In a VoteAlert post, since deleted and reviewed by WIRED, one user wrote: “I’m probably going to get fired for this, but the Riverside County Registrar of Voters hired me as an election official in Hemet, CA. Since I am in charge of this polling place, I ask for a citizenship ID from anyone who looks suspiciously like they are not here legally.”
The post went on to suggest that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office would not intervene in their plan. “It’s just a drop in the bucket, but I’m going to do my part to stop voter fraud,” he wrote. “Wish me luck🙏”
WIRED traced the email associated with the post to a California woman who describes herself as “FED UP with all the bullshit,” according to an app profile. “You are just getting the hard, harsh TRUTH from me.”
The woman, whose name WIRED is not publishing because it was revealed through a security breach, did not respond to requests for comment.
In a phone call, Riverside County Public Information Officer Elizabeth Florer confirmed that the county had hired a poll worker who agreed with WIRED’s findings and was committed to ensuring that all election laws were followed and that was investigating the incident. Florer added that additional staff have now been sent to the Hemet polling place to monitor and ensure strict compliance with election laws.
True the Vote is perhaps best known for his role in the widely discredited film. 2,000 mules. The film relied heavily on the group’s investigation to allege that “election mules” were paid to fraudulently collect and deliver ballots for Democratic candidates in key swing states during the 2020 election. However, an Associated Press investigation found that the film was based on a flawed and inadequate analysis of cell phone location data. After a defamation lawsuit, the film’s publishers, Salem Media Group, retracted the film. removing it from their platforms, and said there would be no future distribution of the book. They also apologized to a voter falsely portrayed as an illegal voter in the film.
Undeterred, in 2022 True the Vote launched a web application called IV3, which it claimed led to hundreds of thousands of voter registrations being challenged. A WIRED analysis found the app’s methodology was unreliable and error-prone, and experts warned that IV3 weaponizes public data and is more likely to remove eligible voters from the rolls than detect widespread fraud, a problem that, according to them, is practically non-existent in the US.
In records obtained by the nonprofit group. American oversight and shared with WIRED, in May 2024, an individual with the username Totes Legit Votes apparently used IV3 to challenge the eligibility of 5,000 people in Florida.
Admittedly, Vote has struggled to provide courts with meaningful evidence to support its claims of widespread voter fraud.
In 2021, the group filed a complaint with the Georgia secretary of state, alleging widespread illegal ballot stuffing in Atlanta during the 2020 election and subsequent runoff. However, when a judge orders you to provide evidence, It is true that Vote admitted that he had no names or documentation to support his claims..
The following year, court marshals arrested Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, and board member Gregg Phillips after defying a court order to present evidence in a defamation case brought by software company Konnech. The lawsuit accused True the Vote of falsely claiming that Konnech stored personal information of American election workers on an unsecured server in China.
