2020 Election Deniers Already Organizing to Challenge Votes in 2022

They are invested in sustaining and bolstering the false narrative of widespread voter fraud.

By Mekela Panditharatne, J.D.
Counsel, Democracy
Brennan Center for Justice

Several former Trump advisers and offi­cials who promoted base­less claims of wide­spread vote fraud and worked to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion ahead of Janu­ary 6 are now enmeshed in a new effort to chal­lenge votes, voter eligib­il­ity, and elec­tion results in 2022 and beyond.

At the center of this effort is the Conser­vat­ive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, a right-wing nonprofit funded in part by Trump’s lead­er­ship PAC and home to several key former Trump aides. It is organ­iz­ing a network of groups and indi­vidu­als commit­ted to taking more control of elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion in future contests.

The network has published mater­i­als and hosted summits across the coun­try with the aim of coordin­at­ing a nation­wide effort to staff elec­tion offices, recruit poll watch­ers and poll work­ers, and build teams of local citizens to chal­lenge voter rolls, ques­tion postal work­ers, be “ever-present” in local elec­tion offices, and inund­ate elec­tion offi­cials with docu­ment requests. The effort is an extraordin­ary invest­ment in sustain­ing and bolster­ing the false narrat­ive of wide­spread voter fraud.

In form­ing the network, the Conser­vat­ive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute has spun a smat­ter­ing of grass­roots organ­iz­a­tions rooted in elec­tion deni­al­ism into a larger and more coordin­ated web of groups that includes estab­lish­ment entit­ies like Herit­age Action for Amer­ica, an affil­i­ate of the Herit­age Found­a­tion. The Repub­lican National Commit­tee — spear­head­ing its own unpre­ced­en­ted recruit­ment drive for poll watch­ers and work­ers — has parti­cip­ated in some of the network’s summits. Cleta Mitchell, a Repub­lican lawyer and public face of the effort, made the plan clear to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon: “We are arming the army of patri­ots, that’s our goal.” (Bannon has also weapon­ized elec­tion deni­al­ism to drive activ­ists to serve as poll watch­ers and staff other offices in a concer­ted effort that he has dubbed the “precinct strategy.”)

The Conser­vat­ive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute reflects a spider­web of connec­tions to key figures involved in the Janu­ary 6 insur­rec­tion or the wider effort to over­turn the elec­tion results. Mitchell helped Trump chal­lenge elec­tion results in court ahead of Janu­ary 6, promot­ing flimsy legal claims that judges threw out. She parti­cip­ated in the infam­ous phone call with Geor­gia Secret­ary of State Brad Raffen­sper­ger on which Trump pressed him to “find 11,780 votes.” Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows is a senior part­ner at the insti­tute and was the keynote speaker at its Geor­gia summit. Dan Scavino — Trump’s former social media director who promoted the Janu­ary 6 rally — is a digital fellow at the insti­tute. Other members of the insti­tute and its orbit also worked to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion.

The network’s efforts are laced with danger­ous false­hoods. Some groups in the network peddle the lie that the 2020 elec­tion could still be decer­ti­fied. Several summit speak­ers have previ­ously embraced false claims that the 2020 elec­tion was marred by wide­spread voter fraud. A speaker at an Arizona summit was part of a bogus slate of pres­id­en­tial elect­ors and was recently issued a grand jury subpoena by the Justice Depart­ment.  

An insti­tute guide published and shared at summits and else­where encour­ages indi­vidu­als to create their own local task forces in order to be “ever-present at the elec­tion office and board meet­ings, to hear and see and learn things that are only learned by being there.” The “Citizens Guide to Build­ing an Elec­tion Integ­rity Infra­struc­ture” also advises task force members to become elec­tion offi­cials and work­ers but fails to describe crit­ical differ­ences between partisan monit­or­ing efforts and offi­cial roles that must serve all voters. It instructs citizens to get exhaust­ive inform­a­tion to locate “bad addresses” and chal­lenge voter eligib­il­ity, without explain­ing common missteps that other organ­ized efforts to chal­lenge voters have previ­ously made, such as fail­ing to account for the ways elec­tion offi­cials record the addresses of student voters, unhoused voters, and milit­ary voters. And it encour­ages state-level activ­ists to identify whether offi­cials in attor­ney general offices are “friend or foe.”

In endors­ing combat­ive yet vague instruc­tions and promot­ing the unjus­ti­fied specter of wide­spread fraud, the unpre­ced­en­ted effort to organ­ize an “army” of citizens could lead to voter inter­fer­ence and intim­id­a­tion, improper mass voter chal­lenges, elec­tion secur­ity breaches, and other forms of lawbreak­ing in Novem­ber.

Groups in the network occa­sion­ally echo progress­ives’ rhet­oric, such as messages stress­ing the import­ance of protect­ing vulner­able voters. When paired with false beliefs about wide­spread voter fraud, however, those messages can carry sinis­ter under­tones and could lead to inter­fer­ence with voters and those who lawfully assist them. The Amer­ican Consti­tu­tional Rights Union, a group that has presen­ted at the summits, promotes misin­form­a­tion on its website concern­ing the legal­ity of assist­ance to elderly voters, describ­ing certain limit­a­tions on such assist­ance in a false or mislead­ing way. The group also claims that it made over 1,000 phone calls and sent more than 3,000 letters to nurs­ing homes and senior living facil­it­ies in the 2020 elec­tion “warn­ing against fraud and provid­ing import­ant legal details.” A differ­ent Pennsylvania group inspired by the insti­tute’s work urges activ­ists to find out the polit­ical affil­i­ation of every nurs­ing home admin­is­trator in the state.

In the new land­scape of elec­tions in 2022, states, offi­cials, civic groups, and the media can take action to protect against dangers to our demo­cratic process. States should enact laws and insti­tute prac­tices to prevent elec­tion system breaches, taking quick action to cure breaches when they occur. Law enforce­ment should take seri­ously threats to elec­tion work­ers and respond appro­pri­ately. And elec­tion offi­cials, tech compan­ies, civic groups, and the media should pree­mpt misin­form­a­tion by shar­ing accur­ate and contex­tu­al­ized inform­a­tion about elec­tions.

Originally published by the Brennan Center for Justice, 07.25.2022, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivs-NonCommercial license.

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