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Tag: voting

  • ‘Take Back the States’: The Far-Right Sheriffs Ready to Disrupt the Election

    ‘Take Back the States’: The Far-Right Sheriffs Ready to Disrupt the Election

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    When WIRED asked Mack how many sheriffs were currently members of the CSPOA, he said 300 sheriffs could be described as “really solid.” He would not divulge how many paying members the group has.

    While Mack and the CSPOA are the most prominent part of the Constitutional Sheriff movement, there are many other sheriffs who espouse the same beliefs. A 2022 survey conducted by the Marshall Project found that close to 50 percent of the sheriffs polled agreed with the constitutional sheriff mantra that “their own authority, within their counties, supersedes that of the state or federal government.”

    Many sheriffs have also shied away from publicly aligning themselves with Mack, something the former sheriff readily admits. And yet Trumpworld, the election denial movement, and some of the most prominent far-right influencers are now seeking to team up with the sheriffs to influence the outcome of the US election.

    In September, election denial group True the Vote told its followers that it was working with sheriffs to monitor drop boxes. While Mack told WIRED he hasn’t spoken to True the Vote about this specific plan, he has confirmed that the CSPOA is still actively working with True the Vote, though he declined to say in what capacity. Bushman also wouldn’t give details of their collaboration, but said: “It’s more than just supporting what they’re doing.”

    In multiple conversations with Mack over the last six months, he repeatedly asserted that the CSPOA advocates only for nonviolent action in efforts to combat the alleged (and unproven) widespread voter fraud that is now the group’s driving force.

    But Mack also maintains deep ties to Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers and is publicly meeting with figures like Raiklin, who in August also posted an ominous threat on X referencing the recent assassination attempt against Trump: “In a duel, each side gets one shot. They missed 36 days ago. Now it’s [our] turn.”

    Earlier this month, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned that “election-related grievances” could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence around the election.

    In a recent phone conversation, Mack’s tone sounded more deflated than antagonistic; he admitted that he was “frustrated” that more sheriffs were not taking a more active role in policing elections, a practice that has led to voters feeling intimidated in the past.

    “President Biden and his administration have just caused so much extra work for the sheriffs, it’s really hard to get them to focus on elections,” says Mack. Every sheriff in this country should verify the security and integrity of the voting in their county. Every single one.”

    Dar Leaf, for one, remains focused. As he prepares to police an election while continuing to investigate the last one, he is clear-eyed about where the threat is coming from: immigrants and Democrats. He claims that America has received “other countries’ garbage,” and as a result, he needs to act.

    “Any police officer who thinks that machine is bad or something criminal is going on,” Leaf says, “we have a duty to seize it.”

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  • Trump Supporters Are Pushing a Clip of a Voting Machine Being Hacked. It’s Not What It Seems

    Trump Supporters Are Pushing a Clip of a Voting Machine Being Hacked. It’s Not What It Seems

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    Behizy’s post caught the attention of some big names in the world of voting machine conspiracies. Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who was named in a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting on account of lies he spread about their machines following the 2020 election, amplified Behizy’s post. Trump’s former national security advisor and election conspiracist Michael Flynn quote-tweeted Behizy’s post about the hack: “Our election system is vulnerable to nefarious actors,” Flynn wrote. “We MUST get rid of the machines! Total BS that we continue using them.” Right-wing influencer Phillip Buchanan, known online as Catturd, also quote-tweeted Behizy’s post, along with a pithy statement to his millions of followers: “Imagine that!”

    The clip of the successful hacking—minus key context—also spread across fringe news sites and platforms. Right-wing commentator Vigilant Fox, who runs Vigilant News, flagged the podcast clip to their 1.3 million followers on X as an “important story” that the media “hid from you today.” On TruthSocial, the news was distributed via links across fringe sites, such as “Slay News,” and shared by “Freedom Force Battalion,” a QAnon account.

    “I haven’t listened to the whole interview yet, to be fair,” one poster on Truth Social wrote, while sharing the short clip and claiming that all voting machines are compromised.

    Voting machines have long been a target of election conspiracies. But in 2020, with the help of GOP members of congress, right-wing sheriffs, conservative pundits, and Trump, those narratives exploded into the mainstream.

    At the same time, officials in the US government and agencies charged with running and defending elections in the US called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

    Well-intentioned cybersecurity experts and hackers, like Hursti, are often tapped by state and federal agencies to probe election infrastructure for security vulnerability to make elections even safer. This August, like every year, hackers at DEFCON’s “Voting Village”—led by Hursti—identified some minor weaknesses in the machines. Politico reported that while it was unlikely that any of those weaknesses could disrupt the election, some experts were concerned about election conspiracy theorists weaponizing the results to advance their own narratives about the system.

    For the last four years, a massive network of national and state-level election denial groups have built up, formed on the belief that the 2020 election was stolen. In recent months, these groups have kicked into gear ahead of November’s vote, pushing conspiracies about immigrants voting, trying to remove thousands of names from voter rolls and even spying on drop boxes in swing states.

    Throughout the podcast, Bet-David repeatedly tries to push conspiratorial claims about why voting machines are so insecure, suggesting that an unnamed “they” are purposely trying to keep the system insecure.

    Hursti continuously pushes back, pointing out that computers by their very nature are vulnerable and that instead of trying to create a perfect system, officials are working to mitigate risks where possible.

    “Every computer in the world can be hacked if you have access and no mitigation,” Hursti said. “When we’ve hacked machines, it is for the purpose that we can improve and if you cannot improve the system then you have to improve everything around the system, have a mitigation strategy, how you defend the system.”

    Citing the vulnerabilities that Hursti has revealed in dozens of voting machines in recent years, Bet-David pushed the well-known conspiracy that in 2020 “the winners were flipped because somebody got into” the machines.

    But the Finnish hacker pushed back, dismissing the suggestion and pointing out that without proper regulations in place to ensure voting machines meet basic security standards, the idea that elections were vulnerable to cyberattacks was enough to damage democracy.

    “The [worry] here is to deny the result or make a false allegation,” Hursti said. “This is very dangerous because it is feeding the distrust of the public and, in democracy, any distrust is damaging the participation and democracy is all about participation. Distrust is causing apathy. Apathy is something which is detrimental for functioning democracies.”

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  • Election Deniers Want AI Cameras to Stream Footage of Ballot Dropboxes

    Election Deniers Want AI Cameras to Stream Footage of Ballot Dropboxes

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    Engelbrecht has also said the group is looking to roll out dropbox monitoring in multiple states, and mentioned Michigan as a possible location, though most of her focus appears to be on Wisconsin.

    In her interview with Wallnau, Engelbrecht added that she was working with “three influential sheriffs” in Wisconsin, though didn’t name them.

    WIRED contacted two dozen sheriffs from Wisconsin’s largest counties, but did not find a single one who was going to be part of the monitoring effort. Engelbrecht and Truth the Vote did not respond to multiple requests for comment from WIRED to name the sheriffs who have agreed to be part of the program.

    “True the Vote has reached out to the Sheriff’s Office regarding ideas as they relate to election integrity and possible law violations,” Deputy Inspector Patrick R. Esser, from the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department, tells WIRED. “True the Vote proposed the idea of donating cameras to the sheriff’s office to monitor election sites, however, the obstacles associated with that idea made it impractical.”

    While most sheriff offices WIRED contacted did not respond to requests for comment, a number, including offices in Buffalo County and Polk County, said they had not even heard about the dropbox initiative. “I was unaware of the plan and will not be participating,” Sheriff Mike Osmond from Buffalo County tells WIRED. “I am not sure if they are legal or not but do not have interest in implementing such a program.”

    In her newsletter this week, Engelbrecht signaled that the group may have been unsuccessful in recruiting enough sheriffs, writing that they would provide cameras to “sheriffs where possible, other individuals where necessary.”

    It’s also not clear that sheriffs would even have jurisdiction over the dropboxes because they are county officials and elections are not run by county officials in Wisconsin.

    “We’re a little different than some states,” says Ann Jacobs, chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is responsible for administering elections in the state. “In Wisconsin our elections are actually run at the municipal level. So we have 1,850, approximately, municipal clerks who run municipal elections.”

    In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in July, the Wisconsin Electoral Commission put in place guidance for clerks on how to implement dropboxes. “The guidance does not prohibit live streaming of ballot drop boxes, and there is no such prohibition in Wisconsin law,” Riley Vetterkind, the public information officer for the Wisconsin Electoral Commission tells WIRED.

    However, if such monitoring interferes with voting, then that could result in criminal charges that carry penalties of up to six months in prison.

    “It really depends on what they do with the information that they glean, and my hope is that they’re not going to go out and attack voters, although I suspect that’s exactly what’s going to happen,” says Jacobs.

    The claims made in the 2000 Mules conspiracy film centered on voters who placed more than one ballot in dropboxes. However, Jacobs points out that voters in Wisconsin are permitted to place more than one ballot in a dropbox if they are doing so for a disabled or infirmed family member, which could lead to tensions with dropbox monitors should confusion about that allowance occur.

    It is also unclear where these cameras would be located, given that they would need to be in situ permanently to provide 24-hour coverage. “What they can’t do is go and just attach a camera to, you know, a city of Milwaukee library and focus it on a dropbox,” says Jacobs. “I suppose in some places, maybe they could figure it out, but I don’t think there’s many places that I can think of where that would actually work.”

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  • Yes, You Can Now Bet on Elections in the US

    Yes, You Can Now Bet on Elections in the US

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    A federal judge has cleared the way for betting on election results in the US for the first time in the modern era, overturning a prohibition imposed on gambling companies by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a financial regulator.

    In November, the CFTC was sued in the District of Columbia by New York-based Kalshi, which operates a predictions market that allows users to bet on the outcome of various events, from the volume of recorded bird flu cases to the number of cars produced by Tesla. Kalshi filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn a CFTC decision preventing it from offering bets on whether the Democratic or Republican party would control the two chambers of Congress.

    On September 6, Judge Jia Cobb ruled in favor of Kalshi, overturning the CFTC prohibition. At a hearing on Thursday, the judge denied a motion for delay meant to buy the CFTC time to appeal, which means betting may now begin.

    The debate over whether betting on the elections should be allowed in the US runs back decades. At the moment, the practice is illegal under the laws of numerous US states, like Texas and Nevada, but not everywhere.

    The CFTC has so far refused to grant gambling platforms a license to offer odds on election results, amounting to a de facto ban. In May, the agency proposed new rules that would make election betting explicitly illegal, classifying it as a type of gaming—a practice over which it has some jurisdiction. The proposal garnered support among some Democrat senators—among them Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Jeffrey Merkley of Oregon—who in August cosigned an open letter endorsing the CFTC’s plan.

    Organizations that lobby against the legalization of election betting claim the practice would encourage meddling by malign actors. “The trust and confidence of American people in our election system is at a very low point. The last thing we need is for people to be incentivized to interfere with the election process,” says Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of nonprofit Better Markets. “There can be no doubt, when there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, people are going to be incentivized to engage in conduct that interferes with the elections.”

    The CFTC did not respond to questions from WIRED, but in a previous statement, its chairman, Rostin Behnam, laid out the justification for the ban it had proposed. “Contracts involving political events ultimately commoditize and degrade the integrity of the uniquely American experience of participating in the democratic electoral process,” he said.

    But in its lawsuit, Kalshi argued that election-related event contracts—the type of betting instrument in question—are a valuable tool for businesses hoping to hedge against a political outcome that might be unfavorable to them. The company also argued that data produced by this type of betting activity can be used as a valuable alternative to traditional polling. “You get more truth out of these markets,” claims Tarek Mansour, cofounder of Kalshi. “They do a better job at aggregating the prevailing wisdom.”

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  • Election Deniers Are Ramping Up Efforts to Disenfranchise US Voters

    Election Deniers Are Ramping Up Efforts to Disenfranchise US Voters

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    EIN advises its network of state-level groups to conduct voter roll challenges using EagleAI, a tool designed to automatically create lists of ineligible voters. Activists in EIN’s network across the country take these lists and manually review them, and, at times, conduct door-to-door canvasses to back up their challenges—a practice that has been condemned for intimidating voters. Experts have also already pointed out flaws with EagleAI’s system: Tiny errors in name spellings, such as missing commas, can lead to names being removed from voter rolls incorrectly. The software is also reportedly facing numerous technical issues. Despite this, one county in Georgia has already signed a contract with the company to use the tool as part of its voter roll maintenance.

    Leaked documents published this month by Documented and ProPublica show that one of the funders of EagleAI is Ziklag, a ultra-secretive group of wealthy individuals dedicated to pushing an overtly Christian nationalist agenda. According to an internal video obtained by ProPublica, Ziklag plans to invest $800,000 in “EagleAI’s clean the rolls project,” and one of the group’s goals is to “remove up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000 ineligible voters” in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

    Mitchell and EIN are also working with a number of other groups that are supporting mass voter roll challenges. One of those is VoteRef, which has obtained and published voter rolls for over 161 million voters in 31 states. The group is run by Gina Swoboda, a former Trump campaign official and current chair of the Republican Party in Arizona. State election officials have said that VoteRef’s claims of discrepancies in voter rolls are “fundamentally incorrect,” and highlighted significant privacy concerns about the data that VoteRef is making publicly available.

    EIN is also working with Check My Vote, a website that hosts publicly available voter rolls and highlights what it calls irregularities, urging those using the system to create walk lists that activists can use to conduct door-to-door canvassing before filing voter challenges with a template available to download from the site.

    Mitchell and EIN did not respond to a request for comment.

    “These groups and the broader election denial movement have been building these structures, building these projects, over the course of many, many months and years, in preparation for this moment,” says ​Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director at Documented. “And the pieces are finally falling into place, where they can begin to file these mass challenges for voter eligibility.”

    Voter rolls are notoriously difficult to maintain, given federal laws that prevent citizens from being removed years after they may have left the jurisdiction. But there is no evidence to back up the claims that this issue causes voter fraud. And election administrators tell WIRED that the processes in place to ensure voter rolls are as accurate as possible already work.

    “[We are] aware of an increase in voter registration challenges over the past year, often submitted by a single individual or entity, on the basis that a voter may no longer be residing at the address of registration,” says Matt Heckel, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of State. “These challenges are an attempt to circumvent the list maintenance processes that are carefully prescribed by state and federal law.”

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  • You Can Get Paid to Talk to Friends About Voting

    You Can Get Paid to Talk to Friends About Voting

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    In Tonya Williams’ Mississippi family, they all vote. But last year, Williams’ uncle mentioned offhandedly that he hadn’t voted in an election for several years. Shocked, she helped him make a plan.

    “We don’t miss elections. We will go. If you need a ride, we will go pick you up and take you to the polls,” says Williams.

    Relentless, a progressive group focused on relational organizing—individuals harnessing their personal networks to get out the vote—relies on people like Williams to get family members to the ballot box.

    Since the 2022 election, Relentless has championed relational organizing, and this year the group is launching a $10.8 million program that will, in part, help pay participants in the program a $200 stipend to get out the vote. The organizers of the program say they plan to build out a network of more than 2 million voters across seven battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

    “Relational [organizing] is a way for voters to receive correct, accurate information in this time of unprecedented disinformation, because people trust their friends,” Davis Leonard, chief executive officer at Relentless, told WIRED. “And so the best way to get people accurate information that they are going to trust is from a trusted messenger. And that’s somebody that they already know.”

    By paying people like Williams, who participated in last year’s Relentless program, the group hopes to reach disenfranchised voters by accessing their personal networks. Relentless is particularly eager to do it this year, because of the amount of election disinformation already present online.

    “One of the things we are learning is that the extent to which I trust information that comes to me, is only enhanced by me trusting the person who gives me that information,” says Hahrie Han, a professor who studies collective action and grassroots movements at Johns Hopkins. “And the extent to which I’m willing to be persuaded by someone is also a function of how much I trust the messenger.”

    In 2022, political texts increased 158 percent compared to the previous year, according to data compiled by the robocall-blocking app Robokiller. That year, Americans received 15 billion political texts. For many, the content of these texts and other communications is suspect: More than 70 percent of voters say they are concerned about misleading election information, according to a recent poll from the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    Relational organizing is “actually communicating in a way that cuts through the noise in the blizzard of information and disinformation that voters are confronted with,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in an interview on Tuesday. “And it’s also helping people think through what their most fundamental values call them to do, even if it means voting for a candidate for a party that they haven’t supported in the past.”

    Relentless uses its own app, Rally, which allows program participants to log their contacts and interactions with their friends. Participants can post memes, text their friends, and throw in-person events over shared interests, as long as the contact is led by the voter and not a campaign. “I just think that everyone needs to know about voting, and this program helped us get it out,” says Williams. “We would meet at a location and then go in that community and get the opportunity to talk to people and see their feelings about voting in Mississippi.”

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  • How Twitch Streamers Could Shape the 2024 Elections

    How Twitch Streamers Could Shape the 2024 Elections

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    Leah Feiger: Yes, the royals are globalist, conspiracy is well trodden, but always good.

    Makena Kelly: Yeah. Haunted portrait.

    Leah Feiger: Haunted portrait, okay, that’s actually a really good one. I didn’t even think about that one as related to conspiracies.

    Hasan Piker: Yeah, it wasn’t bad at all.

    Leah Feiger: I like that one.

    Hasan Piker: Okay. I didn’t realize it was supposed to be a current one. I mean, I got immediately, I’m in New York. The two things I thought about, especially being in one Onw World Trade Center was what happened on Tower seven? How did Tower seven fall? A question that is on my mind at all times. I’m not like a jet fuel, can’t melt steel beams kind of guy, but it’s kind of odd that Tower seven fell. Who knows?

    Leah Feiger: You’re edging into 9/11 truther territory.

    Hasan Piker: That is the one, I’m not like, we did it deliberately and then so that we could do global war or whatever. I don’t go to that length.

    Leah Feiger: Yikes.

    Hasan Piker: But or that it was like a fake or staged or that we did it. We blew up the towers. For our listeners. Hasan does not believe that. Yeah, I don’t believe that, but Tower seven, kind of weird.

    Makena Kelly: Allegedly. Very

    Leah Feiger: Really Allegedly. Really, really harcore, allegedly.

    Hasan Piker: Tower seven, I don’t know what happened. I will go out and investigate later.

    Makena Kelly: Oh, good, now report your Findings back.

    Hasan Piker: When I leave.

    Leah Feiger: I feel like we’ve gotten a little glimpse into the conspiracy corner of your mind here. I’m really sorry. I’m going to have to give the win this week to McKenna.

    Makena Kelly: Wow.

    Hasan Piker: At least this was a relevant one. It’s a new one. Mine is an old one. An old but gold.

    Leah Feiger: Hasan, thank you so much for joining us today.

    Hasan Piker: Thank you for having me.

    Makena Kelly: Yeah, this was great. This was great.

    Hasan Piker: Thank you for having me. Yeah, this was great.

    Makena Kelly: Where can all of our listeners find you besides Twitch?

    Hasan Piker: Yeah. I’m live on Twitch every day at Twitch.tv/HasanAbi from 11:00 A.M. Pacific time, all the way to like eight P.M. seven days a week, and beyond that, I’m Hasan D. Piker on TikTok and on Instagram and Hasan the Hun on Twitter.

    Leah Feiger: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us, Hasan.

    Hasan Piker: Thank you for having me.

    Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter which Makena writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please write to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer, Amar Lal mixed this episode, Stephanie Karyuki is our executive producer. Jordan Bell is our executive producer of development, and Chris Bannon is the Global head of Audio at Condé Nast, and I’m your host, Leah Feiger. We’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.

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  • The Answer to Election Deniers Is in an Idaho County Website

    The Answer to Election Deniers Is in an Idaho County Website

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    “It’s very different if [an online tool] is coming from an independent group, like True the Vote, that obviously has certain political leanings, and information that they’re providing is through a lens,” says Seyler, as opposed to “something like [Ballot Verifier], which is available to everybody and truly transparent.” The data, the team says, is also private. “There is nothing that is printed on this ballot other than the individual markings, [nothing] that would tie it to a particular voter,” says Tripple. “The ballot is completely private.”

    Still, some election experts have voiced concerns about the potential for systems like Ballot Verifier to pose privacy risks for voters, particularly in small precincts or in cases where voters leave notes on the ballots that could identify them.

    “Despite the clear benefits to transparency of releasing cast vote records and ballot images, making these records public comes with trade-offs,” researchers from the Bipartisan Policy Center wrote in August. “Voters’ privacy might be compromised, and vote buying becomes feasible when ballot secrecy is violated—an extreme, if less likely, potential ramification of making ballot images public.”

    There have also been some prior efforts to give voters access to ballot images, such as in Pueblo County in Colorado in 2021, but these efforts were not as comprehensive or technically proficient as Ballot Verifier.

    At the same time that Tripple and Seyler were trying to think about a better solution, Idaho had been using a tool called ElectionStats to give voters access to statistics around election results. That tool was created by Civera Software, a civic technology company that ended up working alongside Ada County election officials to build out the new Ballot Verifier tool.

    And even before the system went live, Tripple invited O’Donnell and other skeptics to be among the first to test it out.

    “I think it’s really good. It’s more than I thought would have happened, because when we request our images now, we just get a data dump of files,” O’Donnell tells WIRED, adding that the Telegram group has responded positively to the launch of Ballot Verifier.

    WIRED also tested the Ballot Verifier tool, looking at specific precincts and races, filtering votes by type (mail-in ballot, absentee ballot, etc.) and found that the system worked smoothly and instantly displayed images of every ballot cast.

    US elections have never been safer, and the 2020 election was declared the “most secure” by Trump’s own officials. But a lot of people still believe unfounded conspiracies about elections, and the roll out of this tool in one county in one state is not necessarily going to change that overnight. Indeed, a review of O’Donnell’s 400-person Telegram channel by WIRED this week shows that many within the election integrity group are still regularly sharing widely debunked conspiracies about voting.

    Adam Friedman, Civera’s founder, believes part of the reason for this is a lack of transparency, something which Ballot Verifier can address.

    “A lot of the conspiracy theories and divisiveness and toxic rhetoric and mistrust around elections in America goes hand-in-hand with people not being able to see enough and people perceiving voting as being a black box experience,” says Friedman. “Ballot Verifier is really a way to turn a black box into a glass box.”

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  • Election Workers Are Already Burned Out—and on High Alert

    Election Workers Are Already Burned Out—and on High Alert

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    “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.”

    In some cases, like in Buckingham County, Virginia, entire election offices have quit due to threats.

    “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.”

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  • Inside the Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November

    Inside the Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November

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    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.

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