You’ve been asked to serve on the jury in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a United States president. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is everything.
A juror in former US president Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal trial in New York was excused on Thursday after voicing fears that she could be identified based on biographical details that she had given in court. The dismissal of Juror 2 highlights the potential dangers of participating in one of the most politicized trials in US history, especially in an age of social media frenzies, a highly partisan electorate, and a glut of readily available personal information online.
Unlike jurors in federal cases, whose identities can be kept completely anonymous, New York law allows the personal information of jurors and potential jurors to be divulged in court. Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing Trump’s prosecution in Manhattan, last month ordered that jurors’ names and addresses would be withheld. But he could not prevent potential jurors from providing biographical details about themselves during the jury selection process, and many did. Those details were then widely reported in the press, potentially subjecting jurors and potential jurors to harassment, intimidation, and threats—possibly by Trump himself. Merchan has since blocked reporters from publishing potential jurors’ employment details.
The doxing dangers potential jurors face became apparent on Monday, day one of the proceedings. An update in a Washington Post liveblog about Trump’s trial revealed the Manhattan neighborhood where one potential juror lived, how long he’d lived there, how many children he has, and the name of his employer. Screenshots of the liveblog update quickly circulated on social media, as people warned that the man could be doxed, or have his identity revealed publicly against his will, based solely on that information.
“It’s quite alarming how much information someone skilled in OSINT could potentially gather based on just a few publicly available details about jurors or potential jurors,” says Bob Diachenko, cyber intelligence director at data-breach research organization Security Discovery and an expert in open source intelligence research.
Armed with basic personal details about jurors and certain tools and databases, “an OSINT researcher could potentially uncover a significant amount of personal information by cross-referencing all this together,” Diachenko says. “That’s why it’s crucial to consider the implications of publicly revealing jurors’ personal information and take steps to protect their privacy during criminal trials.”
Even without special OSINT training, it can be trivial to uncover details about a juror’s life. To test the sensitivity of the information the Post published, WIRED used a common reporting tool to look up the man’s employer. From there, we were able to identify his name, home address, phone number, email address, his children and spouse’s identities, voter registration information, and more. The entire process took roughly two minutes. The Post added a clarification to its liveblog explaining that it now excludes the man’s personal details.
The ready availability of those details illustrates the challenges in informing the public about a highly newsworthy criminal case without interfering in the justice process, says Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director, professor, and James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication.
Makena Kelly: But Eric Clapton had a huge fundraiser. He’s able to get-
Leah Feiger: Alicia Silverstone.
Makena Kelly: I know.
Leah Feiger: That’s the one that you told me about that made me particularly sad. I cannot re-
Anna Merlan: Well, she’s been involved in anti-vaccine activism since at least 2015.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, that was new to me. I’ll be honest, that was new to me. Obviously not new to you, as all of our conspiracy vaccine experts over here. But can I re-watch Clueless in the same way? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think not.
Makena Kelly: Yeah, the celebrities really have that macro influence where they’re able to help spread his name, his things like that. Then you see the PAC, of course, reaching these fitness influencers, targeting micro influencers who have that direct engaged relationship. The campaign is really focused on reaching people all across the board, and then at a smaller level, engaging them and activating to vote.
Leah Feiger: Right, right. What does all of this add up to? The family conspiracies, the money, the celebrity fundraising, the podcasts, the conspiracies. Where does this campaign go from here and could his candidacy actually make a difference? What states is he actually eligible to run in?
Makena Kelly: The campaign has reported that it’s gathered enough signatures to be on a handful of ballots in states like Hawaii, Nevada, New Hampshire and Utah. He’s also claiming that he’s on ballots in North Carolina and Arizona as well. At least three major battleground states for this election.
Leah Feiger: He just added Iowa this passed weekend he says, the campaign says. I guess to clarify, this is what his campaign is saying, this is what the Super PAC is saying. We don’t actually know this for sure. Could his candidacy actually make a difference? Anna, what do you think?
Anna Merlan: This has been the argument since the beginning of his candidacy. Who is it going to make a difference for? He is not going to be President, I feel pretty confident in saying that. So the argument is, is it going to draw more votes from the Trump or the Biden side? I would say that anybody who makes one of those declarations confidently is probably overly confident. I think it will probably draw votes from both sides of the aisle.
But I wrote, when he announced his candidacy, that primarily his candidacy is an ad for himself. It’s an ad for himself, his anti-vax activism and for Children’s Health Defense. Whatever it does to the elections or the vote, it’s going to do infinitely more for his public image and his ability to fundraise for his other causes after he’s no longer on the campaign trail.
Leah Feiger: I don’t know, Anna. I think I have to disagree a little bit. I think that the RFJ Jr. campaign is only going to help Trump. When we’re looking at polls of Trump voters and Biden voters, Trump voters are committed. They are ready to vote for Trump for another term. Biden voters are slightly less so. This is a very unpopular election across the board generally. There are a lot of voters out there, independent, or Biden or otherwise, that may be able to overlook RFJ Jr.’s conspiracy addled past. If it’s not being discussed that much in media right now, which it’s unfortunately not, then it’s an easy way to zoom ahead and say, “I hate these two options, I’m going to go for this one, I’m going to make a statement.” It really doesn’t take that many votes to have a big impact, especially in the states that Kennedy’s trying to get on the ballot for. I’m really nervous about how this could play out.
Boone Cutler, who has written a number of books with Flynn about “fifth-generational warfare”—military actions like social engineering, misinformation, and cyber attacks—described immigrants as “weaponized diaspora communities” who are being brought into the country to commit “terrorism.” Cutler announced, without providing any details, that he would be providing “irregular warfare training” to CSPOA officers ahead of the election.
John Ferguson, who owns an aerospace company that he claims tracks activity along the border, boosted the dangerous and untrue myth that immigrants are crossing the border with military training and could pose a serious threat to the US. “The problem is that a lot of these people, there’s times where over 90 percent of the people that are being apprehended are all fighting-aged males, Chinese, Central and South Americans,” he said. “I have been south of the border doing missions in Mexico, and I have flown my unmanned aircraft over the training camps where they’re training.”
And though they appear to have reached a new pitch, these claims about immigrants voting have been around for years. Trump has been promoting bogus claims about “illegal” immigrants voting since 2016, when he said the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton was due, in part, to many immigrants voting fraudulently.Trump repeated the claim in 2020 to explain the reason he lost to Biden in key swing states like Arizona—a claim he referred to in his speech ahead of the January 6 riot.
Trump hasn’t stopped: “Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” Trump said last month during a speech in North Carolina. “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters, and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”
There is no evidence to back up any of these claims, however, and research from the Brennan Center for Justice and other organizations has shown that the number of noncitizens voting in US elections is statistically insignificant. In one study from the Brennan Center on the 2016 election, researchers found that non-citizens were suspected (not even confirmed) to have voted in just 0.0001 percent of the 23.5 million votes cast.
Still, these assertions have continued to gain traction as tensions at the US-Mexico border escalate. Republicans have also continued espousing the belief that the US population is being systematically replaced by minorities, a conspiracy known as the great replacement. Despite the theory being widely debunked, the conspiracy has taken hold in MAGA and increasingly mainstream right-wing circles, with speaker of the House Mike Johnson recently announcing a bill to prevent noncitizens from voting in elections—even though that is not an issue.
Earlier this month, the far-right X account known as EndWokeness posted misleading statistics about a supposed dramatic rise in the numbers of migrant voters registering in the US to vote without IDs to its 2 million followers. The stats were quickly debunked by election officials, but the post, which is still on the site without a Community Note, has been viewed over 65 million times. Elon Musk, X’s CEO, shared the post with the comment: “Extremely concerning.”
At the CSPOA conference, Wayne Allen Root, a right-wing radio host who promoted the false conspiracy about former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate, repeated Trump’s claims about immigrant voters.
“The [2020] election was stolen in the six battleground states that would have given Trump a landslide win, instead of a landslide electoral loss,” Root said, without providing any evidence to back it up. “Those six states were decided by the votes of illegal aliens who came in through our open borders. That’s who’s voting. That’s our elections.”
Team Trump might also struggle to reach its usual base this year, meaning they’ll need to rely on alternatives. Earlier this week, The Atlantic reported that traffic belonging to the top 10 conservative and right-wing news sites has gone down 40 percent since the last presidential election, in 2020. It was these outlets, like Breitbart, that leveraged the internet to elect Trump in 2016. Now that machine is breaking down.
“The mainstream media is dead. They’re dead. They just haven’t realized it yet,” a former Ramaswamy staffer told me at his caucus night party in January. “If you look at the types of voters that make up the America First movement, they get their news from alternative media. Fox News is just a very small sliver.” Paul, and other creators like him, could fill this void.
Trump’s team is realizing this. Before, right-wing media and Trump’s online fanatics together generated enough buzz that he didn’t need to build these relationships himself. But as the media landscape has changed, so must the campaign. Already last year, the former president appeared on the Nelk Boys’ Full Send podcast, where he was quizzed, of all things, on Ice Spice. He also hosted a dinner for conservative influencers. The fact that the campaign is considering joining forces with Paul marks the next step in their strategy.
It’s not just presidential candidates either. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s trying not to get fired by his own party, briefed popular conservative influencers and activists on his election integrity bill. Popular social media figures including LibsofTikTok, DC Draino, and End Wokeness were all briefed and, in turn, put out messages in support of the bill.
While Johnson’s briefing was an attempt to create his own viral moment, Trump attending Paul’s fight would be him seizing an opportunity that makes sense for his brand. Trump’s involvement in the bravado of men’s fighting sports has lasted decades. More than a decade ago, he famously participated in a Wrestlemania match with Vince McMahon. Recently, Trump’s been attending more UFC fights and chumming it up with Dana White.
Not only will Paul be hyping up this summer’s fight across his social media accounts, but Netflix will also be livestreaming the match, allowing it to reach the streaming platform’s more than 260 million users. Many digital consultants say political advertising on streaming apps like Netflix will be huge this year. Unlike with a New York Times article or an Instagram post, users are often glued to a movie or show, and some services can force their audiences to watch ads, depending on their subscription tier.
“If I were a political candidate, this would be the time where I’m recognizing Jake Paul has a uniquely large audience and would want to leverage that to benefit me in some way,” Lukito told me.
This is all to say that we live in a world where Jake Paul’s endorsement carries weight in politics. Social platforms are no longer prioritizing news content—they’re fixed on the creator economy. Influencers dominate these feeds, where a majority of US voters read the news, and we should expect more YouTube-style collabs like these, at least through November. Get ready. It’s going to be every day, bro.
The Chatroom
NextGen America, the nonpartisan youth voting organization, announced that it was launching a new Discord bot to register young voters earlier this week. The bot is adorably named VOTE-E, and is built on OpenAI’s GPT-4. It will apparently be able to answer an assortment of voting questions in DMs over Discord.
“There’s a huge problem that outreaches made to the gaming community from the political space haven’t felt really authentic—like ‘Pokémon Go to the polls,’” Grant Wiles, NextGen’s vice president of data, research, and polling, told me over the phone.
Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and challenge voter rolls. And though their work was once fringe, it’s become mainstreamed in the Republican Party. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we focus on what these groups are doing, and what this means for voters and the election workers who are already facing threats and harassment.
Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Tori Elliott is @Telliotter. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Write to us at [email protected]. Our show is produced by produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer and Amar Lal mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is the Executive Producer of Audio Development and Chris Bannon is Global Head of Audio at Condé Nast.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Today, we’re going to talk about how election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt November. And what that means for voters and the election workers already facing threats and harassment.
Catherine Engelbrecht: We’re going to be engaged. We are going to understand the process and the lawful approach to the electoral system. And we’re going to have options to continue to hold to those truths. We’re not going to back down.
Leah Feiger: That was Catherine Engelbrecht. She’s the founder of True the Vote, a group that’s been effectively trying to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade. This recording is from a webinar that she led about organizing local activist groups to challenge election officials. They do this by falsely claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony registrations, and the group really became a big deal after 2020 when claims of election fraud exploded. Now along with a bunch of other similar groups, they’re hosting training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level. They’re learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and deploy IV3, a software tool that allows people to challenge voter rolls. Joining me today from Cork, Ireland, to talk about all of this is David Gilbert. David is a senior politics writer at WIRED who just published an article all about True the Vote and groups like them this week on WIRED.com. David, you sat through two whole True the Vote webinars. How was it?
David Gilbert: It was interesting, and I think after about five minutes when Catherine Engelbrecht started talking about how prayers could make ice particles look more beautiful, I knew I was in for an interesting time.
Leah Feiger: Oh, I’m so glad you sat through all of that for us. Yeah. What exactly do they want? What does True the Vote want here?
David Gilbert: True the Vote is coming from a place where they fundamentally believe that elections are broken and they’re rigged, and they’re fraudulent. What they really want is they want voter rolls to be cleaned up and they want their supporters to help them in cleaning up those voter rolls.
Leah Feiger: Why do groups like True the Vote care so much about these voter rolls? What specifically is drawing them to this issue?
David Gilbert: Voter rolls are the lists of registered voters that each state or local jurisdiction maintains of the people who are able to vote in upcoming elections. So they’re very important in maintaining them and keeping them clean as the phrasing goes, is very important. But what True the Vote believe is that voter rolls across the country, particularly in swing states, are filled with fake or phony voters and they believe that their mission is to go out and find these fake voters and challenge them and get them removed from voter rolls.
Leah Feiger: But these “fake” voter registrations, they aren’t actual problems, right?
David Gilbert: No. Like cleaning and maintaining voter rolls and registrations is difficult because people die, people move. It’s a job election officials have to do constantly and keep them updated, and obviously there are going to be people who slip through the cracks and people who move who never inform election officials that they’ve moved. So there will be people on the voter list who shouldn’t be there. But the vigor is infinitesimally small and it is not a significant number that it could impact the outcome of any election.
Leah Feiger: But they’re focusing on it anyway. Let’s talk about exactly what they’re doing. What was in these webinars? What are they telling these local activists to do? Let’s get into it.
David Gilbert: So True the Vote, as you said, has been around for over a decade. Catherine Engelbrecht founded the group back in 2009 and she was a Tea Party activist at the time. And ever since she’s effectively been saying the same thing, that there are real issues with fraud related to voter rolls. And so when 2020 happened and that narrative suddenly became mainstream orthodoxy for the GOP because of Trump’s pushing of those false claims, she suddenly was propelled to the center of this universe of conspiracy theorists along with her close collaborator, Greg Phillips, who built the software tools that True the Vote uses or True the Vote supporters use. And so they suddenly became these kind of infamous figures and they were involved in the 2000 Mules conspiracy theory that was created by Dinesh D’Souza.
Archival audio clip:True the Vote has the largest store of election intelligence for the 2020 elections in the world. No one has more data than we do.
David Gilbert: It was their information that was at the heart of that movie which was widely debunked. They were involved in mass voter challenges in Georgia, 384,000 voter challenges in Georgia.
Leah Feiger: That is just so many. They are really in the thick of it.
David Gilbert: Yeah. And they were hyped by pretty much everyone from Trump on down in the Republican Party because their data appeared to back up the claims that Trump was making. This time around in 2024, they believe the problem is even greater. And so what they’re doing now is they are mobilizing the supporters and the network that they’ve built up over the last four years to go out and to start challenging votes on a case by case basis, and that’s what the relaunch of their IV3 platform is all about.
Leah Feiger: So who’s using the software and how does it work?
David Gilbert: So this software is designed for individuals. So when a user who is subscribed to IV3 logs on, what they see is basically the voter roll that has been imported from their local jurisdiction, and they can search for an address or for an individual if they have already got concerns about someone or somewhere in particular. But what they also get is a list of suspicious accounts.
Leah Feiger: Quote, unquote?
David Gilbert: Yeah, exactly. So they get to log onto that and they can go through all those suspicious accounts and without any real proof that there is something suspicious about them. They can click challenge on that. They get a automated challenge to that voter created, which they can then send to their local election official. And it’s really a automating and supercharging the ability to make these voter challenges.
Leah Feiger: That’s terrible. I mean, that’s so dangerous.
David Gilbert: And the big problem is that it’s based on the US Postal Service’s database and there’s numerous reasons why that is not reliable.
Leah Feiger: Well, what happens when this obviously and very predictably identifies someone incorrectly? What happens? What happens to the voters that are caught up in this? What happens to the election workers that are dealing with these requests?
David Gilbert: The big issue is that it just floods election officials with requests. So they have to then go through this very long and deliberate process of trying to figure out if the person that has been challenged is actually still living at the address that they’re registered at. That takes about four or five years. So that obviously is another issue that True the Vote has because they feel that because it takes so long. The Democrats or the elites or whoever they believe is behind this are going to be able to push forward their agenda in that space of time. But of course, those measures are in place for a reason. It’s because the right to vote is such a core part of being a US citizen and the idea that you should be removed from a voter role just because some random person with access to this IV3 tool decides that you are not who you say you are. It’s incredulous that that could even happen, but that’s exactly what they want to happen.
Leah Feiger: I mean, this sounds like it’s going to be such a mess come November. And there’s a lot of other election denial groups out there that are doing similar things.
David Gilbert: Yeah, voter rolls is just an issue for pretty much every major election denial group out there because that will then give them the ability to make the claim once an election doesn’t go their way that, “Oh, it’s because the voter rolls weren’t cleaned.” There are other groups who are pushing forward similar tools to IV3. Like a Georgia-based group who has produced one called EagleAI or spelt EagleAI which effectively does the exact same thing as IV3. And the county in Georgia has actually signed a contract with that company to use that to clean their voter rolls and maintain their voter rolls, which is really disturbing to someone in an elected official position has decided that this is how they should manage their voter rolls.
Leah Feiger: Right. I mean so many voter rights groups have advised against these uses of EagleAI in particular, a missing comma before like a suffix has led to eligible names being removed. Right?
David Gilbert: Exactly. That’s what it comes down to. It comes down to the most minor of formatting inconsistencies that make a claim that they shouldn’t be on the register. There are checks and balances in place, which mean you can’t just push a button and someone has their voter removed, but as we’ve seen in Georgia with EagleAI, if a county is contracting with this company, then maybe that is something that will happen down the road because we’ve constantly seen how Republican lawmakers across the country have brought forward legislation in the last four years to undermine voting rights in all sorts of different ways.
Leah Feiger: We have to talk about the America Project. That features former national security adviser, Mike Flynn.
David Gilbert: Yeah. I suppose Mike Flynn is a figure that a lot of people may have not heard of for a while because obviously he was Donald Trump’s national security adviser for a couple of days at least. And then he got caught lying twice to the FBI about his communications with a Russian ambassador, and he resigned or was fired or resigned before being fired or however it played out. Ultimately, he got pardoned by Trump. And then ever since the 2020 election when Trump lost, he has become the figurehead of the election denial movement.
Leah Feiger: He’s everywhere.
David Gilbert: He is never not appearing on a podcast or speaking at a conference. He’s currently on a national tour promoting his own movie, which I haven’t seen yet, but I can’t wait to watch because it sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Leah Feiger: I’m looking forward to your reviews there. What exactly is the America Project doing?
David Gilbert: So the America Project is an effort to kind of, once again, like all these other election denial groups, push the narrative that US elections are rigged and fraudulent, all based on absolutely nothing, just so we’re clear. What the America Project is central to that is Mike Flynn’s claim that local action equals national impact. What that means is that he wants people on every single committee, on every single school board, in every single county across the country, pushing this narrative on behalf of him, on behalf of the GOP, on behalf of Trump, and thereby creating this kind of network effect where if everyone is doing it at the same time, then it is going to have a major impact on the elections overall.
Leah Feiger: There are so many of these groups and they feel way more organized than in 2020. And 2020 was bad.
David Gilbert: They are without a doubt way more organized. Most of these groups … So True the Vote has been around for a long time. Most of these groups have kind of formed based on the claims that have been spread from the top, from the likes of Mike Flynn, from Trump himself, from Steve Bannon. They formed in each state and counties. Some of them are really local, some of them are national networks, and they have tens and thousands of millions of followers in some cases. And the America Project is one such group who has not only got a network of people on a very local level, they’re also deeply connected to the GOP at a national level. I have to remind myself even that they’re not fringe groups anymore. These groups are—
Leah Feiger: Right. They’re mainstream. They’re officially mainstream. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about this institutional support. We’ve now gone through all of these different groups that are clearly working to disenfranchise voters and undercut the legitimacy of elections, but this movement has also taken hold at the highest levels of the GOP. I mean, the Republican National Committee has been made over in the image of election deniers.
David Gilbert: On the America Project webinar that I was listening into last month, right at the end, one of the organizers apologized to everyone that was listening because they had hoped to have Christina Bobb appear on the webinar. And for those who may not know who Christina Bobb is, she is a former presenter with the One American Network, the far-right One American Network.
Leah Feiger: And a former Trump lawyer.
David Gilbert: Because of that, she, when Trump kind of remade the RNC, he also appointed Christina Bobb to head up their election integrity efforts, which is incredible given her history of boosting election conspiracies. And so the America Project was saying that they had spoken to the Republican National Committee and they said that she was willing to join another webinar in the future. So that just gives you a little insight into just how connected these groups, which many still call fringe, but are really, really central to the broader efforts being pushed from the top down by Trump and Flynn and are being pushed out then at a local level across the country.
Leah Feiger: When we come back, David and I are going to talk with WIRED staff writer Vittoria Elliott about the impact of all of these groups on voters and election workers today.
“They’re exhausted,” Tammy Patrick, CEO of the National Association of Election Officials, which has a membership of 1,800 officials across the US, tells WIRED. “People are tired, and we haven’t even started the election cycle this year. They are still under attack, they’re still getting death threats from 2020.”
They’re also trying to just do their jobs, and make sure eligible voters are able to vote and the politicians on the ballot accept the results no matter what. “As a nation, we’re holding our breath to see if that happens,” Patrick says.
According to a new report published this week by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the level of election worker turnover has spiked dramatically since 2020, with the researchers observing an almost 40 percent jump in resignations between 2004 and 2022.
“It is difficult to recruit people who are able to withstand the intense pressure that has become inherent in election administration,” Stuart Holmes, director of elections in Washington state, tells WIRED. “We often find that people either love election administration and are in for life, or leave within six months.”
“We do have examples across the country where the entire office resigned because they were just mentally unable to go to work every day and be inundated with death threats,” Patrick said. “It is not the sort of situation one would think about for the United States of America. It’s the sort of thing we would think about in struggling new democracies where they don’t have the traditions that many of us now realize we were taking for granted, like concessions when one loses.”
Leslie Hoffman, who ran the elections office in Yavapai County in Arizona, where vigilantes monitored drop boxes, quit in 2022. At the time, she cited the “nastiness” of the threats she received. She later told WIRED that she actually quit because her dog was poisoned just before she left her post. No one was ever arrested or charged, but she believes it was related to her election work.
For the election officials and workers who have remained in their roles, they are now facing 2024 already having to cover for colleagues who have departed and whose positions remain unfilled—including at least one election director role.
According to the Brennan Center survey, one in five of the officials who will be working on the 2024 vote will be doing so for the first time.
“Institutional knowledge is so important. Employee turnover in an election administration can look like not knowing how to set up, or opening your poll site late, or directing people to the wrong place,” Christina Baal-Owens, the executive director of voting rights organizations Public Wise, tells WIRED. “There’s also the cost of training and recruitment. Hiring costs money, and recruiting costs money. It’s a drain on resources.”
Baal-Owens also points out that the loss of experienced employees can have less obvious impacts: “Voting is incredibly local, and in a lot of communities, elderly folks are the ones that vote and they have relationships with the people that have been administering their elections. So losing those relationships is also really important. Losing that institutional knowledge is an issue.”
Many US election deniers have spent the past three years inundating local election officials with paperwork and filing thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests in order to surface supposed instances of fraud. “I’ve had election officials telling me that in an office where there’s one or two workers, they literally were satisfying public records requests from 9 to 5 every day, and then it’s 5 o’clock and they would shift to their normal election duties,” says Tammy Patrick, CEO of the National Association of Election Officials. “And that’s untenable.”
In Washington state, elections officials were receiving so many FOIA requests following the 2020 presidential elections about the state’s voter registration database that the legislature had to change the law, rerouting these requests to the Secretary of State’s office to relieve the burden on local elections workers.
“Our county auditors came in and testified as to how much time having to respond to public records requests was taking,” says democratic state senator Patty Kederer, who cosponsored the legislation. “It can cost a lot of money to process those requests. And some of these smaller counties do not have the manpower to handle them. You could easily overwhelm some of our smaller counties.”
Now, experts and analysts worry that with generative AI, election deniers could mass-produce FOIA requests at an even greater rate, drowning the election workers legally obligated to reply to them in paperwork and gumming up the electoral process. In a critical election year, when elections workers are facing increasing threats and systems are more strained than ever, experts who spoke to WIRED shared concerns that governments are unprepared to defend against election deniers, and generative AI companies lack the guardrails necessary to prevent their systems from being abused by people looking to slow down election workers.
Chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot can easily generate FOIA requests, even down to referencing state-level laws. This could make it easier than ever for people to flood local elections officials with requests and make it harder for them to make sure elections run well and smoothly, says Zeve Sanderson, director of New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
“We know that FOIA requests have been used in bad faith previously in a number of different contexts, not just elections, and that [large language models] are really good at doing stuff like writing FOIAs,” says Sanderson. “At times, the point of the records requests themselves seem to have been that they require work to respond to. If someone is working to respond to a records request, they’re not working to do other things like administering an election.”
WIRED was able to easily generate FOIA requests for a number of battleground states, specifically requesting information on voter fraud using Meta’s LLAMA 2, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Microsoft’s Copilot. In the FOIA created by Copilot, the generated text asks about voter fraud during the 2020 elections, even though WIRED provided only a generic prompt, and didn’t ask for anything related to 2020. The text also included the specific email and mailing addresses to which the FOIA requests could be sent.
One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.
The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.
Mitchell, EagleAI, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Another training webinar called “We the People” was also hosted last month by the America Project and its offshoot, Vote Your Vision. Broadcasted online to hundreds of attendees, the webinar featured a lineup of election conspiracists, Republican lawmakers, a guy who wrote a book about fifth-generation warfare, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
The webinar, the group’s website said, was designed to give people “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” by using “state-of-the-art election tools,” including those involving artificial intelligence technology. While the details of exactly what these tools will look like and how they will be used are unclear, the America Project has already scheduled more training sessions in the coming weeks to give supporters more information. The group also did not reply to requests for comment.
The America Project was cofounded by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO and conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who also funds part of the organization. Both Flynn and Byrne reportedly attended a White House meeting in late 2020 to urge Trump to essentially declare martial law and seize voting machines.
While Flynn didn’t speak during last month’s webinar, he has arguably done more than anyone since 2020 to push the notion that America’s elections are fundamentally fraudulent, appearing at conferences, in podcasts, and on right-wing news shows on a near-daily basis. Trump has also indicated that Flynn will be brought back into his administration should he win.
These efforts have been given the seal of approval by the Republican National Committee, which was recently restructured by Trump to include election deniers and family members in top positions while cutting minority outreach efforts. One of those election deniers is Christina Bobb, who will be running the “election integrity unit.” A former Trump lawyer and TV presenter on far-right channel One America News, Bobb is a major promoter of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The RNC’s election-related priorities, according to an internal memo recently obtained by NPR, 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.”
During the America Project webinar last month, one of the hosts apologized to listeners for being unable to get Bobb to join the call that day, but promised that she would join a future session—highlighting just how closely these conspiracy-focused groups work with the mainstream GOP apparatus.
“Kennedy’s promise to unravel this corporate capture will help bring an end to this chronic disease epidemic,” Ryerson said.
Bhattacharya declared that he was “delighted” that Kennedy has “lent his considerable voice” to the cause of free speech. Bhattacharya is one of the authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an open letter that argued there should be no Covid lockdowns but instead “focused protection” for older and immune-compromised people; these views were not widely shared by the scientific community.
Chris Clem spoke about his shared desire with Kennedy to secure the border.
Then, Calley Means claimed that both “the media” and many politicians are funded by pharmaceutical companies. “Less SSRIs,” he declared in one representative soundbite. “More sunlight and healthy food.”
“We need a president who questions the science,” he added.
Finally, after several more speakers, videos, and performances—including a dirgelike rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” by singer Tim Hockenberry and a florid “America the Beautiful” by singer Mika Hale—Kennedy’s wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, took the stage to introduce her husband.
Hines has occupied an awkward space for years with regards to her husband’s anti-vaccine activism, which she was eventually forced to comment upon and disavow when Kennedy, at an anti-Covid mandates rally, intimated that vaccine mandates had been worse than the Holocaust.
Onstage, Hines struck a more conventional tone of a political spouse, telling the crowd that Kennedy would bring the country together. “America listening,” she said, adding that the nation “is inspired.”
In his speech announcing Shanahan, as he’s done throughout his campaign, Kennedy again leaned heavily on his family legacy, recounting how his father, Robert Kennedy, had a “rancorous” meeting with local NAACP and Black Panther leaders in Oakland, which eventually led to their political support and the Black Panthers providing security for his father’s campaign. (Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, during his own run for president, by shooter Sirhan Sirhan.)
Over the past few weeks, the Kennedy campaign teased several other VP choices, most notably NFL player Aaron Rodgers and former Minnesota governor turned media figure Jesse Ventura. These picks seemed engineered to appeal to a young male voter base and, like Kennedy, are people who have promoted and spread conspiracy theories. But on March 16, Mediaite reported that Shanahan was Kennedy’s pick, citing sources close to the campaign. That source also told the outlet that Shanahan could help fund Kennedy’s efforts to get on more state’s ballots but added, “She lacks the qualifications to actually do the job.”
In recent months, the DNC has also mounted its pushback against Kennedy as a spoiler candidate and a boon to Trump. In a call with reporters, according to CNN, a DNC adviser called RFK “a stalking horse” being “propped up” by Trump and his donors.
“Our campaign is a spoiler,” Kennedy said on Tuesday, to cheers. “I agree with that. It’s a spoiler for President Biden and for President Trump. It’s a spoiler for the war machine” as well as other targets including “Big Ag and Big Pharma.” Millions of people, he said, might elect not to vote at all rather than choose between the “two tired heads of the uniparty.”
“Nicole and I,” he added, “are going to give those millions another choice.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Truth Social, former President Donald’s Trump’s clone of Twitter, has a fraction of the users of competitors like Reddit and X. The company has never turned a profit, and just happens to be the place where Trump is currently posting.
But on the NASDAQ, the stock exchange where Truth Social became a publicly traded company today, there’s a different story: Truth Social has become a certified meme stock. Trump supporters seem to have conflated their support for the former president with the stock itself, and are buying en masse.
The stock quickly rose more than 40 percent after being listed and trades under a ticker of Trump’s initials, DJT. The company is now valued at more than $6.8 billion. The value, however, could change quickly; the stock was so volatile that it temporarily halted soon after it was listed. The company’s financial performance has been underwhelming. It posted $3.3 million in revenue and lost $49 million in the first three quarters of 2023, according to regulatory filings.
Still, Trump’s fans have posted on Reddit, X, and Truth Social about how they plan to hold the stock in defiance of traditional investing logic. Previous meme stocks like Gamestop and cryptocurrency culture have helped provide the script, but the rhetorical formula is simple: short sellers will perish, this stock is going to the moon, and don’t sell no matter what.
“Let’s go baby! Trump 2024 to the moon,” one user posted on reddit, followed by the rocket ship emoji.
In another Reddit thread, stockholders discussed at what price they would sell shares in the company. “At least waiting for the election win,” one user posted, with the tag Diamond DWAC, a reference to “diamond hands,” a desire to hold a stock despite volatility.
“$150 maybe… but probably waiting for the launch of TMTG+ streaming and also stories videos,” another replied. “Or when our founder is The Leader of The Free World (again) and most reported on person on the world with the most attention on him and his platform. So maybe never‼️”
Reddit user deepfuckingbagholder speculated the company could eventually be worth 1 trillion dollars. When another user replied, saying that valuation would be virtually impossible, deepfuckingbagholder wrote back: “This stock represents the value of Trump’s brand and I personally believe it can achieve that valuation.”
Truth Social is, predictability, a hotbed of conspiracy theories. Electron denialism, vaccine skepticisim, and the great replacement theory are all prominently featured on the site. The company has also been marred in controversy since it began, following Trump’s ban from Twitter after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. A former senior employee filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC, and other former employees have sued the company, alleging a breach of contract. Shareholders voted to take the company public last week, merging Trump Media and Technology Group with a publicly traded holding company, Digital World Acquisition Corp.
The outsized valuation of Truth Social has made Trump incredibly rich. His net worth rose $4 billion to $6.5 billion, making him one of the world’s 500 richest people, according to calculations by Bloomberg News. Trump is restricted from selling shares in the company for about six months, so his net worth could still tank, however, if the price of Truth Social falls.
On Truth Social, one user said a prayer.
“Bless all the patriots invested in #DJT,” GothamGal wrote. “Bless this investment, and make us successful so that we may do your will and bring glory to you. Bless and protect our president DJT, and our country. In Jesus name.”
