A right-wing group founded by prominent conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump allies ran a covert nationwide campaign to fuel the former president’s plans to upend the nation’s elections after his 2020 defeat.
An investigation from Reuters discovered that the influential America Project surveyed more than 260 election officials in eight battleground states without revealing the group’s agenda and its founders’ explicit attempts to seize voting machines.
According to Reuters, interviewers told election officials that they were nonpartisan observers conducting the surveys only for educational purposes.
But in reality, the surveyors fed responses to the America Project and misrepresented their answers, which were “riddled” with mistakes, according to the report.
The America Project was co-founded by former Trump-era national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has since campaigned across the US amplifying election fraud claims and aligned with QAnon-affiliated groups and Christian nationalists.
The group is also backed by wealthy election conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne, a former Overstock.com CEO who is among the most prominent corporate proponents of the former president’s election lies.
Among the 45 election officials that spoke with Reuters, only two were aware of the group’s involvement in the survey.
Thirteen respondents said their answers were misrepresented.
The America Project financially supports spurious litigation that has sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and donated heavily to groups backing election deniers now competing for state offices that could have enormous impact on future elections.
While the former president allegedly conspired to overturn election results in the wake of his loss, Mr Flynn and Mr Byrne visited the White House to urge him to use the military to seize voting machines, according to a House select committee’s ongoing investigation into the events leading up to and surrounding the violence on 6 January, 2021, which was fuelled by Mr Trump’s ongoing bogus narrative that the election was stolen from him.
Chris Quackenbush, a Republican who interviewed election officials in Florida for the America Project survey, told Reuters that the surveyors only “pretended” to be nonpartisan in an effort to gather technical information on voting machines that would support the group’s campaign to undermine them.
A statement from an America Project spokesperson to Reuters denied hiding the group’s involvement in the survey project, adding that the group is “proud of it, and refer to it as a concrete example of how we are promoting election integrity in our fundraising efforts.”
In one New Mexico county, a Trump-backed commissioner led efforts refusing to certify local primary election results over vague and unsubstantiated concerns about voting machines, forcing state courts to intervene.
Pro-democracy groups, election officials and voting rights organisations have warned that misinformation deliberately casting doubt on the nation’s electoral process risks undermining confidence in elections and compromising America’s democratic bedrock.
Complicating efforts is an urgency to replace outdated voting equipment, despite significant improvements within the last years, now threatened by partisan election officials and conspiracy theories that support removing them altogether.
Such allegations are also fueling harassment and threats of violence against election workers, the people who work the polls, help tabulate results and perform other Election Day duties, among other tasks that help run the nation’s elections.
Federal law enforcement agencies have reviewed more than 1,000 threats nationwide against people involved with elections.
