Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Hunting for Voter Fraud, Conspiracy Theorists Organize ‘Stakeouts’

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      One night last month, on the recommendation of a man known online as Captain K, a small group gathered in an Arizona parking lot and waited in folding chairs, hoping to catch the people they believed were trying to destroy American democracy by submitting fake early voting ballots.Captain K — which is what Seth Keshel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who espouses voting fraud conspiracy theories, calls himself — had set the plan in motion. In July, as states like Arizona were preparing for their primary elections, he posted a proposal on the messaging app Telegram: “All-night patriot tailgate parties for EVERY DROP BOX IN AMERICA.” The post received more than 70,000 views.Similar calls were galvanizing people in at least nine other states, signaling the latest outgrowth from rampant election fraud conspiracy theories coursing through the Republican Party.In the nearly two years since former President Donald J. Trump catapulted false claims of widespread voter fraud from the political fringes to the conservative mainstream, a constellation of his supporters have drifted from one theory to another in a frantic but unsuccessful search for evidence.Many are now focused on ballot drop boxes — where people can deposit their votes into secure and locked containers — under the unfounded belief that mysterious operatives, or so-called ballot mules, are stuffing them with fake ballots or otherwise tampering with them. And they are recruiting observers to monitor countless drop boxes across the country, tapping the millions of Americans who have been swayed by bogus election claims.In most cases, organizing efforts are nascent, with supporters posting unconfirmed plans to watch local drop boxes. But some small-scale “stakeouts” have been advertised using Craigslist, Telegram, Twitter, Gab and Truth Social, the social media platform backed by Mr. Trump. Several websites dedicated to the cause went online this year, including at least one meant to coordinate volunteers.Some high-profile politicians have embraced the idea. Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, asked followers on Twitter whether they would “be willing to take a shift watching a drop box to catch potential Ballot Mules.”Supporters have compared the events to harmless neighborhood watches or tailgate parties fueled by pizza and beer. But some online commenters discussed bringing AR-15s and other firearms, and have voiced their desire to make citizens’ arrests and log license plates. That has set off concerns among election officials and law enforcement that what supporters describe as legal patriotic oversight could easily slip into illegal voter intimidation, privacy violations, electioneering or confrontations.“What we’re going to be dealing with in 2022 is more of a citizen corps of conspiracists that have already decided that there’s a problem and are now looking for evidence, or at least something they can twist into evidence, and use that to undermine confidence in results they don’t like,” said Matthew Weil, the executive director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “When your entire premise is that there are problems, every issue looks like a problem, especially if you have no idea what you’re looking at.”Screenshot from Truth SocialMr. Keshel, whose post as Captain K inspired the Arizona gathering, said in an interview that monitoring drop boxes could catch illegal “ballot harvesting,” or voters depositing ballots for other people. The practice is legal in some states, like California, but is mostly illegal in battlegrounds like Georgia and Arizona. There is no evidence that widespread illegal ballot harvesting occurred in the 2020 presidential election.“In order to quality-control a process that is ripe for cheating, I suppose there’s no way other than monitoring,” Mr. Keshel said. “In fact, they have monitoring at polling stations when you go up, so I don’t see the difference.”The legality of monitoring the boxes is hazy, Mr. Weil said. Laws governing supervision of polling places — such as whether watchers may document voters entering or exiting — differ across states and have mostly not been adapted to ballot boxes.In 2020, election officials embraced ballot boxes as a legal solution to socially distanced voting during the coronavirus pandemic. All but 10 states allowed them.But many conservatives have argued that the boxes enable election fraud. The talk has been egged on by “2000 Mules,” a documentary by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which uses leaps of logic and dubious evidence to claim that an army of partisan “mules” traveled between ballot boxes and stuffed them with fraudulent votes. The documentary proved popular on the Republican campaign trail and among right-wing commentators, who were eager for novel ways to keep doubts about the 2020 election alive.“Ballot mules” have quickly become a central character in false stories about the 2020 election. Between November 2020 and the first reference to “2000 Mules” on Twitter in January 2022, the term “ballot mules” came up only 329 times, according to data from Zignal Labs. Since then, the term has surfaced 326,000 times on Twitter, 63 percent of the time alongside discussion of the documentary. Salem Media Group, the executive producer of the documentary, claimed in May that the film had earned more than $10 million.Rise of the ‘Ballot Mule’Mentions of “ballot mules” surged in May after the debunked documentary “2000 Mules” claimed that an army of operatives stuffed ballot boxes during the 2020 election.

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      Digital mentions of “ballot mules” per week
      Note: Includes mentions on digital platforms including social media, broadcast, traditional media, and other online sites. Source: Zignal LabsBy The New York TimesThe push for civilian oversight of ballot boxes has gained traction at the same time as legislative efforts to boost surveillance of drop-off sites. A state law passed this year in Utah requires 24-hour video surveillance to be installed at all unattended ballot boxes, an often challenging undertaking that has cost taxpayers in one county hundreds of thousands of dollars. County commissioners in Douglas County in Nebraska, which includes Omaha, voted in June to allocate $130,000 for drop box cameras to supplement existing cameras that the county does not own.In June, Arizona lawmakers approved a budget that included $500,000 for a pilot program for ballot box monitoring. The 16 boxes included will have round-the-clock photo and video surveillance, rejecting ballots if the cameras are nonfunctional, and will accept only a single ballot at a time, producing receipts for each ballot submitted.Many supporters of the stakeouts have argued that drop boxes should be banned entirely. Some have posted video tours of drop box sites, claiming that cameras are pointed in the wrong direction or that the locations cannot be properly secured.Melody Jennings, a minister and counselor who founded the right-wing group Clean Elections USA, claimed credit for the Arizona gathering on Truth Social and said it was the group’s “first run.” She said in a podcast interview that any surveillance teams she organized would try to record all voters who used drop boxes. The primaries, she said, were a “dry run” for the midterms in November. Ms. Jennings did not respond to requests for comment.After the Arizona gathering, organizers wrote to high-profile Truth Social users, including Mr. Trump, claiming without evidence that “mules came to the site, saw the party and left without dropping ballots.” Comments on other social media posts about the event noted that the group could have frightened away voters wary of engaging, drawn people planning to report the group’s activities or simply witnessed lost passers-by.On Aug. 2, Ms. Lake and several other election deniers prevailed in their primary races in Arizona, where a GoFundMe campaign sought donations for “a statewide volunteer citizen presence on location 24 hours a day at each public voting drop box location.” Kelly Townsend, a Republican state senator, said during a legislative hearing in May that people would train “hidden trail cameras” on ballot boxes and follow suspected fraudsters to their cars and record their license plate numbers.“I have been so pleased to hear about all you vigilantes out there that want to camp out at these drop boxes,” Ms. Townsend said.Surveillance plans are also forming in other states. Audit the Vote Hawaii posted that citizens there were “pulling together watch teams” to monitor the drop boxes. A similar group in Pennsylvania, Audit the Vote PA, posted on social media that they should do the same.In Michigan, a shaky video filmed from inside a car and posted on Truth Social showed what appeared to be a man collecting ballots from a drop box. It ended with a close-up shot of a truck’s license plate.In Washington, a right-wing group launched Drop Box Watch, a scheduling service helping people organize stakeouts, encouraging them to take photos or videos of any “anomalies.” The group’s website said all its volunteer slots for the state’s primary early this month were filled.The sheriff’s office in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, is investigating after election signs popped up at several drop box sites in the state warning voters they were “under surveillance.”One Gab user with more than 2,000 followers offered stakeout tips on the social network and on Rumble: “Get their face clearly on camera, we don’t want no fuzzy Bigfoot film,” he said in a video, with his own face covered by a helmet, goggles and cloth. “We need to put that in the Gab group, so there’s a constant log of what’s going on.”Calls for civilian surveillance have expanded beyond ballot boxes. One post on a conservative blog cheers on people who monitor “any suspect activities before, during and after elections” at ballot-printing companies, vote tabulation centers and candidates’ offices.Paul Gronke, the director of the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College, suggested that activists hoping for improved election security should push for more data transparency measures and tracking programs that allow voters to monitor the status of their absentee ballot. He said he had never heard of a legitimate example of dropbox watchdogs successfully catching fraud.The prospect of confrontations involving self-appointed overseers largely untrained in state-specific election procedures, charged up by a steady diet of misinformation and militarized rhetoric, is “just a recipe for disaster” and “puts at risk the voters’ ability to cast their ballots,” Mr. Gronke said.“There are ways to secure the system, but having vigilantes standing around drop boxes is not the way to do it,” he said. “Drop boxes are not a concern — it’s just a misdirection of energy.”Cecilia Kang More

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      John Eastman Proposed Challenging Georgia Senate Elections in Search of Fraud

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      On the day of President Biden’s inauguration, John Eastman suggested looking for voting irregularities in Georgia — and asked for help in getting paid the $270,000 he had billed the Trump campaign.John Eastman, the conservative lawyer whose plan to block congressional certification of the 2020 election failed in spectacular fashion on Jan. 6, 2021, sent an email two weeks later arguing that pro-Trump forces should sue to keep searching for the supposed election fraud he acknowledged they had failed to find.On Jan. 20, 2021, hours after President Biden’s inauguration, Mr. Eastman emailed Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, proposing that they challenge the outcome of the runoff elections in Georgia for two Senate seats that had been won on Jan. 5 by Democrats.“A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,” Mr. Eastman wrote in the previously undisclosed email, which also went to others, including a top Trump campaign adviser. “If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump’s claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial.”The email, which was reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who worked on the Trump campaign at the time, is the latest evidence that even some of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters knew they had not proven their baseless claims of widespread voting fraud — but wanted to continue their efforts to delegitimize the outcome even after Mr. Biden had taken office.Mr. Eastman’s message also underscored that he had not taken on the work of keeping Mr. Trump in office just out of conviction: He asked for Mr. Giuliani’s help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had sent the Trump campaign the previous day for his legal services.The charges included $10,000 a day for eight days of work in January 2021, including the two days before Jan. 6 when Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump, during meetings in the Oval Office, sought unsuccessfully to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to go along with the plan to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. (Mr. Eastman appears never to have been paid.)A lawyer for Mr. Eastman did not respond to a request for comment.Disclosure of the email comes at a time when the Justice Department is intensifying its criminal investigation of the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Patrick F. Philbin, who was a deputy White House counsel under Mr. Trump, has received a grand jury subpoena in the case, a person familiar with the situation said.Mr. Philbin is the latest high-ranking former White House official known to be called to testify before the grand jury. Others include his former boss, Pat A. Cipollone, who as White House counsel argued, along with other White House lawyers, against some of the more extreme steps proposed by Mr. Trump and his advisers as they sought to hold onto power.Earlier subpoenas to a number of people had sought information about outside lawyers, including Mr. Eastman and Mr. Giuliani, who were advising Mr. Trump and promoting his efforts to overturn the results.In June, federal agents armed with a search warrant seized Mr. Eastman’s phone, stopping him as he was leaving a restaurant in New Mexico.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      On Election Day, G.O.P. Raise Doubts about Arizona Elections

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      Republican candidates and conservative media organizations seized on reports of voting issues in Arizona on Tuesday to re-up their case that the state’s elections are broken and in need of reform, even as state and county officials said the complaints were exaggerated.“We’ve got irregularities all over the state,” Mark Finchem, who won the Republican nomination for secretary of state in Arizona, said before his victory was announced.Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona’s secretary of state, at a rally last month with Donald Trump in Prescott Valley, Ariz.Ash Ponders for The New York TimesGateway Pundit, a conservative website that breathlessly covered the election rumors on Tuesday, wrote that Arizona’s largest counties were apparently “rife with serious irregularities that have been occurring all day long, sparking even more concern for election integrity.”There is no evidence of any widespread fraud in Tuesday’s election. But the concerns raised were bolstered by a number of problems in Pinal County, the state’s third-most populated county, located between Phoenix and Tucson. More than 63,000 ballots were mailed with the wrong local races on them, requiring new ballots to be issued. On election night, at least 20 of 95 precincts in Pinal County were running low on ballots or ran out entirely.Sophia Solis, the deputy communications director of Arizona’s secretary of state, said voters could still cast a ballot at those precincts using voting machines that are typically used by disabled voters.“We did not hear of any widespread problems,” Ms. Solis said, adding that “one of the main issues that we did see yesterday was the spread of mis- and disinformation.”Kent Volkmer, the attorney for Pinal County, said there were more in-person voters in the county than had been seen before, including far more independent voters. He added that many voters surrendered their mail-in ballot so they could vote in person, possibly motivated by the ballot-printing issues.“We don’t think that there’s nearly as many people who were negatively impacted as what’s being related to the community,” Mr. Volkmer said.One common talking point on Tuesday resurrected a false theory from 2020, known as Sharpiegate, which claimed that markers offered by poll workers were bleeding through and invalidating ballots. Election officials have said that machines can read ballots marked with pens, markers and other instruments, and any issues can be reviewed manually.“This is Sharpiegate 2.0,” Ben Berquam, a conservative commentator, said on a livestream. Mr. Finchem shared the conspiracy theory on his Twitter account. The campaign for Ron Watkins, a congressional candidate for Arizona’s Second District who came in last place in his race on Tuesday, also suggested that Mr. Watkins’s votes were being artificially slashed.Sorting mail-in ballots at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Phoenix, Ariz., on Tuesday.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMany election fraud theories focused on the governor’s primary race between Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed former news anchor, and Karrin Taylor Robson, who was endorsed by former Vice President Mike Pence. Ms. Lake was badly trailing her competitor for most of the night, whipping up election fraud theories among her supporters. She eventually took the lead.Ms. Lake’s allies suggested during a livestream that the results were suspicious because many other Trump-aligned candidates were winning their races. In Arizona, mail-in ballots received before Election Day are counted first, and polling suggested those would slightly favor Ms. Taylor Robson. In-person votes were counted on election night, and Ms. Lake’s supporters preferred voting in person.As counting continued late into the night, Ms. Lake claimed victory while she was still trailing Ms. Taylor Robson.“When the legal votes are counted, we’re going to win,” Ms. Lake said at her election night party. The Associated Press has not yet called the race. More

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      Arizona Attorney General Debunks Trump Supporters’ Election Fraud Claims

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      Accusations that hundreds of ballots were cast in Arizona in 2020 in the name of dead voters are unfounded, the state’s Republican attorney general said on Monday in a sharply worded letter to the president of the Arizona Senate, who has advanced false claims of voter fraud.The attorney general, Mark Brnovich, wrote in his letter to Senator Karen Fann that his office’s Election Integrity Unit had spent “hundreds of hours” investigating 282 allegations submitted by Ms. Fann, as well as more than 6,000 allegations from four other reports. Some of them “were so absurd,” he wrote, that “the names and birth dates didn’t even match the deceased, and others included dates of death after the election.”The claims in Ms. Fann’s complaint stemmed from a heavily criticized audit of the 2020 election that the company Cyber Ninjas conducted last year in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa. That audit found no evidence for former President Donald J. Trump’s claims that the election had been stolen from him; in fact, it counted slightly fewer votes for Mr. Trump and more for Joseph R. Biden Jr. than in the official tally. A subsequent report from election experts accused Cyber Ninjas of making up its numbers altogether.Nonetheless, Ms. Fann sent the accusations of dead voters to Mr. Brnovich’s office in a September 2021 complaint.“Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead, and many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased,” Mr. Brnovich wrote in his letter. His office concluded, he wrote, that “only one of the 282 individuals on the list was deceased at the time of the election.”Mr. Biden won Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes.In a statement on Monday evening, Ms. Fann thanked Mr. Brnovich for his “tireless work” in “answering some tough questions from voters and lawmakers who had grave concerns over how the 2020 general election was conducted in Arizona.”“They asked us to do the hard work of fact finding, and we are delivering the facts,” she said, calling the investigation “critical to restoring the diminished confidence our constituents expressed following the last election” and praising “the increased voter integrity measures put in place after the audit revealed weaknesses in our election processes,” though the audit did not reveal weaknesses in Arizona’s election processes.Spencer Scharff, an election lawyer in Arizona and a former voter protection director for the Arizona Democratic Party, said that while there was value to a public statement from a Republican official that the allegations were unfounded, it would not undo the damage done by the original lies, and by the willingness of so many elected Republicans to entertain and promote them.“The thing that I think is most unfortunate is that it comes long after these allegations were made, and they weren’t clearly refuted by individuals who had the ability to refute them immediately,” Mr. Scharff said, noting that, by contrast, officials in Maricopa County debunked many of Cyber Ninjas’ claims months ago.Mr. Brnovich sent the letter one day before Arizonans go to the polls for another election — one in which he himself is running. He is a candidate in the Republican Senate primary, the winner of which will challenge Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, in November. The front-runner in public polling is Blake Masters, a venture capitalist who has Mr. Trump’s endorsement and has promoted the former president’s false claims of election fraud.Mr. Brnovich has sought to walk a fine line on Mr. Trump’s lies — refusing to call for overturning the 2020 election results, but rarely explicitly rejecting the claims. He publicly defended Arizona’s vote count shortly after the election, and Mr. Trump blasted him in June and endorsed Mr. Masters instead. But he has also suggested that 2020 revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system, and said cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast in April, “I think we all know what happened in 2020.” More

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      Newsmax Renews Deal to Be Carried by Verizon’s Fios

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      Newsmax, a news network that amplified the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged against Donald J. Trump, reached a deal to continue to be distributed by Verizon’s Fios network just days after the telecom company said it was dropping another right-wing broadcaster.A spokeswoman for Verizon confirmed the renewal, which Newsmax described as a “multiyear” deal in a statement posted to its website on Wednesday.The deal comes shortly after Verizon said it was no longer going to carry One America News after this week. Both networks are known for their loyalty to Mr. Trump, the former president, and for serving as platforms for his debunked claims of rampant voter fraud in the 2020 election.Along with the much larger Fox News, they face defamation lawsuits over some of those claims. Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology company that became a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, is seeking $1.6 billion from each network.Last year, facing a lawsuit from a Dominion employee, Newsmax issued a formal apology for spreading allegations that the worker had rigged voting machines against Mr. Trump. In a statement at the time, Newsmax acknowledged that it had “no evidence” for the claims.But the network has also argued with the merits of Dominion’s case, saying it was reporting on allegations made by Trump supporters.“Dominion is claiming because we had Trump and his supporters on air that we defamed them,” Bill Daddi, a representative for the company, wrote in an email on Thursday.Verizon said its decision to drop OAN was the result of their inability to agree on the terms of a new distribution deal. Verizon’s Fios service will stop carrying OAN starting on Saturday. More

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      He Ordered Celebrities’ Absentee Ballots. Now He’s Under Arrest.

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      A criminal complaint filed in Federal District Court claimed that Louis Koch obtained the absentee ballots of public figures, calling the practice a “hobby.”Two years ago, a Manhattan resident, Louis Koch, asked the New York City Board of Elections to mail him absentee ballots for the primary and general elections for 2020, the authorities said.He didn’t stop there.Since then, Mr. Koch has obtained well over 100 absentee ballots in the names of other people, including politicians, journalists and lawyers, without their permission, according to a criminal complaint filed in Federal District Court.But despite ordering all of those ballots, Mr. Koch never cast them in an election. He told F.B.I. agents who interviewed him last month that he collected the ballots “as a hobby,” the complaint said.The hobby may become an expensive one: Mr. Koch, 39, was arrested on July 8 and charged with using false information in voting and identity theft. He was released on a $250,000 bond, pending further legal proceedings. The arrest comes as allegations of election fraud continue to polarize American politics, with false claims spread by former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters. Studies show genuine election fraud is extremely rare in the United States.Even if Mr. Koch’s alleged aim was not to sway an election as opposed to feeding a somewhat unconventional quest for celebrity ballots, it suggests a flaw in the way absentee ballots are made available in New York.According to the complaint, Mr. Koch applied for the absentee ballots by entering his victims’ names, dates of birth, counties of residence and ZIP codes into the elections board’s website. He then directed that the ballots be mailed to his apartment in Manhattan and a family house in Tenafly, N.J., the complaint said.Under the board’s current system, the complaint said, a potential voter can have an absentee ballot sent to an address other than the requester’s as long as they provide the voter’s personal identifying information.In late May, the complaint said, absentee ballots for several current and former politicians from New York were requested from the board, and sent to Mr. Koch’s Manhattan and Tenafly addresses.The elections board, in reviewing its records, identified at least 95 additional absentee ballot requests in the last week of May, which had been submitted in the names of other people, including “recognizable politicians, media personalities and lawyers,” the complaint said.Vincent M. Ignizio, the deputy executive director of the elections board, said Mr. Koch’s activities were detected in early June. The campaign of a sitting state official who was running for re-election told the board that the candidate’s name had been found on a list of people who had requested absentee ballots.But the candidate had not requested one, Mr. Ignizio said. Authorities have not publicly identified the people in whose names prosecutors said Mr. Koch obtained the ballots.The board began investigating, he said, and turned over its findings to the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.“We take ballot security very seriously,” Mr. Ignizio said. “We’re proud we uncovered a potential vulnerability and we’ll continue to tighten up the process in order to ensure that security is paramount.”On June 30, the F.B.I. conducted searches of Mr. Koch’s addresses, the complaint said. In his Manhattan apartment, agents found more than 100 absentee ballots in the names of other people, which had been issued by New York, California and Washington, D.C., for various elections, including the June 28 New York primary.At the Tenafly residence, agents searched Mr. Koch’s childhood bedroom, and seized additional such ballots, the complaint said.The number of absentee ballots cast in New York City has varied in recent years, reaching nearly 684,000 in the November 2020 general election, in which President Biden defeated Mr. Trump; and dipping to 83,000 in the general election a year later, when Eric Adams was elected mayor.Mr. Ignizio said that the board’s investigation found that none of the absentee ballots Mr. Koch was said to have obtained in the names of other people were cast in any election. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment. Mr. Koch is registered as a Democrat, according to a public record of the elections board.Mr. Koch’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on his client’s behalf. Mr. Koch had no comment, a family member said.According to the complaint, Mr. Koch, after waiving his Miranda rights, told the F.B.I. agents that he had been ordering ballots in other people’s names since at least 2020, using personal identifying information he obtained from public sources.At one point last year, he said, a relative living in the Tenafly house who was aware he had been obtaining the ballots advised him to stop, according to the complaint.“Koch understood it was ‘foolish’ to continue ordering ballots, but he continued doing it anyway,” the complaint said.When U.S. Magistrate Judge Valerie Figueredo agreed to release Mr. Koch on bail, she imposed several conditions, including one tailored to the allegations in his case.He could not order absentee ballots for himself or anyone else — for any national, state or local election.Alain Delaquérière More

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      2020 Election Deniers Seek Out Powerful Allies: County Sheriffs

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      LAS VEGAS — An influential network of conservative activists fixated on the idea that former President Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election is working to recruit county sheriffs to investigate elections based on the false notion that voter fraud is widespread.The push, which two right-wing sheriffs’ groups have already endorsed, seeks to lend law enforcement credibility to the false claims and has alarmed voting rights advocates. They warn that it could cause chaos in future elections and further weaken trust in an American voting system already battered by attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies.One of the conservative sheriffs’ groups, Protect America Now, lists about 70 members, and the other, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, does not list its membership but says it conducted trainings on various issues for about 300 of the nation’s roughly 3,000 sheriffs in recent years. It is unclear how many sheriffs will ultimately wade into election matters. Many aligned with the groups are from small, rural counties.But at least three sheriffs involved in the effort — in Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin — have already been carrying out their own investigations, clashing with election officials who warn that they are overstepping their authority and meddling in an area where they have little expertise.“I’m absolutely sick of it,” said Pam Palmer, the clerk of Barry County, Mich., where the sheriff has carried out an investigation into the 2020 results for more than a year. “We didn’t do anything wrong, but they’ve cast a cloud over our entire county that makes people disbelieve in the accuracy of our ability to run an election.”In recent years, sheriffs have usually taken a limited role in investigations of election crimes, which are typically handled by state agencies with input from local election officials. Republican-led state legislatures, at the same time, have pushed to impose harsher criminal penalties for voting infractions, passing 20 such laws in at least 14 states since the 2020 election.“This is all part and parcel of returning to a world where we’re using the criminal law in a way to make voting harder,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the interim co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U. “All the things that used to feel more fringy no longer feel so fringy, as we’re starting to see this very much collective effort.”Richard Mack, center, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, appeared at FreedomFest, a recent event in Las Vegas attended by a range of libertarians and conservatives.Alexandra Berzon/The New York TimesThe sheriff of Racine County in Wisconsin, the state’s fifth-most-populous county, is trying to charge state election officials with felonies for measures they took to facilitate safe voting in nursing homes during the pandemic.In Barry County in Michigan, a rural area that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, the sheriff has been investigating the 2020 election after becoming involved with efforts by people working on Mr. Trump’s behalf to try to gain access to voting machines.And the sheriff of Johnson County in Kansas, which includes suburbs of Kansas City and is the most populous county in the state, has said he is broadly investigating the county’s 2020 election. At a recent meeting with election officials, he questioned their procedures and integrity, according to a written account from the county’s top lawyer, who sent him a letter expressing concern that he was interfering in election matters.The Johnson County sheriff, Calvin Hayden, said in an interview that sheriffs faced a learning curve.“We don’t know anything about elections,” he said. “We’re cops. We have to educate ourselves on the system, which takes a long, long time.”More From Democracy ChallengedRight-Wing Radio Disinformation: Conservative commentators falsely claim that “Democrats cheat” to win elections, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.Jan. 6 Timeline: We pieced together President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong campaign to subvert American democracy and cling to power.The Far-Right Christian Push: A new wave of U.S. politicians is mixing religious fervor with conspiracy theories, even calling for the end of the separation of church and state.A Cautionary Tale on Democracy: A New Hampshire man pushed through a drastic budget change in his “Live Free or Die” town, angering the community — and jolting it out of indifference.Hatching election plans in Las VegasThe three sheriffs gathered with a few hundred others at a forum this month in Las Vegas hosted by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.Attendees included leaders of True the Vote, a group whose work spreading discredited theories of mass voter fraud inspired the conspiratorial film “2000 Mules”; Mike Lindell, the Trump ally and MyPillow chief executive; and other prominent figures in the 2020 election-denial movement.Speakers urged more sheriffs to open investigations of the 2020 election, which they compared to a rigged sporting event, presenting evidence that rehashed long-disproved theories. One speaker said the way that betting odds had changed on election night constituted proof of a stolen election.Some of the arguments centered on the premise of “2000 Mules”: that an army of left-wing operatives wrongfully flooded drop boxes with absentee ballots in 2020. Many, including William P. Barr, Mr. Trump’s former attorney general and Georgia state officials, have pointed to major flaws in the supposed findings and the flimsy evidence presented.Still, Richard Mack, the founder of the constitutional sheriffs association, said the accusations made in “2000 Mules,” which was released in May, were a “smoking gun” and had persuaded him to make election issues his group’s top priority.Mr. Lindell said in an interview that he and his team had offered the three sheriffs “all of our resources,” including computer experts and data on voters, but that he had made no financial commitments.Mr. Mack speaking at FreedomFest. He said in an interview that accusations of voter fraud made in the conspiratorial film “2000 Mules” were a “smoking gun.”Alexandra Berzon/The New York TimesThe Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which was formally founded about a decade ago by Mr. Mack, is dedicated to the theory that sheriffs are beholden only to the Constitution and serve as the ultimate authority in a county — above local, state and federal officials and statutes. The group, whose leaders have promoted Christian ideology in government, has been active in supporting fights against gun control laws, immigration laws and federal land management.Protect America Now, founded by Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Ariz., and Republican operatives, was announced shortly after the 2020 election. Its principles closely align with many of the constitutional sheriffs association’s, but it has employed more traditional political methods such as running ads.Attempts to interview Mr. Lamb, who has not announced local investigations into election issues, were unsuccessful. Discussing his partnership with True the Vote at a Trump rally in Arizona on Friday, he said sheriffs would do more to hold people accountable for violating election laws. “We will not let happen what happened in 2020,” he said.For conservative activists focused on voter fraud, an alliance with law enforcement seemed natural.True the Vote initially approached state and federal law enforcement agencies with its election claims, but did not provide sufficient evidence to warrant an investigation, officials said.In partnership with Protect America Now, the group has now raised $100,000 toward a goal of $1 million for grants to sheriffs for more video surveillance and a hotline to distribute citizen tips.True the Vote’s executive director, Catherine Engelbrecht, said in a speech at the Las Vegas event that in sheriffs, she had found a receptive audience for her claims.“It’s the sheriffs,” she said. “That’s who we can trust.”A troubled history of law enforcement at the pollsSome conservative activists have also floated the idea of increasing the presence of sheriffs wherever ballots are cast, counted and transported, echoing a proposal by Mr. Trump in 2020 that didn’t gain steam.Deputizing volunteers could even be an option, said Sam Bushman, the national operations director for the constitutional sheriffs association.Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for secretary of state of Nevada and an attendee in Las Vegas, said that if elected, he would try to “bring sheriffs back in” to the election process.“The deputies are going to be there at the locations to watch for any anomaly,” he said in an interview.Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, said he would like to involve sheriffs in the election process.John Locher/Associated PressFor voting rights groups, the potential presence of law enforcement officers at polling locations evokes a darker period in American democracy, when the police were weaponized to suppress turnout by people of color.Because of this history, state and federal protections limit what law enforcement can do. In California and Pennsylvania, for example, it is a crime for officers to show up at the polls if they have not been called by an election official. In other states, including Flor­ida, North Caro­lina, Ohio and Wiscon­sin, officers must obey local elec­tion offi­cials at the polls, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Sheriffs interviewed at the Las Vegas event said they were aware of such restrictions and did not want to impede voting. The Barry County, Mich., sheriff, Dar Leaf, said he was more focused on 2020 rather than looking ahead. Others, like Mr. Hayden, said they were considering increased video surveillance of drop boxes.Mr. Mack said, “I don’t think any sheriff is trying to intimidate people not to vote.”Some sheriffs from rural Trump-voting counties said they hadn’t observed major problems to fix in their own counties but supported more sheriff involvement overall. Richard Vaughn, a sheriff in rural Grayson County in Virginia, said he wanted officers to be involved in observing vote counts, and would support election investigations “in areas where there are allegations.” “A lot of people are losing confidence,” he added.Wide-ranging investigative scrutinyElection experts say the activities of the three sheriffs already raise concerns.Sheriff Hayden of Johnson County, Kan., said he had started investigating elections after receiving 200 citizen complaints.He is scrutinizing “ballot stuffing,” “machines” and “all of the issues you hear of nationally,” he said in an interview. Asked what he meant by ballot stuffing, he described the practice of delivering absentee ballots on behalf of other voters. (During the 2020 election, Kansas did not have a law regarding that practice; last year, it passed legislation allowing people to return no more than 10 ballots from other voters.)Mr. Hayden said in a statement that he disagreed with the county lawyer’s depiction of his meeting with election officials and that he was treating the elections work like any other investigation.“Our citizens want to have, and deserve to have, confidence in their local elections,” he said.Election workers sorting mail ballot applications in Olathe, Kan., in 2020. The sheriff of Johnson County, which includes Olathe, has said he is investigating elections.Charlie Riedel/Associated PressMr. Leaf has led an effort to try to investigate voting machines.Emails obtained last year from his department by the news site Bridge Michigan showed that a lawyer identifying Mr. Leaf as his client had communicated about seizing machines with Trump allies who were trying to prove 2020 election conspiracy theories.In December 2020, Mr. Leaf met with a cybersecurity specialist — who was part of the Trump allies’ network — to discuss voting machine concerns, Mr. Leaf said in an interview.Mr. Leaf said he had also been provided with a private investigator for election matters by another lawyer of his, who previously helped Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump, bring a conspiratorial lawsuit seeking to overturn Michigan’s 2020 results.At one point, someone connected to Mr. Leaf’s investigation gained access to a voting tabulator, according to state police records. State authorities intervened and began investigating Mr. Leaf’s office.Over 18 months, Mr. Leaf’s investigative efforts have changed focus several times, and he has had three search warrant requests rejected for lack of evidence, Julie A. Nakfoor Pratt, the county’s top prosecutor, said in an interview.Mr. Leaf said in a statement, “I took an oath and obligation as sheriff to investigate all potential crimes reported to my office, including election law violations.”In Wisconsin, Mr. Schmaling has tried to charge statewide election officials with violating the law by temporarily suspending election oversight work in nursing homes.Those officials, who serve on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the state’s bipartisan arbiter of election matters, voted for the suspension in March 2020, as the pandemic was first raging. After investigating a complaint in November 2021, Mr. Schmaling said he had found eight instances of potential fraud.No fraud charges were filed in any of the cases.But in November, Mr. Schmaling issued criminal referrals for five of the six members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, recommending that the district attorneys in the counties where they live charge them with crimes including felonies.Three of the district attorneys have dismissed the referrals; two have not yet made a decision.Mr. Schmaling, who said his nursing home inquiry took up hundreds of hours, described his decisions as routine. “The bigger picture for me is we exposed something that was wrong, something illegal,” he said. “My goal is to make certain that the law is followed.”But others involved said the actions were an overreach of power.“The idea that the solution for an election whose results you didn’t like is, after the fact, to threaten criminal charges for that public work of a government official is shocking,” said Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, who faced a criminal referral. “It is chilling. It is the antithesis of how democracy works.” More

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      in Elections

      QAnon Candidates Aren’t Thriving, but Some of Their Ideas Are

      by

      PRESCOTT, Ariz. — Pamphlets, buttons and American flags cluttered booth after booth for political candidates at a conference center in Prescott, Ariz., this month. But the table for Ron Watkins, a Republican candidate for Congress who rose to fame for his ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, sat empty.“I thought it started at 11:30,” said Orlando Munguia, Mr. Watkins’s campaign manager, who arrived about 30 minutes after the event had begun and hastily laid out campaign materials without the candidate in tow.Mr. Watkins, a computer programmer in his 30s, is running into the same reality that many other QAnon-linked candidates have confronted: Having ties to the conspiracy theory does not automatically translate to a successful political campaign.More established Republican rivals have vastly outraised Mr. Watkins in Arizona’s Second District. Two other congressional candidates in Arizona who have shown some level of support for QAnon also trail their competitors in fund-raising ahead of the Aug. 2 primary. A fourth Arizona candidate with QAnon ties has suspended his House campaign. The same trend is playing out nationally.Primary results for QAnon-linked candidates More