Trump's allies ramp up voter rolls challenges
A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.
Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.
In one Michigan town, more than 100 voters were removed after an activist lobbied officials, citing an obscure state law from the 1950s. In the Detroit suburb of Waterford, a clerk removed 1,000 people from the rolls in response to a similar request. The ousted voters included an activeduty Air Force officer who was wrongly removed and later reinstated.
The purge in Waterford went unnoticed by state election officials until The New York Times discovered it. The Michigan secretary of state's office has since told the clerk to reinstate the voters, saying the removals did not follow the process laid out in state and federal law, and issued a warning to the state's 1,600 clerks.
The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grassroots groups that formed after Trump's attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.
Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.
The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists upto-date are failing.
The bigger risk, they note, is disenfranchising voters.
“If you're challenging 1,000 voters at once, you are not bringing the sophistication required when you are handling someone's constitutional right,” said Michael Siegrist, clerk of Canton Township, Michigan, and a board member of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks.
In an email response to questions, Mitchell dismissed those concerns.
“The only persons `disenfranchised' by following the law are the illegal voters, whose illegal registrations suppress and dilute the votes of those who are lawfully registered,” she said. “Our primary goal is to see that the laws of the states are followed and enforced by those sworn to administer the elections according to the applicable law.”
It is difficult to know precisely how many voters have been dropped from the rolls as a result of the campaign — and even harder to determine how many were dropped in error. A Times review of challenges in swing states, which included public records, interviews and audio recordings, suggested the activists were rarely as effective at removing voters as they were in Waterford.
But even when they fail, the challenges have consequences. In some states, a challenge alone is enough to limit a voter's access to a mail ballot, or to require additional documentation at the polls. Privately, activists have said they consider that a victory.
At the same time, rightwing media outlets have promoted the challenges, casting public officials as corrupt and creating fodder that could be used in another round of legal challenges should Trump lose again.
“It really is aimed at being able to cast doubt on the results after the fact,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization. “But also, before the election itself, at being able to shape who turns out and how they turn out.”
`That's just garbage'
In Michigan, activists call their project Soles to the Rolls — an apparent play on Souls to the Polls, a get-out-the-vote effort popular in Black churches.
The undertaking pulls from every corner of the election-denial movement. Its parent group is an offshoot of Mitchell's national network. A top deputy to Mike Lindell, a leading promoter of election-related conspiracy theories, helped conceive of the data program the activists use to hunt for suspicious voters, according to recordings reviewed by the Times. The state's Republican Party, which is mired in a leadership dispute, has also endorsed the data program, and the Trump campaign cited its numbers in a misinformation-riddled report released in January.
That program, called Check My Vote, identifies addresses with irregularities, such as missing an apartment number or having an unusually high number of registered voters.
In training sessions, Tim Vetter, a developer of the system, has acknowledged that it turned up large numbers of supposedly questionable voters in dense areas of Detroit and in student housing in Ann Arbor, both overwhelmingly Democratic cities.
Activists can then use the data to assemble lists of voters to challenge. The program also tracks the outcome of the challenge and whether a voter later tries to vote, information that could be shared with election officials or law enforcement, Vetter has said, according to recordings reviewed by the Times.
“That's just garbage,” Chris Thomas, an elections consultant for Detroit, said of the analysis. “It's targeting lower income, immigrants and students.”
Vetter did not respond to a request for comment. Janine Iyer, who trains activists for the project, described the work as support for public officials. “All we're doing is asking clerks to follow the law, and we're just assisting them because we feel it's important,” Iyer, a Republican Party official in Livingston County, near Detroit and Ann Arbor, said in an interview.
Federal law requires clerks to keep voters who may have moved on the rolls for two election cycles, unless they receive notice from the voter. The Times identified four Michigan cities or towns where activists have lobbied officials to follow a
faster removal process.
In October, Polly Skolarus, the clerk in Genoa, a small township west of Detroit, received a list of about 120 names and an email from Iyer suggesting she would be “breaking the law” if she did not begin the removal process outlined in a state law, according to records obtained by Documented, a liberal investigative group, and shared with the Times.
`We're not ... whack jobs'
In Nevada, the Pigpen Project has set out to clean the voter rolls. Two longtime conservative activists, Chuck Muth and Dan Burdish, have organized door-to-door canvassing and enlisted landlords to compare voter rolls with their leasing records. More than once, they have escorted landlords to the Clark County registrar's office so that they can flag registrations of former tenants.
Stephanie Wheatley, a spokesperson for Clark County, said that the evidence was not enough to remove a voter but that it was “enough for the election department to do research and investigate.”
Wheatley said the registrar did not know how many investigations or removals had been prompted by the group.
The Pigpen Project, which is coordinating with Mitchell's network, uses a platform based on data from VoteRef.com, a database that has been criticized by election officials as unreliable.
Burdish and Muth did not respond to requests for comment.
On a video call in November, Burdish displayed a map of Clark County, home to roughly 70% of the state's voters, that was littered with blue dots supposedly identifying residences with problematic voters, according to a copy of the video obtained by Documented.
In the video, Burdish said his volunteers would be knocking on those doors and describing themselves as part of a quasi-governmental effort, despite having no connection to Clark County.
The goal, Burdish said on the call, was “to make sure that they know that we are working with the local registrar of voters and, you know, we're not, I say, whack jobs.”