Election denial organization True the Vote says it “is reaching out to sheriffs across the country” to monitor ballot drop boxes

True the Vote founder said the organization would provide local sheriffs with “camera equipment” to monitor drop boxes and in exchange the public can livestream the footage to “see for themselves what’s happening”

Written by Alex Kaplan

Research contributions from Payton Armstrong

Published 08/06/24 2:02 PM EDT

During July and August media appearances, the leadership of the election denier organization True the Vote revealed that it is trying to partner with local sheriffs to monitor ballot drop boxes for supposed voter fraud during the 2024 election, particularly in swing states like Wisconsin, where the organization’s founder claimed to “have three very influential sheriffs.”

True the Vote was founded in 2009 — following the election of former President Barack Obama — by then-tea party activist Catherine Engelbrecht with the goal of pushing for voter ID laws and purging voter rolls. Engelbrecht, whom “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander has called “the godmother of the election integrity movement,” and her business partner, Gregg Phillips, a Republican operative and former Mississippi official, have repeatedly pushed false election-related claims since at least 2016. Phillips claimed without evidence that millions of illegal votes had been cast in the 2016 presidential election, and both Engelbrecht and Phillips were listed as executive producers for and starred in 2000 Mules, a widely debunked 2022 film that claims to show evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. (Salem Media, which distributed the film, has since retracted it and removed it from its platforms.) Engelbrecht has admitted that former President Donald Trump is a “natural beneficiary of the majority of what we [True the Vote] do.”

Engelbrecht and Phillips also cultivated a close relationship with influencers in the QAnon community, turning over supposedly “devastating” evidence of 2020 election fraud and asking the QAnon community to “start connecting dots” and look further into election software company Konnech. As a result, those figures targeted the company, and the Los Angeles County, California, district attorney later indicted Konnech CEO Eugene Yu, apparently spurred at least in part by True the Vote’s and QAnon figures’ efforts. The charges were ultimately dropped, with the county and Yu later reaching a $5 million settlement. True the Vote also collaborated with a then-QAnon supporter whose group monitored drop boxes during the 2022 elections.

Ahead of the 2024 elections, the organization has launched an app based on flawed data that “enables users to research voter data and submit voter-eligibility challenges to local election offices.” In multiple media appearances in late July and early August, Engelbrecht appeared to reveal an additional 2024 effort to partner with local sheriffs and target ballot drop boxes, particularly in swing states like Wisconsin.

During a July 30 interview with self-described Christian nationalist “prophet” Lance Wallnau — in which Wallnau predicted that “there will be cheating” using drop boxes in swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan — Engelbrecht said that True the Vote would be “working with sheriffs to identify areas that sheriffs would be willing to allow us to grant them camera equipment that they can monitor and we can livestream.” When Wallnau asked specifically about Wisconsin, Engelbrecht said, “We have three very influential sheriffs, and we look forward to more. We’re getting there next week to do a site assessment.”

From the July 30, 2024, edition of The Lance Wallnau Show, streamed on Rumble

CATHERINE ENGELBRECHT (TRUE THE VOTE FOUNDER): But you then see states like Wisconsin, where, up until 2023, the Supreme Court had made the decision that there would be no more drop boxes in that state. Then the Supreme Court makeup was changed. It went from conservative to liberal. And just a month or so ago, that Supreme Court reopened the case that determined the unconstitutionality of ballot drop boxes, made a new decision, say — said that now that they will be used. And so what you’re seeing in Wisconsin as we speak is the installation of over 500 new ballot drop boxes across the state.

LANCE WALLNAU (HOST): Oh my gosh. In Wisconsin. The swing state of Wisconsin.

ENGELBRECHT: That’s right.

WALLNAU: And, you know, I’ll get in trouble for this, but we gotta have people watching these drop boxes. I don’t wanna have another election where the camera’s down, you know? I want Dinesh D’Souza at every drop box with a camera crew, and I wanna see what’s going on, and I wanna track these people as they’re doing their multiple ballot drops. But how frustrating is that? And that comes because of a Supreme Court vote. And so —

ENGELBRECHT: Right.

WALLNAU: How about Michigan?

ENGELBRECHT: Yeah, it’s a — yeah, well, Michigan’s a similar — and I’ll tell you, you know, when we came out, after having provided — we did that huge geospatial project where we were looking at drop boxes and geofenced around the drop boxes and then measured the number of times that a mobile device went to the drop box, and then that became the subject matter for what Dinesh turned into 2000 Mules. But with that sort of as a backdrop, we are very familiar with the problems of ballot drop boxes. And in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, the — you know, one of the many tragedies was that they told their citizens that they would monitor those drop boxes, that they would have surveillance cameras on them, and they did not. And so we know that now. We know that the cameras are not to be relied upon, that the belief that this would be monitored in any way is frankly not to be believed.

And so what we are doing at True the Vote is taking it an extra step and working with sheriffs to identify areas that sheriffs would be willing to allow us to grant them camera equipment that they can monitor and we can livestream. It’s our opinion that making this transparent is the best way to alleviate the anxiety that comes from knowing that those drop boxes are just open to anything that people want to shove into them.

And so making that — making it visible, you know, taking it public, is the way that we hope — in one of many ways, that we hope to push back this general election cycle.

WALLNAU: Alright. Now listen, folks. That’s a mouthful, but I want you to hear what we just discussed. There will be cheating. The drop boxes is where they’re going to put fake votes. They’re going to do multiple votes. They’re going to drop wads of votes.

If what we’ve seen before is repeated in the swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin, then we got Pennsylvania and Georgia and Arizona. We know where the states are that we gotta work in. We’re going to have to go to True the Vote right now. You gotta go there and you gotta support these people. This is how you do it. If you’re in Michigan or if you’re in Wisconsin, especially, you need to fund the camera operation. You got — do you have camera? Do you have any sheriffs working with you in Wisconsin too?

ENGELBRECHT: Yes. We have three very influential sheriffs, and we look forward to more. We’re getting there next week to do a site assessment. But we have the plans in place. We’ve learned a lot from the project we undertook in 2020 and are a little wiser and a whole lot older, but we’re going to get it done in a whole new way, and we look so forward to livestreaming it. I just think that’s essential. People need to see what’s really happening.

The following day, on True the Vote’s own Lunch and Learn podcast, Engelbrecht encouraged viewers to monitor drop boxes, and said that True the Vote was “reaching out to sheriffs across the country where drop boxes are going to be located and offering to provide them with camera equipment that they can help to oversee” while the public has the “ability to livestream the footage coming off of that drop box so that people can see for themselves what’s happening.”

From the July 31, 2024, edition of True the Vote's Lunch and Learn, streamed on Locals

CATHERINE ENGELBRECHT (TRUE THE VOTE FOUNDER): Drop boxes should be monitored, full stop. Wherever they are, there needs to be a camera, at minimum, on that drop box. And we should all have an understanding of who is — how it’s going to be monitored and who’s monitoring it, what that process looks like, and how you can go about getting the access to the video, and all of those things.

And so I would suggest this: Even though True the Vote can ask that — we did this in 2020 and asked the question nationwide — there’s nothing preventing all of you, and the people that check into these Lunch and Learns during the week are typically pretty rock solid activists. I would suggest thinking about filing your own open records request, and there are templates for that. You can find them online. You can find them on our website as well. … How to file an open records request in your county, saying, “We’re having drop boxes in this election cycle. How will they be monitored? What's the equipment? What’s the process? Where can I find the video? What do you do when you see a problem in the video?” And all of that should be written down in a procedure manual so that it is very clear to the staff that is going to be monitoring broadly the elections, specifically the drop boxes. Get those answers.

And for any of you that choose to do this and you get an answer back, please share it with us, because we will make it public. And these are the kinds of things that we need to be certain about because, you know, if they have a plan — and let’s just say the response is, “Yes, the plan is that it’s going to be monitored 24/7, and we’re going to be livestreaming the video so anybody else can watch it. And if we do see something here are the proactive steps that we take, and, you know, post-election, if you want to get a copy of the video for yourself, yes, you can do that.”

If — then you know what? That’s a huge step in the right direction and one fewer thing we have to worry about as quite as seriously as so many of the other things that are out there to worry about. But if the response is silence, or, “We’re not going to tell you,” or, “We don’t have a plan,” then we have to escalate the solution.

What True the Vote is doing is reaching out to sheriffs across the country where drop boxes are going to be located and offering to provide them with camera equipment that they can help to oversee. The hope is that with this exchange will come our ability to livestream the footage coming off of that drop box so that people can see for themselves what’s happening. And frankly, it will make for a much calmer election cycle if people can just see it. Just don’t hide it. Don’t hide the problems.

If none of that works, if you don’t have cameras, and we can’t work things out with sheriffs, and there’s no private property owners that will do it, and there’s just no way that we can figure out how to get 24/7 monitoring, you know, then I would say it bears serious consideration whether or not citizens going to the vicinity of a drop box, and I say vicinity because the drop box itself has been established as a polling place, which means that state standards for electioneering being away from a polling place by it — depends upon the state. Some states is 50 feet, some states is 100 feet, some states is much further.

Whatever your state standard is, being away that far out from a drop box and just watching what’s going on. The sentinel impact in that would be significant. That would be my least favorite option because, I mean, for many reasons. The obvious reason is just safety, but also what we learned when we did our project that went on to become 2000 Mules, but when we were doing the geospatial work, what we saw was that most of the exploitation, most of these repeat visits, were happening in the dark of night, like, you know, after 10 o’clock and before 5 o’clock in the morning. That’s the serious graveyard shift.

Then you go back to — but if we really believe that our country hangs in the balance, you know, what price freedom? Are we willing to staff it up together and just show up and watch? Do everything we can, leave nothing on the field. I submit to you that I think that it is worth it and that we should endeavor — it won’t be perfect — but that we should endeavor to do that.

So I know that is a super long-winded answer, but I want to just share with you our thought process in this because it’s sort of the easy way or the hard way, right? Like, it would be — I mean, there should be no drop boxes to begin with, but since there are, dysfunction breeds dysfunction, and we saw it all the way down the line in 2020.

…

I think we should at least have in mind plans and backup plans for every possible way to have — legally — to have eyes on this election, because it will give us all peace of mind and maybe deter some, you know, bad actors from doing things they might otherwise do. And more than it all, I think, is to send a message loudly and clearly to anybody who’s watching that we love our country just as passionately as the people in Venezuela love theirs. And we are also willing to stand and do whatever it takes to achieve an accurate count of the votes — whatever that is — but an accurate count of legal votes. And then whatever it is, let the chips fall where they may.

Days later, on a True the Vote stream on August 5, Engelbrecht and Phillips gave more details on their plans with sheriffs, with Engelbrecht saying that right before the stream she “was on a phone call with a group of sheriffs, and we are going to continue to work with sheriffs to hopefully help support them in monitoring drop boxes.” Phillips also said that they are “going to be working with sheriffs and others,” and that they had “started a PAC” and “are going to be raising money through [the PAC] to be able to maybe donate surveillance cameras to some of these sheriffs that don’t have them or don’t have the budget to get it done.”

True the Vote’s apparent attempt to partner with sheriffs would be the organization’s second such attempt. In 2022, True the Vote announced a partnership with right-wing sheriffs groups to pass along allegations of voter fraud. That effort — which Phillips suggested was used to funnel their claims and related “evidence” to LA County for its subsequent indictment of the Konnech CEO — later “kind of disintegrated,” according to Engelbrecht.

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