How Election Deniers Became Mainstream—and Are Weaponizing Tech
Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and challenge voter rolls. And though their work was once fringe, its become mainstreamed in the Republican Party. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we focus on what these groups are doing, and what this means for voters and the election workers already facing threats and harassment.
Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Tori Elliott is @Telliotter. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Write to us at [email protected]. Our show is produced by produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer and Amar Lal mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is the Executive Producer of Audio Development and Chris Bannon is Global Head of Audio at Conde Nast.
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Transcript
Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Today, we’re going to talk about how election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt November. And what that means for voters and the election workers already facing threats and harassment.
Catherine Engelbrecht: We’re going to be engaged. We are going to understand the process and the lawful approach to the electoral system. And we’re going to have options to continue to hold to those truths. We’re not going to back down.
Leah Feiger: That was Catherine Engelbrecht. She’s the founder of True the Vote, a group that’s been effectively trying to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade. This recording is from a webinar that she led about organizing local activist groups to challenge election officials. They do this by falsely claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony registrations, and the group really became a big deal after 2020 when claims of election fraud exploded. Now along with a bunch of other similar groups, they’re hosting training sessions about how to organize on a hyper-local level. They’re learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and deploy IV3, a software tool that allows people to challenge voter rolls. Joining me today from Cork, Ireland to talk about all of this is David Gilbert. David is a senior politics writer at WIRED who just published an article all about True the Vote and groups like them this week on wired.com. David, you sat through two whole True the Vote webinars. How was it?
David Gilbert: It was interesting, and I think after about five minutes when Catherine Engelbrecht started talking about how prayers could make ice particles look more beautiful, I knew I was in for an interesting time.
Leah Feiger: Oh, I’m so glad you sat through all of that for us. Yeah. What exactly do they want? What does True the Vote want here?
David Gilbert: True the Vote is coming from a place where they fundamentally believe that elections are broken and they’re rigged, and they’re fraudulent. What they really want is they want voter rolls to be cleaned up and they want their supporters to help them in cleaning up those voter rolls.
Leah Feiger: Why do groups like True the Vote care so much about these voter rolls? What specifically is drawing them to this issue?
David Gilbert: Voter rolls are the lists of registered voters that each state or local jurisdiction maintains of the people who are able to vote in upcoming elections. So they’re very important in maintaining them and keeping them clean as the phrasing goes, is very important. But what True the Vote believe is that voter rolls across the country, particularly in swing states, are filled with fake or phony voters and they believe that their mission is to go out and find these fake voters and challenge them and get them removed from voter rolls.
Leah Feiger: But these “fake” voter registrations, they aren’t actual problems, right?
David Gilbert: No. Like cleaning and maintaining voter rolls and registrations is difficult because people die, people move. It’s a job election officials have to do constantly and keep them updated, and obviously there are going to be people who slip through the cracks and people who move who never inform election officials that they’ve moved. So there will be people on the voter list who shouldn’t be there. But the vigor is infinitesimally small and it is not a significant number that it could impact the outcome of any election.
Leah Feiger: But they’re focusing on it anyway. Let’s talk about exactly what…
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