A far-right group run by a Christian pastor has sparked a legal firestorm by spearheading a drive to aggressively monitor drop-box voting for fraud in Arizona and other states, in an echo of Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election results were rigged.

Melody Jennings, who runs Clean Elections USA, has teamed up with the conservative group True the Vote, which has a track record for making debunked charges of voting fraud. Together they are promoting a project to hunt for alleged drop-box fraud, which Jennings boasted in multiple interviews on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room and the MG Show, a conspiratorial QAnon program.

Jennings’ frequent messages advocating using cameras and videos in drop-box surveillance fueled lawsuits last month by Arizona voting rights groups charging that voters have faced intimidation tactics from her followers, some of whom have been armed, as they have put their ballots in boxes.

Nationwide, more than 4,500 people have reportedly signed up to help monitor drop boxes as part of the Clean Elections drive, which has discussed plans to share photos, information and videos with True the Vote, an organization recently enmeshed in legal battles.

Oklahoma-based Jennings has said her campaign to investigate Arizona drop boxes, where people can legally drop off their ballots, was inspired by a teaser on Trump’s Truth Social website for the widely discredited film 2000 Mules, which True the Vote helped make. Jennings has roughly 30,000 followers on the platform.

“We’ve got people ready to go in 18 states to go out in shifts and guard these boxes,” said Jennings, whose moniker is Trumper Mel, to Bannon on a 15 October podcast. “We’ve got people out there, on the ground and doing the work.”

On Monday, the justice department (DoJ) supported a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters against Clean Elections and two other rightwing drop box surveillance operations. The DoJ brief outlines organized campaigns to intimidate voters with video recording and photography.

The brief also noted that a legitimate role exists for poll watchers, but said private “ballot security forces” probably violated the federal Voting Rights Act.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Arizona issued a temporary restraining order against Clean Elections and its allies: the order barred them from taking videos and photos of voters and promoting baseless charges of voter fraud, and banned them from openly carrying guns and wearing tactical gear.

Judge Michael Liburdi, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, also required that Clean Election drop box watchers stand at least 75 ft (23 metres) away from the boxes they’re monitoring, and publicly correct past false charges they have made about the state’s election laws.

Shortly before the restraining order, Clean Elections announced its volunteers would halt certain tactics, such as openly carrying guns and wearing tactical gear. A lawyer for Jennings and the group has said it’s likely that an appeal would be filed on first amendment grounds, contesting some parts of the order.

The judge’s restraining order and the Arizona lawsuits came after several drives by Clean Elections volunteers to target alleged drop-box fraud in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, including one where two armed individuals wearing tactical gear identified themselves as being with Clean Elections, an action that Jennings sought to distance her group from.

Similarly, last month the Arizona secretary of state received a report from one individual stating that a Clean Elections representative accused one voter of being a “mule” and had the voter’s license plate photographed, after being followed into a parking lot.

Some Arizona GOP officials voiced alarm about the drop box monitoring tactics by Clean Elections and some allied groups, and deplored how their efforts were fueled by the 2000 Mules movie, created by conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote. The movie’s sweeping claims of nefarious, but unsubstantiated, ballot-box stuffing has drawn widespread criticism.

“If it were not for 2000 Mules, organizations and activists in our state would not be engaging in aggressive monitoring of drop boxes which has bordered on unlawful voter intimidation,” said Bill Gates, the GOP chairman of the Maricopa board of supervisors.

Gates added that GOP candidates running for governor, secretary of state and attorney general in Arizona have “pointed to 2000 Mules as evidence that the 2020 election was marred by fraud”.

Arizona Republican state senator Paul Boyer also voiced strong criticism of the aggressive actions some groups have taken in their pursuit of drop box fraud.

“For those who monitor ballot drop boxes, there are the malicious actors who wear military fatigues thereby insinuating voting is akin to war. It is not. No Arizona citizen should ever feel intimidated when dropping off their ballot,” Boyer said.

But there’s no doubt that Jennings has been zealous in spreading debunked allegations about 2020 election fraud as revealed by internet archives of now deleted Clean Election USA blog writings and other group materials.

“We often hear people say things like, ‘there is always some election fraud’ as if it is OK at a certain level. However, with the help of our heroes mentioned above, we now know that the level of fraud in 2020 was unprecedented and determinative, meaning Joe Biden is now NOT our duly elected representative and neither is Kamala Harris.”

“The rabbit hole goes much deeper, but this is all we need to know for now. It means that we do not have free and fair elections in the US and this should be concerning for all,” Jennings said in a previously unreported Clean Elections document found using internet archives.

The alliance between Clean Elections and True the Vote to target drop boxes seems to have been fostered in part to obtain evidence to support the unsubstantiated claims in 2000 Mules. The film slings allegations of “ballot trafficking” by 2,000 people – dubbed mules – who were hired by nonp-rofits to stuff drop boxes with potentially bogus absentee ballots in five key states that Joe Biden won.

Last month, before the start of early voting in Arizona, Votebeat first revealed that True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips raved about the fledgling partnership with Clean Elections in a video on the conservative website Rumble: “This is the greatest opportunity for us to catch the cheaters in real time, maybe that’s ever existed. So we’re excited about it.”

True the Vote is expected to offer new information to conservative sheriffs including a group, launched by the Pinal county sheriff, Mark Lamb, who has been working with True the Vote for several months on other fraud finding missions involving drop boxes.

Jennings has denied charges that her group has broken any laws. “All activities supported by Clean Elections USA are lawful and designed to support lawful elections,” she wrote to Votebeat.

But Jennings sees her battle to uncover alleged election fraud in apocalyptic terms.

“Luckily, people are standing up and the truth is being uncovered. We have some real American heroes out there,” she wrote in a previously unreported blog earlier this year. Jennings cited True the Vote’s leader Catherine Engelbrecht, Phillips and D’Souza among other heroes “who literally put their lives on the line to uncover what is clearly a planned effort to undermine our democratic republic”.

Meanwhile, True the Vote has faced mounting legal scrutiny in Arizona and Texas – where two of its leaders were arrested on Monday and cited with contempt of court – related to conspiratorial allegations about voting fraud in the 2020 election.

Last month, Arizona’s Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich, requested an investigation of True the Vote by the IRS and the FBI into potential tax violations by the non profit tax exempt group after the group failed to provide his office evidence of voting fraud they had promised for months.

A Brnovich investigator in a letter last month said True the Vote has “raised considerable sums of money alleging they had evidence of widespread voter fraud”.

The letter concluded that given True the Vote’s non-profit IRS status, “it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted”.

The letter also revealed that the attorney general’s office had three meetings over the course of about a year with Engelbrecht and her key associate, Phillips. True the Vote leaders have called the attorney general’s charges inaccurate, but didn’t offer proof to rebut them. Engelbrecht and Phillips did not respond to calls seeking comment.

In a separate legal firestorm facing True the Vote in Texas, both Engelbrecht and Phillips were arrested on Monday, after being cited with contempt of court by a judge in a defamation lawsuit brought against the group by a Michigan election software firm, Konnech, for alleging that the company’s leader was a “Chinese operative” and that Konnech had engaged in the “subversion of our elections”.

True the Vote in podcasts and other places had stated it authorized “analysts” to hack Konnech’s computers that it claimed gave China access to the names of 2 million election workers, to support its allegations against the firm. Last month, a Texas judge ordered True the Vote to hand over the Konnech data and reveal the name of the person who helped them obtain the information.

On Monday, US district judge Kenneth Hoyt ordered the True the Vote leaders detained for “one day and further until they fully comply” with his demand last week that they disclose the name of a person of interest in the case who True the Vote had cited in its defense in court but referred to mysteriously as a confidential FBI informant.

A True the Vote spokesperson has said the group’s lawyer would appeal against the judge’s action and demanded the pair’s “immediate release”.

As for Jennings, just days before the justice department brief and the judge’s restraining order against her group she dropped some hints about her looming legal problems during another interview with Bannon.

Jennings told Bannon that her group was rebranding some by changing its name to the Drop Box Initiative in Arizona, but keeping her original name in other states.

“We are going to rebrand a little bit,” Jennings told Bannon, noting that “I don’t need any more people in Arizona, honestly”. But she added that her drive was still trying to recruit more volunteers in many states.

Appearing on War Room again two days later, Jennings appealed to the podcast’s audience to help her legal defense by donating funds to True the Vote.