Hunting for fraud, conspiracy theorists organize “stakeouts”
One night last month, on the recommendation of a man known online as Captain K, a small group gathered in an Arizona parking lot and waited in folding chairs, hoping to catch the people they believed were trying to destroy American democracy by submitting fake earlyvoting ballots.
Captain K — which is what Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who espouses voting fraud conspiracy theories, calls himself — had set the plan in motion. In July, as states such as Arizona were preparing for their primary elections, he posted a proposal on the messaging app Telegram: “All- night patriot tailgate parties for EVERY DROP BOX IN AMERICA.” The post received more than 70,000 views.
Similar calls were galvanizing people in at least nine other states, signaling the latest outgrowth from rampant election fraud conspiracy theories coursing through the Republican Party.
In the nearly two years since former President Donald Trump catapulted false claims of widespread voter fraud from the political fringes to the conservative mainstream, many of his supporters have drifted from one theory to another in a frantic but unsuccessful search for evidence.
Many are now focused on ballot drop boxes — where people can deposit their votes into secure
and locked containers — under the unfounded belief that mysterious operatives, or socalled ballot mules, are stuffing them with fake ballots or otherwise tampering with them. And they are recruiting observers to monitor drop boxes across the country, tapping the millions of Americans swayed by bogus election claims.
In most cases, organizing efforts are nascent, with supporters posting unconfirmed plans to watch local drop boxes. But some small- scale “stakeouts” have been advertised using Craigslist, Telegram, Twitter, Gab and Truth Social, the social media platform backed by Trump. Several websites dedicated to the cause went online this year, including at least one meant to coordinate volunteers.
Some high- profile politicians have embraced the idea. Kari Lake, the Trump- endorsed Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, asked followers on Twitter whether they would “be willing to take a shift watching a drop box to catch potential Ballot Mules.”
Supporters have compared the events to harmless neighborhood watches or tailgate parties. But some online commenters discussed bringing AR- 15s and other firearms and have voiced their desire to make citizens’ arrests and log license plates. That has set off concerns among election officials and law enforcement that what supporters describe as legal patriotic oversight easily could slip into illegal voter intimidation, privacy violations, electioneering or confrontations.
“What we’re going to be dealing with in 2022 is more of a citizen corps of conspiracists that have already decided that there’s a problem and are now looking for evidence, or at least something they can twist into evidence, and use that to undermine confidence in results they don’t like,” said Matthew Weil, executive director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “When your entire premise is that there are problems, every issue looks like a problem, especially if you have no idea what you’re looking at.”
Keshel said in an interview that monitoring drop boxes could catch illegal “ballot harvesting,” or voters depositing ballots for other people. The practice is legal in some states, including California, but is illegal in battlegrounds Georgia and Arizona. There is no evidence that widespread illegal ballot harvesting occurred in the 2020 presidential election.
“To quality- control a process that is ripe for cheating, I suppose there’s no way other than monitoring,” Keshel said. “In fact, they have monitoring at polling stations when you go up, so I don’t see the difference.”
The legality of monitoring the boxes is hazy, Weil said. Laws governing supervision of polling places — such as whether watchers may document voters entering or exiting — differ across states and mostly have not been adapted to ballot boxes.
In 2020, election officials embraced ballot boxes as a legal solution to socially distanced voting during the pandemic. All but 10 states allowed them.
But many conservatives have argued that the boxes enable election fraud. The talk has been egged on by “2000 Mules,” a documentary by conservative commentator Dinesh D’souza, which uses leaps of logic and dubious evidence to claim that an army of partisan “mules” traveled among ballot boxes and stuffed them with fraudulent votes. The documentary proved popular on the Republican campaign trail and among rightwing commentators, who were eager for novel ways to keep doubts about the 2020 election alive.
“Ballot mules” have become a central character in false stories about the 2020 election. From November 2020 to the first reference to “2000 Mules” on Twitter in January 2022, the term “ballot mules” came up only 329 times, according to data. Since then, the term has surfaced 326,000 times on Twitter, 63% of the time alongside discussion of the documentary. Salem Media Group, the executive producer of the documentary, claimed in May that the film had earned more than $ 10 million.
The push for civilian oversight of ballot boxes has gained traction at the same time as legislative efforts to boost surveillance of drop- off sites. A state law passed this year in Utah requires 24- hour video surveillance to be installed at all unattended ballot boxes, an often challenging undertaking that has cost taxpayers in one county hundreds of thousands of dollars. County commissioners in Douglas County, Nebraska, voted in June to allocate $ 130,000 for drop box cameras to supplement existing cameras that the county does not own.