It begins, as such campaigns in democracies often do, with paperwork. In the weeks before California’s November election, letters have been arriving in the offices of county registrars — dozens of requests for public records, sent by organizations that believe the vote cannot be trusted. CalMatters obtained the request logs of 13 geographically and demographically diverse counties to learn who was asking, and for what.
California law gives everyone the right to ask. But election activists have a proven history of using what the agencies hand over to wrap disproven claims of election irregularities in a veneer of credibility — and there is a business in it. “It’s always accompanied by a plea to donate,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told CalMatters. “There’s always a donate button. There’s always a newsletter that says ‘donate.’ They’re trying to get you to, you know, ‘Give us $25 from your Social Security check’ every time.” He called it an “economy of grift.”
The Ledger of True the Vote
The records show that Catherine Engelbrecht and others at True the Vote made requests in at least Fresno, Orange, Riverside and Sacramento counties — part of 250 such requests across the country, spokeswoman Megan Denning said by email. The group wants to “document, directly from election officials, how jurisdictions are responding and what actions, if any, they are taking” in response to one of President Donald Trump’s election executive orders, key provisions of which the courts blocked for being unconstitutional. “Regardless of political perspective, Americans should be able to agree on the importance of transparency in government processes,” Denning wrote. No one from the group responded to interview requests. On its website, it posts the harvested documents and urges followers to take “on-the-ground action in your state.”
The group’s history is a ledger with entries missing. After the 2016 presidential election, True the Vote said it had evidence of 3 million illegal votes and launched a fundraising campaign, saying it needed $1 million to verify its data before releasing the proof; the proof never came, according to an investigation by Reveal based on court and tax records. After the 2020 election, it raised $2.5 million from a single donor on promises of fraud evidence and a legal strategy to prove it — and Reveal found that much of that money was routed to Engelbrecht herself, to a longtime board member’s company and to an attorney for the nonprofit.
In a podcast last month, Engelbrecht and Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis spoke of the movement’s end goal: to put material before Trump. “If it actually gets to the president, he’ll be able to make some significant changes,” Curtis said — what changes, he left unclear. “And there’s still time to do that, even before this election.” The federal government has since met Curtis in person: in September, FBI and other federal agents visited his office in Redding and inspected June primary ballots, after the longtime election denier declared the contest he had overseen in his heavily Republican rural county might be fraudulent. He told reporters the ballots looked, felt and smelled funny — proof, he suggested, of a nefarious group stuffing drop boxes with fakes.
This is where paper suspicion becomes armed fact. Earlier this year, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office seized 650,000 ballots from last November’s election, relying on an activist group’s questionable findings — a seizure that ended when California’s top court ordered Sheriff Chad Bianco to give the ballots back. Curtis had advised the activist group behind it. On the podcast, Engelbrecht — whose name Trump has been known to shout at his rallies — set her own timetable. “Whatever happens, whatever level of chaos it causes, let it come today,” she said. “It’s better than tomorrow. Let’s just get ‘er done.”
The Foundation and the Resumes
The Public Interest Legal Foundation describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit “public interest law firm dedicated to election integrity.” Its offices open onto the White House. Trump appointed its president, J. Christian Adams, to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Adams once sat on Trump’s election integrity team. Its former board chair, Cleta Mitchell, was on the telephone call when Trump demanded Georgia’s secretary of state find the votes to overturn the 2020 result. And in 2019 the foundation settled a lawsuit in which it admitted to falsely accusing thousands of legal Virginia voters of being part of an “alien invasion” of noncitizen voters — claims built on public records it had obtained and shared publicly, complete with voters’ Social Security numbers, home addresses, emails and phone numbers. Adams agreed to apologize, and the foundation pledged to redact personal information before sharing records again.
Seven years later, its research director, Logan Churchwell, has asked all 58 California counties for election personnel records — organizational charts, job descriptions and resumes, including those of people who applied and were never hired. It is standard research into election worker qualifications, he told CalMatters, “to see if there were any patterns to glean” — stock for future testimony in Sacramento or Washington. Virginia, he argued, was a case of election officials’ own poor record keeping, of the kind his foundation finds all the time. His organization, he insisted, is no election-denier group: it has “never challenged the outcome of an election” and does not fundraise off false claims. That is others’ trade: “They’re looking for grand conspiracies and smoking guns. And there are people out there that are happy to fundraise off that mentality, and that’s really unfortunate.”
The Local Hunters
Below the heralded names work the local prospectors. New California State, a group trying to carve a 51st state out of the old one, has requested ballots, internal communications, voting machine records and voter registration numbers in multiple counties — and one of its members pressed Sheriff Bianco, behind the scenes, to investigate fraud claims in Riverside County. Its leader, Robert Paul Preston, said in a brief telephone call that the group has found “massive voter fraud in all 58 counties.” He did not elaborate. Another member, Darcia Stebbens, an activist and conservative talk-radio host in San Luis Obispo County, regularly makes unfounded claims about election fraud. And the worrying arithmetic of the logs is this: material that begins in a believer’s inbox has ended, in Riverside County and in Shasta, in the hands of men with badges.