A half-million records and one app: The group behind a massive effort to ‘clean’ voter rolls

By Curt Devine, Yahya Abou-Ghazala and Kyung Lah, CNN

(CNN) — Police officers in Texas, senior citizens at a nursing home in Pennsylvania and people who had registered to vote at a Marine base in California.

They are among the thousands of voters whose right to cast a ballot has been needlessly challenged ahead of this November’s election by activists — many of whom have been inspired by conspiracy theories — seeking to prevent voter fraud.

“My simple right as a voter is being attacked,” said Daniel Moss, a university administrator from Denton County, Texas, whose registration was challenged by one of the activists even though he has lived in the county and voted there for about two decades. “It’s kind of un-American to do that.”

Election officials across the country have been inundated with dubious complaints about inaccurate voter rolls, which have wasted government resources and sapped taxpayer money spent reviewing lists of registered voters that officials say are already carefully maintained, a CNN investigation has found.

One of the main drivers of the fruitless challenges is a conservative Texas-based nonprofit group called True the Vote, an election-monitoring organization that has long peddled debunked voter-fraud theories. The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has called on followers to help clean voter rolls by using an app called IV3 that enables users to research voter data and submit voter-eligibility challenges to local election offices.

The activists say they are merely trying to help clean voter rolls to prevent fraud, but their challenges have been riddled with errors and have at times included vulnerable groups, such as people registered to vote at assisted-living facilities and homeless shelters, documents obtained by CNN show.

True the Vote has said that nearly 7,000 people have been using its app, which references voter and postal data, to challenge a total of more than a half-million records.

Acting on conspiracy theories

County and state officials across nine states — many of them considered battlegrounds — interviewed by CNN said they have meticulous processes for maintaining voter rolls. They also said they cannot simply purge registered voters from the rolls without making efforts to contact them and following other safeguards. Some officials added that portions of the data in the IV3 app appear outdated, which they say undercuts much of the activists’ work.

“These people are actually trying to help but they did not understand the procedures we have in place,” said Matt Webber, the registrar of voters for Yavapai County, Arizona, who explained how two people who said they were working with True the Vote in May and June sought to challenge a list of potentially ineligible voters that the county had already addressed by contacting them and, if warranted, placing them into an inactive status.

Some election observers have argued that even if the activists submitting mass challenges are operating in good faith, their efforts waste election officials’ time, promote false notions about the maintenance of voter rolls and could prompt the inappropriate removal of some registered voters. In Waterford, Michigan, for example, an activist’s lobbying last year led to what the state called the improper removal of 1,000 people, including an Air Force officer’s registration that was later reinstated, as reported by The New York Times.

Moreover, some argue the challenges show how certain groups have not only spread false election conspiracy theories but also convinced believers to act on them, which could further inflame distrust in elections.

“A lot of these people are people of goodwill. They have just been fed a constant diet of lies,” said David Becker, founder of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, who added that one of the “great ironies” is that “the voter lists are more accurate than they have ever been” because of modern data-sharing technology.

In a statement, Engelbrecht of True the Vote said her group seeks to “empower citizens to ensure accurate, secure, and fair elections,” and argued, “In pursuit of our mission, True the Vote has developed specialized processes, technologies, and methodologies that have been affirmed by experts and courts across the political spectrum.” She did not name the experts and courts to which her statement referred.

‘Unlawful disenfranchisement’

Some states have recommended local officials disregard or dismiss pleas from private citizens to drop groups of voters from the rolls. A June memo from Pennsylvania’s deputy secretary for elections and commissions warned that such challenges can lead to “unlawful disenfranchisement.” A spokesperson for California’s secretary of state told CNN that responding to unvetted voter-removal requests “distracts” from necessary election preparation. The challenges come as a wave of states have passed laws with added voting restrictions since 2020.

Other officials have been more receptive.

“We are open to anyone assisting,” said Jeff Roberts, the administrator of elections for Tennessee’s Davidson County, home to Nashville. Roberts said he has received voter-registration challenges from a local resident who separately told CNN he had spent about 100 hours compiling lists of voters who appeared ineligible based on data in the IV3 app. Roberts said he would follow the law and would not simply purge voters from the rolls without giving them the opportunity to respond.

About a dozen people in Denton County, Texas — outside of Dallas — have submitted what has sometimes surpassed 1,000 challenges a day, according to the county elections administrator, Frank Phillips. Records show at least some of them have used IV3.
Phillips said he has sought to review all their challenges but added the effort has become “a little time-consuming.”

Phillips said most of the challenges involve voters the county has already placed in an inactive status or removed from the rolls, whereas a minority of them warrant follow-up. In those cases, he said the activists’ challenges speed up the process the county already has for maintaining its rolls and verifying voters’ residences.

Some of the challenges submitted by Denton County activists have had blatant problems. For example, one woman challenged a few local police officers who lawfully listed their address as a government building, emails show.

“These people just can’t see past the end of their own nose, evidently,” said one of those officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he lacked approval to speak to the media. He explained that cops and other officials are sometimes allowed to use alias addresses like county buildings out of concern for their personal safety. “They’re just throwing everything against the wall to see what will stick. … That undermines their investigation.”

Unconventional addresses

True the Vote has seemingly encouraged the practice of submitting mass challenges against people registered at unconventional addresses even if some voters may be properly registered at those locations.

In a June webinar, for example, True the Vote’s founder Engelbrecht highlighted what she called a “sketchy” address in Phoenix where she said hundreds of people were registered to vote. “Would I challenge them? Probably so,” she said.

A basic internet search reveals a local nonprofit organization has offered that location as a mailing address for homeless people seeking shelter or other services. Still, a few weeks after that True the Vote webinar, a woman tried to challenge the individuals registered there. A county official responded to her email by thanking her but stated the county already “continuously” performs list maintenance through processes mandated by law.

Challenges submitted by another woman in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, included voters registered at assisted living facilities and nursing homes, according to the local elections director, Marybeth Kuznik. In a June letter, Kuznik explained that she would reject the woman’s challenges because they conflicted with voter registration laws and because the mere appearance that someone lives in a “commercial” facility like an assisted living facility does not justify cancellation.

Melanie Patterson, the Fayette County woman who submitted those challenges after doing research with IV3, told CNN that she wanted to help clean the rolls to deter potential fraud in future elections. Despite an absence of evidence, she said she believes voter fraud in Pennsylvania influenced the 2020 election.

“Dirty voter rolls mean dirty elections,” Patterson said. “If you don’t protect that vote, we are going to lose the foundations this country was built on.”

Patterson’s views were largely reflected by a handful of other IV3 users who agreed to speak to CNN.

Christine Wilfong of Maricopa County, Arizona, said she believes her county has not effectively policed its voter rolls and that she hoped her efforts would remind officials that local citizens are now providing more government oversight.

“We are watching you,” Wilfong said, referring to election officials. “That’s why I’m doing what small thing I can do to try to clean up the rolls. … I do want people to understand that they are being looked at.”

Links to discredited ‘2000 Mules’ film

Aside from using the IV3 app promoted by True the Vote, Wilfong and others referenced the film “2000 Mules” — which cited data from True the Vote and purported to reveal widespread ballot fraud in the 2020 election — for bolstering their desire to help prevent potential voter fraud.

But that film has been discredited. When a Georgia judge ordered True the Vote last year to provide relevant evidence and sourcing for its claims, the group responded that it did not have the identity or contact information for its sources, nor records that supported other claims made.

The film’s publisher, Salem Media Group, issued a public apology this year and said it would stop distributing the movie after a Georgia man wrongly accused of voter fraud sued the company for defamation. In its statement, the company pointed the finger at True the Vote and a conservative filmmaker, saying it relied on their representations and evidence that people were captured illegally depositing ballots.

The history of True the Vote and its leaders peddling baseless election conspiracy theories extends further.

In November 2016, days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, a then-board member of True the Vote, Gregg Phillips, tweeted that he had verified more than 3 million votes cast by non-citizens. When pressed in an appearance on CNN in January 2017, Phillips refused to provide the evidence. Instead, he argued that he needed more time to prepare a public report to ensure accuracy and because the work — much like the efforts of IV3 today — was being completed by volunteers.

Despite those controversies, the group’s revenue has ballooned over the last decade. True the Vote pulled in just over $4 million between 2014 and 2019 but reported nearly $12 million in revenue between 2020 and 2022, the latest year of its publicly available financial reports.

Scrutiny of finances

True the Vote has also faced allegations of financial wrongdoing. Last year, the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint with the IRS that alleged True the Vote may have excessively paid former director Phillips’ business and improperly loaned money to Engelbrecht.

Specifically, the organization paid Phillips’ business at least $750,000 for data analysis after the 2020 election and did not disclose the transactions in a government filing, according to the complaint. True the Vote also allegedly issued loans to Engelbrecht, a director and employee for the organization, despite Texas law prohibiting nonprofit directors from receiving loans from their groups. A True the Vote spokesperson previously argued that the complaint was filed as a “form of harassment” and that it was “without merit.”

An IRS spokesperson said the agency by law cannot confirm or deny whether an entity is under examination.

Today, True the Vote continues to solicit donations with appeals to “protecting the republic” and calls on followers to help “save” trustworthy elections.

But to some election professionals and voters who have had their registrations challenged, the group’s efforts could have the opposite effect.

“These kinds of rash activities can do much more harm than good,” said Moss, the Denton County, Texas voter. “If you want to be part of the solution and you want to help … maybe push to get people to vote versus trying to find answers that don’t even have problems to begin with.”

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