One night last month, at the urging of a man known online as Captain K, a small group gathered in a parking lot in Arizona, waiting in folding chairs. ballot paper.
Captain K — a self-proclaimed former U.S. Army intelligence officer, Seth Kechel, who supports voter fraud conspiracy theories — has set the plan in motion. In July, he posted the proposal on the messaging app Telegram. This post has been viewed over 70,000 times.
Similar calls have sent people into a frenzy in at least nine other states, pointing to recent results from the election fraud conspiracy theory circulating within the Republican Party.
Nearly two years after former President Donald J. Trump spread false allegations that voter fraud was rampant from the political fringes to the conservative mainstream, Trump supporters are desperate. The search for evidence, shifting from one theory to another, was unsuccessful.
Many are now focused on ballot drop-boxes, where people can cast their ballots into a safe, locked container. baseless belief Mysterious operatives, so-called ballot mules, are stuffing and tampering with fake ballots. And they are recruiting observers to monitor countless dropboxes across the country, taking advantage of the millions of Americans who have been misled by bogus election claims.
For the most part, the organizing effort is still in its infancy, with supporters posting unconfirmed plans to look at local dropboxes. But some smaller “stakeouts” have been promoted using Craigslist, Telegram, Twitter, Gab, and Trump-backed social media platform Truth Social. Several websites dedicated to the cause have come online this year, including at least one intended to coordinate volunteers.
Some prominent politicians have embraced this idea. Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, told her followers on Twitter, “Would you mind looking at the dropbox and taking a shift to catch potential voters?” Are you there?” I asked.
Supporters compare the event to innocuous neighborhood lookouts and pizza-and-beer-fueled tailgate parties. However, some of his commenters online have discussed bringing in AR-15s and other firearms and expressed a desire to arrest citizens and record their plates. This is because what advocates describe as legal patriotic oversight can easily lead to illegal voter intimidation, invasion of privacy, campaigning, or conflict between election officials and law enforcement. has raised concerns.
“What we’re trying to address in 2022 is a civil group of conspiracy theorists who have decided there is already a problem and are now looking for evidence, or at least what they can do to twist the evidence and undermine it. We’re looking for something we can do. We’re confident in the outcome they don’t like,” said Matthew Weil, executive director of the Election Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Assuming there is a problem makes every problem look like a problem, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking at.”
Keshel, who inspired Arizona rallies as Captain K, said in interviews that monitoring drop-boxes could prevent illegal “collection of ballots,” or the practice of voters depositing ballots for others. He said he could find it.While the practice is legal in some states, such as California, most illegal On battlefields like Georgia and Arizona. There is no evidence of widespread illegal ballot collection in the 2020 presidential election.
“I think the only way to quality control a process ripe for fraud is to monitor it,” Keschel said. “Actually, when I go to the polling place, there’s surveillance, so I can’t tell the difference.”
Weill said the legality of monitoring boxes is ambiguous. Supervision law The number of polling places varies from state to state, including whether observers can record voters’ comings and goings, and ballot boxes are largely unadapted.
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But many conservatives say the box enables election fraud. The story was instigated by the documentary 2000 Mules by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza. Using leaps of logic and dubious evidence, the documentary claims that an army of partisan “mules” moved between ballot boxes and stuffed them with fraudulent ballots. vote. The documentary became popular among Republican campaigners and right-wing commentators who were desperate for novel ways to keep doubts about the 2020 election alive.
“Voting mules” have become central figures in hoaxes about the 2020 election. According to Zignal Labs data, from November 2020 to January 2022, when he first referenced “2000 Mules” on Twitter, the term “ballot mules” had only appeared 329 times. did not come. Since then, the term has appeared on his Twitter 326,000 times, 63% of which aligns with discussions about the documentary.The documentary’s executive producer, Salem Media Group, announced in May that the film will $10 million.
The push for citizen oversight of ballot boxes is gaining momentum, along with legislative action to strengthen polling place oversight. A state law passed this year in Utah requires all unattended ballot boxes to have 24-hour video surveillance of her. often challenging work It cost one county taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars. County commissioners in Douglas County, Nebraska, which includes Omaha, voted in June to allocate $130,000 for Dropbox cameras to supplement existing cameras that the counties don’t own.
In June, lawmakers in Arizona approved a budget that includes $500,000 for a ballot box monitoring pilot program. His 16 boxes contained, with 24/7 photo and video surveillance, rejecting votes if the cameras weren’t working, and he only accepted and submitted one vote at a time. Produce a receipt for each vote cast.
Many staking proponents argue that dropbox should be banned entirely. Some have posted video tours of the Dropbox site, claiming that the cameras were pointed in the wrong direction or that the locations weren’t properly protected.
Melody Jennings, the minister and counselor who founded the right-wing group Clean Elections USA, claimed credit for the Arizona rally on Truth Social, saying it was the group’s “first run.” The surveillance team she organized would try to record every voter who used a dropbox, she said. Jennings did not respond to a request for comment.
After a rally in Arizona, organizers wrote letters to prominent Truth Social users, including Mr. Trump, saying, “A mule came to the scene, watched the party, and left without dropping a vote,” without evidence. claimed. Comments on other social media posts about the event terrified voters wary of the group’s involvement, attracted those planning to report the group’s activities, or simply disappeared. He pointed out that he may have witnessed an unknown passerby.
On August 2, Mr. Lake and several other opponents of the election won the primary in Arizona. There, a GoFundMe campaign solicited donations for “a statewide presence of volunteer citizens who station him 24 hours a day at each ballot box location.” Republican Senator Kerry Townsend told a congressional hearing in May that people would train “hidden trail cameras” at ballot boxes to track suspected fraudsters to their cars and record their license plate numbers. said.
“I’m so happy to hear about vigilantes wanting to camp with these drop boxes,” Townsend said.
Monitoring plans are being formed in other states as well. An audit of Hawaii’s polls posted that citizens were “putting together an oversight team” to oversee Dropbox. A similar group in Pennsylvania, Audit the Vote PA, posted on social media that they should do the same.
In Michigan, a shaky video shot from inside a car and posted to Truth Social showed what appeared to be a man collecting ballots from a drop-box. At the end, I shot the license plate of the truck up.
In Washington, a right-wing group launched Drop Box Watch, a scheduling service. Helping People Organize Stakeouts, suggest taking pictures or videos of the “abnormality”. Volunteer slots for state primaries earlier this month have all been filled, according to the group’s website.
Sheriff’s offices in King County, Washington, including Seattle, are investigating after the election. signs appeared in some drop box In-state sites warn voters that they are “under surveillance.”
One Gab user with over 2,000 followers has provided staking tips on social networks and Rumble. helmet, goggles, cloth. “I need to put it in the Gab group, so I always have a log of what’s going on.”
Calls for civilian surveillance go beyond the ballot box. One of his posts on a conservative blog called out people monitoring “any and all questionable activity before, during, and after the election” at ballot printers, vote counting centers, and candidates’ offices. I’m rooting for you.
Paul Gronke, director of the Center for Election and Voting Information at Reed University, said activists wanting to improve election security should implement more data transparency measures and allow voters to monitor the status of absentee ballots. suggested that we should promote a tracking program to He said he’s never heard of a legitimate example of Dropbox’s watchdog successfully catching fraud.
The potential for conflict involving self-appointed supervisors who have had little training in state-specific electoral procedures and who have been indicted by a constant diet of misinformation and militarized rhetoric ” It’s just a recipe for disaster” and “endangers the ability of voters to vote,” Gronke said.
“There are ways to protect the system, but having vigilantes around dropbox is not the way to do it,” he said. I’m just there.”
Cecilia Kang contributed to the report.
