayes by fewer than 400 votes. He also attempted to overturn the results with a legal challenge. 

Bryan Blehm, a Scottsdale divorce attorney who represented Lake in her court challenges, and Shelby Busch, an election conspiracy theorist who testified during them, heaped praise on Trump for his demonization of no-excuse voting by mail during a livestream on X Monday. 

“We’ve been talking for years about the danger of mail-in ballots,” said Busch, the first vice chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee.

Blehm, who was suspended from practicing law for two months last year for lying to the Arizona Supreme Court on Lake’s behalf, went on to claim — without evidence — that COVID-19 was intentionally released prior to an election year to force more voting by mail. ….

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“Newsmax pays $67 million to settle defamation case linked to 2020 election coverage”

cheap speech, fraudulent fraud squad

NPR:

Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle one of the last outstanding defamation lawsuits against a news organization for airing false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems – the same voting-technology company that had received a $787 million settlement from Fox News over its election coverage – brought the lawsuit against Newsmax. A trial was scheduled to begin in October.

In the lawsuit, filed in the months after the 2020 election, Dominion accused the cable news network of spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been manipulated to help Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. Like other right-wing news networks, Newsmax featured Trump allies who promoted these conspiracies, including former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and supporter Mike Lindell of My Pillow.

Newsmax announced the settlement in an Aug. 15 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the document, the network paid $27 million of the settlement on that day; the rest will be paid by January 2027.

Multiple court rulings and investigations by election officials have found no widespread fraud was present in the 2020 election; even still, these debunked claims were still being echoed by factions of Trump supporters in 2024. Dominion has said the election lies caused the company and its employees extensive harm, including death threats and lost revenue….

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“Despite grand claims, a new report shows noncitizen voting hasn’t materialized”

chicanery, election administration, fraudulent fraud squad

Miles Parks for NPR:

After President Trump and many other Republicans warned that vast numbers of non-U.S. citizens would influence last year’s election, states and law enforcement have devoted more resources than ever before to root out those ineligible voters.

More than six months into Trump’s second term, they haven’t found much.

New research out Wednesday tracking state government efforts across the country confirms what election experts have said all along: Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way.

“Noncitizens are not a large threat to our election system currently,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which conducted the research. “Even states that are looking everywhere to try to amplify the numbers of noncitizens … when they actually look, they find a surprisingly, shockingly small number.”

CEIR spent roughly four months reviewing states’ public disclosures about noncitizen voting, stretching back years. The organization shared its findings with NPR exclusively.

The report shows a wide disparity in how states have investigated the issue and what data officials in those states choose to make public. Many states have released no information, even though it’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and all voting officials do some type of maintenance to their voter rolls.

Some states, such as Michigan and Georgia, have undertaken audits of their entire voter rolls, using resources from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to check for noncitizens. Michigan officials announced in April that a review found that “cases of noncitizens casting a ballot in Michigan elections are extremely rare.” The review found more than a dozen noncitizens appear to have illegally voted in the 2024 general election. That’s 0.00028% of the state’s total votes….

No state has found any coordinated effort to get noncitizens to vote in the 2024 election.

When UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen was presented with the CEIR findings, he said he wasn’t “surprised in the slightest.”

“It really is not a big problem, both because on the individual level, it would be hard to get noncitizens to agree to it,” Hasen said. “And on the broader level, it’s just not a very cost-effective way to try to steal an election.”

Election officials note there are safeguards to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote, but the biggest deterrent is the fact that immigrants without legal status generally don’t want to risk deportation to cast one ballot — especially because the inherent paper trail of voting makes it very easy to get caught.

Separate research has found that when noncitizens do register to vote, it’s often due to bureaucratic errors or a misunderstanding about eligibility, as opposed to intentional fraud.

Still, the noncitizen voting myth has persisted for more than 100 years in American elections. Hasen expects it to come up again in 2026, even if states don’t find any data to support it.

“Most people who make claims that noncitizen voting is a big problem are doing so for political purposes,” Hasen said. “It’s a way of demonizing immigrants. It’s a way of trying to claim that Democrats cheat. And no amount of evidence is going to stop people from making politically expedient claims.”

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Rove on the Political Price of Conspiracy Theories

cheap speech, election subversion risk, fraudulent fraud squad

Karl Rove in WSJ, connecting the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein drama to election-related conspiracy theories:

Other conspiracies await action by the White House….

Team Trump could produce evidence that confirms the conspiracy advocates were right. They could reveal just how the 2020 election was stolen—computers in Europe, miscounted ballots, phony election returns, etc.—and identify the Deep State agents who conceived this crime against our democracy and bring them to justice. Team Trump could also produce the evidence that Jan. 6 was a Deep State plot to discredit the president by causing law-abiding Americans to breach police lines and storm the Capitol.

But in truth there is no “there” in either case. Neither happened. Years have passed, yet there has been no real evidence or successful court case proving the vast conspiracies around the 2020 election or Jan 6.

However, if Team Trump admits the election wasn’t stolen and government agents didn’t organize the Capitol assault, MAGA conspiracy theorists would be furious and the president’s base further weakened and fractured.

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“Mike Lindell celebrates victory after appeals court voids $5M award in election data dispute”

election subversion risk, fraudulent fraud squad

AP:

 A federal appeals court handed a victory Wednesday to Mike Lindell, ruling that the MyPillow founder doesn’t have to pay a $5 million award to a software engineer who disputed data that Lindell claims proves that China interfered in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an arbitration panel overstepped its authority in 2023 when it awarded $5 million to the engineer, Robert Zeidman, of Las Vegas, who took Lindell up on his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge.”…

Lindell, one of the country’s most prominent propagators of false claims that the 2020 election was a fraud, lost in a different case in Colorado last month. A jury ruled that Lindell defamed a former employee of a voting equipment company by accusing him of treason, and awarded $2.3 million in damages.

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Brennan Center: “Homeland Security’s ‘SAVE’ Program Exacerbates Risks to Voters”

fraudulent fraud squad, voter registration

Jasleen Singh and Spencer Reynolds:

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or “SAVE,” program was designed to help states verify the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for government benefits…. But SAVE’s results — sometimes based on incomplete or outdated information — have never been perfect. For that reason, the information gleaned from the SAVE program should be considered useful, but not definitive, in assessing an individual’s citizenship.”

…. DHS has allowed state and local election officials to search for hundreds of thousands of voters simultaneously. This increases the risks that state officials will carry out erroneous voter purges and disenfranchise eligible voters. SAVE could also mislead, either because it incorrectly identifies someone as a noncitizen or fails to confirm immigration status, fueling false conspiracy theories about the integrity of U.S. elections.

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“Wyoming Is Now Requiring Would-be Voters to Document Their Citizenship”

fraudulent fraud squad, voter id

Bolts:

Wyoming became the second state to require that all would-be voters provide physical documentation of their citizenship to vote in any election, as conservatives step up their nationwide push for policies to bar noncitizens from voter rolls…

Opponents of Wyoming’s change warn that it will trip up people who are eligible to vote. They’ve filed a federal lawsuit to block it, making the case that it imposes unconstitutional burdens because some citizens don’t possess the required documents and now risk being rejected….

The reform, House Bill 156, was adopted into law by the GOP-led legislature in March. But it is the brainchild of Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican who became Wyoming’s chief election official in 2022 after campaigning on accusations that the nation’s elections are “rigged” and amplifying Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential race was stolen from him due to large numbers of noncitizens voting illegally.

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Lawsuit on Alleged “Irregularities” in Rockland County

fraudulent fraud squad

Votebeat has this piece on the alleged voting irregularities, which Charles Stewart debunks:

The case against Rockland County, New York, claims that there were irregularities in the county’s vote tallies, judging in part by what the plaintiffs characterize as statistical anomalies — notably the mismatch in support between Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and the person at the top of the party’s ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris. Gillibrand won the suburban county by about 8,000 votes, while Harris lost to Trump by more than 17,000….

A state court dismissed most of the plaintiffs’ requests in March, but Justice Rachel Tanguay is allowing discovery in the case to proceed after the county Board of Elections acknowledged it might amend its response….

In a recent blog post, Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor and well-known election expert, carefully broke down the precinct-level data for Rockland County and said he found no signs of errors or manipulation.

Examined closely, Stewart wrote, the anomalies are mostly centered on a small number of polling locations in the town of Ramapo. There, he wrote, many members of Orthodox Jewish communities supported Gillibrand, but declined to support Harris, which explains the gap.

“The Rockland County election results in this case are a nothingburger,” he wrote unequivocally.

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“Former postal carrier gets 5 years for ballot theft scheme”

chicanery, fraudulent fraud squad

From Colorado Public Radio:

A Mesa County woman who was a part of a scheme to steal ballots ahead of the 2024 election was sentenced to 5 years in the department of corrections, Wednesday.

, , , At the time of the ballot theft [she] was working as a postal carrier and, along with another woman, stole ballots before they could be delivered to voters.

The two then fraudulently cast those ballots in an effort to test Colorado’s election security safeguards, investigators said. Three of those ballots did make it through the signature verification process and were counted as legitimate votes.

If your interest is in having less election fraud, the easiest way to further that interest is to stop committing election fraud.

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“FBI Director Kash Patel feeds 2020 election conspiracy theories with documents about unverified tip”

fraudulent fraud squad

Ryan Reilly for NBC News:

FBI Director Kash Patel said this week the bureau had shared “alarming” — but unsubstantiated — allegations about manipulation of the 2020 election with a Republican member of Congress.

“The FBI has located documents which detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP,” Patel wrote, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “I have immediately declassified the material and turned the documents over to the Chairman Grassley for further review.”

Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The unsubstantiated claim promoted by Patel, which an unidentified confidential human source gave to the FBI in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, asserts that the Chinese mass-produced driver’s licenses to be used in a mail-in ballot scheme. Patel linked to an article written by John Solomon, whom Trump appointed alongside Patel in 2022 to represent him before the National Archives and Records Administration on matters related to his presidential records….

The article Patel promoted mentioned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seized fake licenses that were arriving mostly from China and Hong Kong around the time the FBI received the tip about the election plot. According to a 2020 news release from CBP, most of the seized licenses “were for college-age students,” a population that has historically sought licenses with fake birthdays so underage students can get into bars and purchase alcohol.

No evidence of widespread or systemic voter fraud affecting the 2020 election has been found, despite allegations promoted by Trump and his allies since he lost that year’s presidential race….

said the bureau produces hundreds of reports every day based on such tips, which do not always pan out.

Sometimes they are recalled or edited for a number of reasons, the former FBI official said. Those reasons could be that agents found the information to be false or that the sources of the information had been discredited.

A second former senior FBI official, who also asked not to be named, said they were not familiar with the report but said both the Chinese and the Russian governments have spread false claims about fake ballots to aggravate divisions between Americans.

The second former FBI official suggested that Patel share “the information with both Republicans and Democrats so there can be a balanced look and heal the country instead of causing more distrust and discontent playing into the hands of our foreign enemies.”

Rick Hasen, an election law expert, said that Patel’s post “might feed the MAGA base” but that what he was promoting was an uncorroborated story of unknown origin “with no evidence that anything actually happened, and certainly no evidence that any ballots were cast or illegal voters were even registered to vote using state identifications.”

Hasen said there has long been a “cottage industry of people” making false or vastly exaggerated claims of election fraud or portraying administrative errors as acts of malice. While there are occasionally instances of voting fraud, Hasen added, they tend to be isolated and small….

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“DHS Said to Brief Cleta Mitchell’s Group on Citizenship Checks for Voting”

chicanery, fraudulent fraud squad

Democracy Docket:

A senior official in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) held a briefing for a far-right anti-voting group on Thursday, according to an email sent by the group. The virtual meeting was to discuss how a database run by the department can be used to verify the citizenship status of registered voters.

The email, sent Thursday to members of the Election Integrity Network (EIN) — a voter-suppression advocacy group founded by the prominent anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell — advertised David Jennings, DHS’s associate chief of U.S. citizenship and immigration services, as the special guest for a Zoom meeting later that morning.

“When Trump issued Executive Order 14248 earlier this year, he included much needed directives to the Department of Homeland Security to ensure (finally!) that state and local election officials have full and free access to the system used by DHS to verify citizenship status of individuals already on voter rolls,” the invite to EIN members read. “But what does that look like? How does it work in real time? And who has access?”

The email said that Jennings would review the abilities of DHS’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program — a federal database to help state and local governments confirm the citizenship status of individuals — to “aid in assuring that noncitizens are removed from our voter rolls.”…

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“Georgian falsely accused in ‘2000 Mules’ of voting fraud wants filmmaker to pay”

fraudulent fraud squad

AJC:

A man falsely accused of voting fraud in the conspiracy film “2000 Mules” tried to hold its producers responsible Friday, asking a federal judge to rule in his favor.

But the moviemakers, including conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and the election group True the Vote, said they couldn’t have defamed a man whose face was blurred and who wasn’t identified by name.

U.S. District Judge Steven Grimberg didn’t signal how he would rule, asking skeptical questions of both sides before deciding whether to send the case to a jury or dismiss it.

“This case is not that complicated. It’s about defendants working together to spread a lie,” said Lea Haber Kuck, an attorney for Mark Andrews, an auditor from Gwinnett County who brought the suit. “They accuse him of committing a crime … and expose him to ridicule, hatred and contempt.”

The lawsuit centers on an eight-second surveillance video featured in “2000 Mules” that shows Andrews returning absentee ballots for himself and four family members at a drop box before the 2020 election.

D’Souza, speaking as the narrator, tells the audience “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”

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“Georgian falsely accused in ‘2000 Mules’ of voting fraud wants filmmaker to pay”

fraudulent fraud squad

Mark Niesse in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

A man falsely accused of voting fraud in the conspiracy film “2000 Mules” tried to hold its producers responsible Friday, asking a federal judge to rule in his favor.

But the moviemakers, including conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and the election group True the Vote, said they couldn’t have defamed a man whose face was blurred and who wasn’t identified by name.

U.S. District Judge Steven Grimberg didn’t signal how he would rule, asking skeptical questions of both sides before deciding whether to send the case to a jury or dismiss it.

“This case is not that complicated. It’s about defendants working together to spread a lie,” said Lea Haber Kuck, an attorney for Mark Andrews, an auditor from Gwinnett County who brought the suit. “They accuse him of committing a crime … and expose him to ridicule, hatred and contempt.”

The lawsuit centers on an eight-second surveillance video featured in “2000 Mules” that shows Andrews returning absentee ballots for himself and four family members at a drop box before the 2020 election.

D’Souza, speaking as the narrator, tells the audience “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”

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