Eighteen months after Donald Trump lost the White House, loyal supporters continue to falsely claim that electoral machines across America stole his 2020 election. To counter this false claim, some hardline Trumpists are taking the law into their own hands – trying, with some success, to jeopardize the electoral systems themselves. An unannounced surveillance video recorded such an attempt in August in the rural Colorado city of Kiowa. Footage obtained by Reuters through a request for public records shows county official Ella Dallas Schroeder, the county’s top election official, working on the cables and typing on his phone as he copied computer disks containing sensitive information. Schroeder, a Republican, later testified that he was receiving instructions on how to copy system data from a retired Air Force colonel and political activist who tended to prove Trump lost by fraud. On that day, August 26, Schroeder made a “forensic picture of everything on the election server,” according to his testimony, and later handed the cloned hard drives to two lawyers. Schroeder is now under investigation for possible election violations by the Colorado Secretary of State, who also sued him demanding the return of the data. Schroeder defied the state’s request and refused to identify one of the lawyers who owned the hard drives. The other is a private lawyer working with an activist backed by Mike Lindell, the pillow tycoon and election conspiracy theorist. Schroeder said in a legal statement that he believed he had a “legal duty” to keep the ballot papers. He declined to comment on the report. The episode is one of eight known attempts to gain unauthorized access to electoral systems in five U.S. states since the 2020 election. , according to a Reuters investigation into the incidents. Some of the breaches, including one in Elbert County, were partly inspired by the mistaken belief that state-mandated upgrades or maintenance of the electoral system would erase evidence of alleged fraud in the 2020 election, in fact, state election authorities say. , these processes have no effect on the ability of electoral systems to store data from previous elections. The incidents include a North Carolina case first reported last week by Reuters in which a local Republican leader threatened to fire a county top executive or cut her salary if she did not pay him. unauthorized access to polling equipment. In southern Michigan, a pro-Trump official who has spoken out in support of QAnon’s conspiracy theories on social media defied state orders to maintain a polling machine with the unfounded belief that it could dispel evidence of a presumption. In another Michigan case, a Republican activist impersonated an official from a fabricated government agency in a conspiracy to seize election equipment. Some of the people and groups involved in the election watchdog movement are gaining financial support from Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow Inc. and one of the most outspoken supporters of Trump’s false allegations of fraud. Lindell said he hired four top members of a team, the US Election Integrity Plan or USEIP. The group received Lindell support about three months after its co-founder advised Elbert County Clerk Schroeder on trying to copy and leak voting data. In all, Lindell told Reuters he had spent about $ 30 million and hired up to 70 people, including lawyers and “cyber people”, in part to support the Cause of America, a right-wing network of election activists. Lindell, who said he had not been involved in data breaches, said his effort was aimed at proving fraud in the 2020 election and reshaping the US election by getting rid of electronic voting machines and getting back on paper. Trump’s ally has said his allegations of fraud will eventually be justified, despite ridicule from the media. “We have to get rid of the machines!” said Lindell. “We have to melt them down and use them as prison railings and put in prison everyone who had anything to do with them.” A Trump spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
“Destroying the trust of the voters”
Four election law experts told Reuters that the scale of these ballot violations was unprecedented in modern-day US elections. Violations are particularly worrying, election officials say, because they are breaking the chain of ballot storage and billboard equipment. Such safeguards make it possible to track who exactly handled sensitive voter data. are necessary for the security of the elections and for resolving any provocations or allegations of fraud. “You have to make sure that these ballots are kept under strict guard at all times,” said David Becker, executive director of the non-partisan Center for Electoral Innovation and Research. “It destroys the confidence of the voters in the United States.” Such breaches can also constitute privacy breaches by disclosing information to individual voters. Schroeder leaked Colorado data may have included ballot papers showing how people voted, according to the State Department’s office. If so, that would violate a key principle of modern American democracy: secret ballot, which aims to protect voters from politically motivated harassment or intimidation and to prevent vote-buying. Secret ballot “is a fundamental right in the US election,” said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a non-partisan group that advocates for safe elections. The Reuters incident all happened in states that competed in the recent election: two in Colorado, three in Michigan and one in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. At least five of the cases are under investigation by local or federal law enforcement, with three arrests and one conviction, according to state and local officials. Four of the violations forced election officials to certify or replace election equipment that was no longer safe. The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment. The type of data leaked varies. In some cases, the full extent of the damage remains unknown. In Colorado’s Mesa County, Secretary of State Tina Peters is accused of allowing an unauthorized person to create a “forensic picture” of a voting equipment hard drive. In addition, the confidential passwords required to upgrade the county’s election software were posted online, according to a Peters indictment. Like Schroeder, Peters said she had a statutory duty to keep the ballot papers. He accused Dominion and the foreign minister, without evidence, of conspiring to destroy evidence of electoral fraud. Three other attempts – in Lake County, Ohio, in the Cross Village of Michigan and in Surry, North Carolina – are not believed to have accessed the data. In two other cases, Reuters was unable to determine which data, if any, was stolen. It is also unclear what data, if any, may have been accessed in Adams Township, Michigan, where a key component of a polling machine was lost for four days in October 2021. It was eventually found in the office of an employee who posted memes indicating support. for QAnon on Facebook. QAnon is a conspiracy theory that portrays Trump as a savior fighting a secret war against a group of Satanist pedophiles and cannibals, including prominent Democrats. The rise of what election security officials describe as “internal threats” – officials leaking classified election data or undermining ballot machines – coincides with a national campaign of pressure from Lindel-backed groups and other Trump allies traveling to the country. pressure on local officials to replace electronic voting systems with hand-counted ballots. The impetus comes in the run-up to the November midterm elections that will judge the control of the US Congress, which is now narrowly held by the Democrats, and the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump has stated that he could seek a second term in the White House. House. County and city officials are in the depths of things, in some cases as targets of pressure, in others as supposed actors. Officials in the United States are often key election administrators in addition to managing vital records, such as marriage licenses. The American right-wing focus on the voting machine intensified in the days after Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump. The defeated subordinate and his lawyers, including former New York mayor Rudolf Giuliani, have begun making bizarre claims about rigged machines. The allegations were soon found to be false by the courts and Trump’s own security chief, and led to ongoing defamation lawsuits against Giuliani and others from a Trump camp target, Domsion V. Dominion’s machines have been at the center of many baseless electoral conspiracy theories, including financier George Soros and the family of the late Venezuelan Socialist President Hugo Chavez, who conspired with the Denver-based Dominion to oust him. Dominion said statements by Lindell and others “about Dominion have been repeatedly demystified, including by bipartisan government officials.” Despite the lack of evidence, many of Trump’s allies continue to insist that electronic voting machines were rigged in 2020 and support a return to print ballots. Electoral officials from both parties warn that such a change would make voting less secure. They say that electronic voting machines provide more safeguards against fraud than paper ballot boxes, reducing human error and preventing delays that could be exploited by bad agents …
