Ahead of November, the election denying activist group with ties to Donald Trump, “True the Vote,” is asking sheriffs across the country to monitor ballot drop boxes for supposed suspicious or fraudulent activity in swing states — an apparent attempt to revive conspiracy theories leftover from Trump’s campaign to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Ballot drop boxes became an area of fixation for conspiracy theorists and election deniers in 2020 who were convinced that bad actors were using drop boxes to dump fraudulent ballots for President Biden. This did not happen, but groups like “True the Vote” and other election deniers clung to the narrative. True the Vote gained traction with MAGA followers as it spread various lies about the election, primarily false claims of ballot stuffing in 2020.
Election experts have been sounding the alarm that drop boxes may become a target of election deniers’ threats and vigilante activity again in the fall, but this most recent admission from True the Vote is particularly concerning due to the group’s reach and following among right-wing extremist and Trump supporters.
Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reinstated the use of ballot drop boxes for absentee voting. Although it expands the franchise, the decision has also reignited concerns of ballot monitoring activity and voter intimidation. Some Republicans and online election denying conspiracy theorists, as TPM reported, have already begun to make plans on social media to monitor drop boxes. Votebeat Wisconsin highlighted a user on Telegram who wrote: “Sit by those boxes like flies on shit.”
The concern here is that this type of intimidation in patrolling drop boxes could have the effect of disenfranchising voters, Wendy Via, president and co-founder of The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said in a previous interview with TPM.
It appears the effort has moved offline and into the far-right activist realm now too. In a series of interviews, first reported by Media Matters, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht explicitly detailed the group’s plans to work directly with sheriffs in swing states throughout the country to urge them to monitor drop boxes for supposed instances of fraud.
In an interview with self-described Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau last month, Engelbrecht, who admitted before a Georgia judge in February that her group had no evidence to support claims of ballot stuffing, told Wallnau that Wisconsin is now, following the state Supreme Court ruling, installing “over 500 new ballot drop boxes” in Wisconsin. Wallnau responded to this news by saying: “we gotta have people watching these drop boxes.”
“I want to track these people as they are doing their multiple ballot drops,” he added.
Engelbrecht then raised additional baseless claims, arguing that there is a “tragedy” playing out in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, where state officials supposedly told voters that they would monitor these drop boxes, and then didn’t. To rectify this “tragedy,” and in light of Wisconsin reinstating drop boxes, True the Vote plans to work with sheriffs directly to “alleviate the anxiety” of voters, she said.
“What we are doing at True the Vote is taking it an extra step and working with sheriffs to identify areas that sheriffs would be willing to allow us to grant them camera equipment that they can monitor and we can livestream,” she said.
She noted too that True the Vote is working with “three very influential sheriffs.”
While it’s unclear what “influential sheriffs” Engelbrecht was referencing, True the Vote has worked with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which is a far-right movement that maintains that sheriffs hold supreme law enforcement authority in the country. During an event hosted by the group in April of this year, Richard Mack, CSPOA founder and former Oath Keeper board member spoke about a partnership with True the Vote, working on voter fraud issues together.
Again, in a July 31 podcast episode from the True the Vote “Lunch And Learn” podcast, Engelbrecht said that “drop boxes should be monitored full stop,” adding that True the Vote is “reaching out to sheriffs across the country where drop boxes are going to be located and offering to provide them with camera equipment” to monitor drop boxes.
“It’s extremely alarming that True the Vote, an election denier group that has had close ties to the QAnon community, is trying to partner with sheriffs to monitor ballot boxes, especially in swing states like Wisconsin,” Media Matters Senior Researcher Alex Kaplan said in an email to TPM. “These actions could dissuade people from voting in the 2024 election and cause harassment against voters.”
This isn’t the first time the True the Vote has detailed plans to begin spinning baseless tales of voter fraud ahead of the 2024 election.
The group recently released a 44-page “advocate handbook” warning against the non-existent threat of non-citizens casting ballots and an explicit call for vigilante activity in targeting voters based on race or ethnicity.
The handbook aks supporters to “help review and report ineligible voter records,” something that David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told TPM, are merely “designed to create the political partisan fear of immigrants.”
True the Vote is also responsible for a similar effort to enlist private citizens to overwhelm election offices with voter roll challenges using a flawed technology known as IV3 that claims to be able to identify ineligible voters.
Douglas Jones, a professor of computer science and election expert at the University of Iowa, described the technology as “just a front end package that aggregates voter data from the states and tries to mush it into a uniform format with a common search interface.”
