Ten days before Georgia’s Senate runoff election in 2021, Gamaliel Warren Turner Sr. , a 69-year-old veteran, found out that someone in his county had challenged his eligibility to vote. Turner, a retired major in the US Army, had requested an absentee ballot, and when it didn’t arrive in the mail, he got nervous and called the Muscogee County registrar’s office to figure out where it was.
According to court records, a clerk informed Turner that his name was on a list of thousands of voters in the county whose registrations were under investigation. “I was beyond irate. I was hollering,” Turner says.
“I didn’t know what the hell a voter challenge was. I just wanted to know, am I going to be able to vote or not?” Turner has lived in Georgia for his entire life and voted there in nearly every election for the past 50 years. He owns a home there and the utility bills are under his name.
He has a Georgia driver’s license that he uses to drive his two cars, both registered in Muscogee County. But in 2019, his job required that he temporarily relocate to Camarillo, California. In order to avoid missing packages while away on his temporary work assignment, he did what millions of Americans do every year and notified the United States Postal Service (USPS) that he wanted his mail forwarded to a new address.
What Turner didn’t know at the time was that this simple notification to the USPS would enmesh him in a scheme dreamed up by a right-wing activist group called True the Vote that ended up challenging the voter registrations of 364,000 Georgians. Best known for its work on the widely debunked film 2,000 Mules , True the Vote had developed an algorithm that matched names in voter rolls with data kept by the USPS about individuals who changed addresses. The group’s goal was to aggressively cull voter rolls, under the suspicion that inaccurate registrations lead to voter fraud, which is extremely rare in the US.
Along with Turner’s, True the Vote sent the names of approximately 4,000 supposedly ineligible voters to the leader of the Republican Party in Muscogee County, Alton Russell, a toilet paper salesman, who in turn submitted them to the county Board of Elections to challenge their voter registrations. But the scheme didn’t work: Most of the counties in Georgia rejected True the Vote’s challenges, and Turner successfully sued the Muscogee County Board of Elections to ensure his ballot would be counted in the 2021 runoff election. Undeterred, True the Vote has quietly rolled out a web app called IV3 to replicate this process around the country.
The browser-based application has led to the challenges of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations, the group claims. Yet little is known about IV3. The app is not active in most states, and to get access, you need to provide True the Vote with a valid form of identification.
But by analyzing the code IV3 uses for its frontend, WIRED has been able to piece together how the tool likely functions. Our review found that the app ultimately uses an ineffective and unreliable methodology to determine who should remain on the rolls. Experts say that the app weaponizes public data and is more likely to remove eligible voters from the rolls than it is to catch rampant fraud that doesn’t exist in this country.
True the Vote is a Texas–based nonprofit whose founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has played a crucial role in mainstreaming the voter fraud movement . The organization has set itself apart by using technology to legitimize their dubious claims of massive voter fraud, but it has consistently refused to provide any empirical evidence . IV3 is part of a growing strategy by right-wing activists to leverage state laws that allow a private citizen to dispute a voter’s eligibility to toss out tens of thousands of voter registrations and ballots in battleground states.
According to The New York Times , activists in Michigan tried to challenge 22,000 voter registrations for the state’s August primary. In Texas, residents challenged the eligibility of more than 6,000 voters in Harris County. While it’s unclear how many voter challenges were facilitated using True the Vote’s app, Facebook posts from groups organizing some of the country’s largest voter challenges suggest that people are actively using IV3.
For instance, in September, a group called VoterGA challenged the registrations of 37,500 voters in Georgia . On its Facebook page, one member encouraged her colleagues to use IV3, claiming that she had used the app to challenge nearly 6,000 people in Georgia’s Fayette County. According to the True the Votes tax filings obtained by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, True the Vote spent more than $500,000 on app development in 2020, using some of those funds to build a “proprietary organizing web app” that leverages its “national voter roll database” to “notify counties of voter role inaccuracies”.
The app, which is not named but whose description mirrors IV3, was likely built by OPSEC Group LLC, whose founder, Gregg Phillips, was a former board member of True the Vote who has worked closely with Engelbrecht for years. OPSEC also performed the debunked data analysis behind 2,000 Mules . Court marshals arrested Engelbrecht and Phillips last week after they refused a court order to turn over alleged evidence of voter fraud that’s central to a defamation case brought by software company Konnech against True the Vote.
Representatives for True the Vote did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Access to IV3 is limited only to verified individuals who reside in one of the seven states where the app is active. However, WIRED was able to analyze the app’s public-facing code to get a better understanding of how it works.
This was possible because upon loading the app’s login page, the browser automatically requests all the code needed to render the frontend components of the entire tool, even if a user is unauthenticated. By saving these HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files and running a web mock server, WIRED was able to explore some of the core features of the app, albeit without live data sent from True the Vote’s servers. In a help page WIRED found bundled in the app’s code, True the Vote claims that IV3 cross-references state databases of voter registrations with the USPS NCOALink database , a dataset of approximately 160 million permanent change-of-address records that can be licensed for a fee .
If True the Vote’s algorithm finds a “substantive discrepancy” between the two records, it will flag the registration for manual review by individuals who sign up to use the app. These records then show up in a page on the app called “IV3 Identified Records for Review. ” After a volunteer submits a challenge, True the Vote claims to “prepare that challenge for filing based on your state’s specific requirements.
” Network requests made by the app suggest that individuals who sign up for IV3 are only able to see and vet registered voters in their own county, as many state laws only allow other voters within the county to submit challenges. When we rendered the frontend components in IV3, we found that the tool also gives vetted users the ability to look up the registrations of any voter in their county in order to determine whether or not the registration looks suspicious enough to challenge. While this voter registration data is technically public, its distribution by a partisan group can feel intimidating.
“I feared that I could—or my family could—become the next target of harassment from True the Vote and their supporters for having voted, especially because my name and address had been published online and I had been publicly identified as a challenged voter,” a woman who had their registration challenged by True the Vote said in court records . While WIRED was unable to use the app with live data, court records suggest that the way True the Vote matches individuals from voter rolls to those in the USPS database appears broken. Ken Mayer, a political scientist who analyzed a file of challenged voters for a lawsuit that Fair Fight filed against True the Vote, said in an expert report that True the Vote’s file of challenged voters was “riddled with errors” and “almost certainly mismatches voters with NCOA records.
” He added, “The results do not come anywhere close to what would be required for valid practices in academic studies of election administration. ” True the Vote did not respond to questions about Mayer’s assessment. Moreover, experts say that the entire premise of using USPS data alone to invalidate voter registrations is flawed.
Andrew Garber, a counsel within the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, says that there are dozens of reasons why people might want their mail forwarded and all are insufficient alone to cancel a voter’s registration. “The use of this app is really concerning because it seems to be an effort to automate and take onto a mass scale a process that’s supposed to be local and individualized,” Garber says. USPS did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request to comment on True the Vote’s use of its address-change data.
The voter challenges facilitated by IV3 have already run into problems. In an email IV3 sent to its users in August that WIRED obtained, True the Vote has run into hurdles in Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The email states that in Pennsylvania, election officials told True the Vote each challenge requires a notarized and signed affidavit, at a cost of $5 to $7 each.
“Think about that for those of you who completed 20, or 50, or 100, or several hundred challenges,” the August email reads. “It was never our intent for this process to cost our volunteers any money, much less hundreds to thousands of dollars just to ask your county to check and verify the rolls. We will be talking to election attorneys and Pennsylvania officials about this statute.
It needs to be changed. ” While IV3 makes it possible to file a large number of challenges, it’s highly unlikely that any of them would be sufficient to remove anyone from voter rolls . Nevertheless, the challenges are likely to burden election officials as they may have to research and adjudicate each challenge brought.
According to Garber, “even if the challenges don’t result in people being removed from the roles, they are gumming up the works and slowing down other vital election processes. ” Turner says he already voted by absentee ballot for the 2022 US midterms, which conclude today. But that doesn’t mean he’s not concerned with what True the Vote has been up to around the country.
“It’s dangerous,” he says. “They are just throwing everything up against the wall and seeing what sticks. All of their strategies to disenfranchise voters are just sowing distrust about elections and it’s frustrating.
I just don’t know where all of this is heading. ”.
From: wired
URL: https://www.wired.com/story/true-the-vote-iv3-app-voter-fraud/
