An influential conservative group that includes two Trump allies who helped push lies about voter fraud in 2020 is spearheading “election integrity” summits in battleground states, advocating for expanded poll watching, “clean” voter rolls and other measures watchdogs say could curb voting rights to help Republican candidates.
The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) “election integrity network” is run by the veteran GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who helped to spread misinformation about supposed election fraud in 2020.
Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff, is a senior partner of the CPI and reportedly had a lead role in at least one of its summits.
Mitchell, CPI’s senior legal fellow, has hosted multi-day summits, seeking to mobilize hundreds of conservative activists for elections this year in Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, all states that Trump lost to Joe Biden, and Florida, which he won.
CPI is slated to hold summits this spring in Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin, as it seeks to build “election integrity” infrastructure in swing states.
Powerful groups on the right such as Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots Action have participated in previous summits.
Ties between CPI and Trump were underscored last July, when the former president’s Save America leadership Pac donated $1m to the group weeks after the House voted to create a committee to investigate the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 by Trump loyalists seeking to disrupt certification of Biden’s election victory.
Mitchell’s election summits began in February this year. Previously, she and other conservatives worked with legislators in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Texas to spur the passage of voting laws, including new voter ID requirements and curbs on absentee voting, that seem heavily aimed at Black voters, voting rights advocates say.
A participant at the CPI Arizona event said falsehoods about voter fraud in 2020 were voiced to gin-up enthusiasm for more aggressive election monitoring in 2022.
“The event definitely used the false allegations of fraud in 2020 as a call to action to rally support for vigilant engagement this year in the election process,” the participant told the Guardian, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“There was a large focus on recruiting precinct officials to watch the polls and all of the other processes associated with elections.”
Voting rights watchdogs voiced strong concern about the CPI summits.
“Ongoing efforts to promote false claims of widespread voter fraud are dangerous and damaging to our democracy,” Wendy Weiser, vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, said.
“There is a multi-pronged attack on the core principles of our democracy in the name of election integrity. The country’s history with these kinds of so-called ‘election integrity’ operations makes clear that they create a serious risk of racial targeting, voter intimidation, and vote suppression.”
The push to forge state election “integrity” networks is occurring while Mitchell and Meadows face congressional scrutiny and other investigation of their efforts to help Trump stay in power.
Mitchell participated in a 2 January 2021 call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump urged the state official to “find” 11,780 votes, in order to overturn Biden’s win in the state.
The Fulton county district attorney and a special grand jury are investigating whether Trump and others broke laws barring the solicitation of election fraud and other statutes in Georgia. Last month, Mitchell was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee that is investigating the Capitol attack.
Meadows was a “keynote speaker” at a two-day CPI Georgia summit in February, where he was scheduled to discuss “what happened in Georgia in 2020 and what we must do to protect future elections”, according to the Citizen Times, a paper in Meadows’ home state, North Carolina.
Meadows is now under scrutiny for alleged voter fraud in 2020. North Carolina officials announced last week the four-term congressman had been removed from voter rolls pending the outcome of an investigation prompted by a New Yorker report that in 2020 he registered to vote using an address he never lived at.
In March, several days before the North Carolina inquiry was announced, Meadows pulled out of the CPI’s Arizona summit, where he had been billed as a top speaker. He has reportedly not participated in other events.
Meadows also faces a criminal contempt of Congress referral to the US justice department, for refusing to comply fully with requests from the January 6 committee.
‘Capitalizing on confusion’
CPI declined to answer queries about the summits and about Meadows’ role.
Watchdog groups say the summits are sham efforts based on the lie that the 2020 election was subject to widespread fraud.
“The people who perpetrated the fraudulent notion that the 2020 election was stolen are capitalizing on the confusion they deliberately sowed to undermine the safety and security of future elections and, not coincidentally, rake in money in the process,” Melanie Sloan, a senior adviser to the government watchdog group American Oversight, said.
Some details of CPI’s gameplan for the 2022 elections have been revealed by websites promoting state summits.
In Pennsylvania, a three-day summit in late March was advertised to include sessions on how to form a “local election integrity taskforce”; how to protect “vulnerable voters from leftist activists”; “researching your local election office”; “monitoring voting equipment and systems”; and more.
Some “election integrity” meetings have drawn powerful conservative groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity that have to varying degrees amplified false claims about the 2020 elections.
Some groups at the summits have been bankrolled by donors including the oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch, billionaire businessman Richard Uihlein and the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, where Mitchell is a board member.
CPI gatherings have also been attended by GOP figures including candidates running for governor in Pennsylvania and the sitting Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, at a secretive January meeting with leaders of Tea Party Patriots and conservative groups from several states, Mitchell and CPI distributed a “citizens’ guide to building an election integrity infrastructure” to promote the summits and her message.
Mitchell was also tapped last March by FreedomWorks to spearhead what it billed as a $10m drive to push tougher voting laws in more than half a dozen states and to fight Democratic proposals to make voting easier.
Some watchdog groups say the CPI summits pose several threats to voting rights in 2022.
Sloan, of American Oversight, said the CPI agenda had echoes of “Jim Crow-style voter suppression techniques, and a recipe for more verbal and physical threats against election administration officials”, similar to ones that occurred in Georgia and other states after the 2020 elections.
Weiser, of the Brennan Center, warned: “There is a growing risk that in the name of election integrity, partisans and vigilantes will mobilize to intimidate voters and thwart their participation.”
