The NPR Politics Podcast - The Grassroots Efforts To Spread Election Conspiracies

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

Election misinformation has spread beyond the confines of social media to local, grassroots events taking place throughout the country. An NPR investigation explores the role four prominent election denial influencers have in promoting false claims about the 2020 election, and how the events they hold & the ideas they promote affect election officials — and erode trust in the democratic process. This episode: political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, political correspondent Miles Parks, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Sarah and Ruthie and we are in Washington, D.C. And we are here to attend the American Library Association Annual Conference with a lot of authors and illustrators and librarians. This podcast was recorded at 1.05 p.m. on Wednesday, July 6, 2022. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show. God, it's just so purely good. What an excellent timestamp. Librarians are really underrated. Underrated professional.

Yeah. Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today we are talking about disinformation about elections, and there is a lot of it. As disinformation and lies about elections continue to spread, the messaging behind these false claims has diversified. In addition to spreading the big lie on big national platforms like on Fox News or Twitter, conspiracists are going smaller.

They're also focusing their attention on local officials, creating grassroots efforts that you, Miles, have been following. So let's talk about it. Yeah, basically what happened is over the last year and a half covering voting, I've kind of realized that when we were covering elections in 2020, so much of misinformation around voting was coming from Donald Trump's Twitter account. And that's not the case anymore. He is not on Twitter anymore. And so now what I kind of realized is that it was happening in places I couldn't really see it at all of these kind of local events. I was seeing kind of event notifications in different towns for like election integrity rallies with prominent election

conspiracy theorists. And so a few months ago, I got together with the investigations team here at NPR, and we started tracking these sorts of local grassroots events to spread disinformation. We ended up focusing on four really important election denial influencers, as we're calling them. Mike Lindell, who most people have heard of, the MyPillow guy, Douglas Frank, who is a former high school teacher from Ohio, and then two other guys, Seth Keschel and David Clements. And we found that they held over 300 different grassroots sorts of events across the country in almost every state over the last year and a half, kind of spreading this gospel of voter fraud. And beyond Mike Lindell, who, yes, many of our listeners may have heard of, I certainly hadn't heard of those three other guys before. Were they popular? Were they public figures before any of this? Or have they really

made their names by doing this kind of denialism? No. And that's a big part of this story, I think, is the fact that these people, there's been this kind of cottage industry that's popped up around the idea of election denial. These are guys who basically jumped in, quit their full-time job, or in some cases were fired from their full-time jobs, to basically go on tour as election denialists and kind of spread these ideas. They've basically built these online audiences feeding people this sort of information that people were used to getting from former President Trump. And then they show up in your town or city, kind of rent out a hotel conference room or show up at your church. And they give this whole presentation about how the 2020 election was

fraudulent. And in a lot of cases, giving you instructions for how you can stop, you know, election fraud in the future that you need to go to your city council, you need to, in some cases, make your local election officials fearful of you, or, you know, go knock on doors and find election fraud in your own neighborhoods. These events usually come with actionable advice. Well, you know, Frank's in particular, like his math theory, he's a math professor, is not credible, and not reliable, and doesn't prove anything to election fraud in this country. But he gives the sheen of respectability because he's a, quote, professor and he knows math and numbers. So it makes it look like there's something to the false theory that something happened that was untoward in the election, whether it be voting machines or changing numbers. And that's kind of the smoke and mirrors of it all, just showing numbers, making himself sound like he's smart and knows what he's talking about when there's in fact no credibility to it.

And other professors have come along and debunked his math theory across the board. But it's giving enough people who want to believe something to believe in. Right. And let's be 1000% clear here. Actual documented cases of election fraud are vanishingly few. Am I right on that, Miles? You are. Yeah. I mean, there's never mean, it's never been found that enough fraud, you know, we have these tiny, tiny instances that pop up every once in a while in different towns, but there's never been any evidence to support this idea that there's widespread fraud in American elections. And to be honest, the way our election systems work, it would be almost impossible to be able to

commit that sort of election, the kind of election fraud that these people allege that there is. It basically would be impossible to actually do in a practical way. Well, let's get at the importance of this, because it's one thing to get on national media and say elections are stolen, which there are plenty of public figures who unfortunately do. But it's another thing to do that in a tiny town. How does doing these grassroots events change how election denialism looks in our country? And Miles, let's start with you on this. I was really interested in that question too, Danielle. And I ended up zeroing in on this

place called Weld County, Colorado, which is about an hour north of Denver. I had a long conversation with the county clerk there, Carly Coppice. Basically, what she told me is that Douglas Frank, who Domenico mentioned a second ago, came to Colorado and gave a couple presentations last spring. And from that, basically, we saw this chain reaction happen in this community where there was an increase in threats to local election officials, increase in pressure, angry phone calls, angry people showing up at county commission meetings. In addition to that, there have been these groups that have popped up in Colorado to basically, they're going and knocking on doors, on thousands of doors in

Colorado to try and root out the fraud, try to find the fraud in Colorado's elections, and then making these reports based on all this faulty data and this faulty methodology to basically claim that, oh, yes, Colorado's elections are fraudulent, and we need to go back to hand-counted paper ballots, which election experts all say would create a lot more chaos into our process. And so you have this chain reaction that all of it kind of ties back, as the county clerk said, to one of these election and all influencers showing up and basically showing people how to rattle the system. The thing that I think that's most surprising to me when it comes to this is that we've had cons for a long time in this country, you know,

stretching back to the wagon wheel days. There were people who'd go town to town and say, here's something that's gonna cure all your ails and make you feel great. And when it was revealed to be bunk, people threw them out of town or worse, right? Now, because of distrust in the media and elites who can prove things right or wrong, people are believing what they want to believe and taking those people into their homes instead. And I think that's the difference, Domenico, right? I mean, you can kind of survive. American democracy can survive if 10, 15% of the people kind of believe conspiracy theories.

But if we get into a place which is where these election denial influencers are trying to push us, where those sorts of conspiracies are actually changing voting policy, affecting how democracy works, then it's a much more dangerous situation. All right, we're going to take a quick break. We have a lot more to talk about. So when we get back, more on these efforts. And we are back. And Miles, the claims that these influences are making are baseless. And that's worth saying a million times over and over. These claims are baseless. So what's the end game? What is the end goal? You talked of these sorts of people. Obviously, there does seem to be some financial aspect to this. We know that Mike Lindell has said that he's spent millions of dollars kind of pushing these ideas across the country. I think when it comes to the end goal, though, politically, they've made that very, very clear. They want to, Seth Keschel, for instance, has what he calls a 10-point plan to improve election integrity. Part of that plan includes eliminating all early voting across the country. Part of it includes eliminating tabulators, which make counting ballots exponentially more accurate and make it much faster so we can have election results in a quick manner. So what we're seeing is this kind of push under the guise of election security to actually make American

elections less safe and less effective. And Miles, I kind of wonder, you know, when you think about the magnitude, right, and the magnitude of Trump's rallies being so big and broad, and he'll have like, you know, 1000 to 10,000 people at something that he's holding a rally on. What are you seeing size wise? How well attended are these events? Are they Trump rally size? Or does it sound it sounds more like small groups in a library? Yeah, I mean, some of the events that we tracked were kind of either conferences or rallies, kind of big, big events. But a lot of them were kind of these more local, I would say, you know, in the dozens to less than 100 people range, which I think my first thought on that was as somebody who's focused a lot on Internet disinformation where a viral post can be seen, you know, millions of times potentially. I was kind of like, oh, why is it really that bad to have a couple dozen people in a room hearing this conspiracy theory?

And I think the Colorado instance really shifted my mind on that because what I kind of came to realize in reporting this story is that while these events reach far fewer people than Internet posts do, they're more effective at bringing this sort of almost evangelical intimacy into people and getting them really motivated to act. That's the difference. When I see something on Twitter, I might move right past it and might swipe. But if I'm in a room with somebody for an hour and they really, really make all of these grand claims about how your community is being stolen from you and how you need to go knock on doors. At the end of one David Clements event, for instance, he said, go to the offices of your county commissioners. They respond to fear. And so that's the sort of messages that are being given in these small events, which, yes, are reaching less people. But if they're motivating those small groups of people to action, they still

really, really matter. Wow. You use the evangelical analogy. It's a little like a revival or like trying to create converts. Yeah, and that's not something I came up with. I've talked to a number of election officials who basically say this has moved away from politics and is bordering on an almost religious movement in the sense that these people are given evidence over and over and over again to prove the election was safe and accurate and that something inside of them tells them that it wasn't. And that's not nothing, right? I mean, politically speaking, people go door to door trying to have the argument with people, trying to convince them to evangelize, if you will, for their candidate and win them over. Missionaries do this throughout the world, even with skeptical audiences. And that kind of one-on-one contact with millions of volunteers can make a huge difference in taking a message that's at the high levels up

in the clouds, like Trump, and trying to inspire people and send that sort of those seeds out there. And then people can sort of plant them in their communities and watch them grow these seeds of election denialism. Yeah, I talked about that with Chris Krebs, who you guys might remember was fired by Trump. He was a former Department of Homeland Security official who was fired by tweet shortly after the 2020 election for saying the election was fair. And he told me, frankly, this is really becoming a cult. So, Miles, you mentioned those local election officials. What's the impact on them and how are they fighting back? Can they fight back? Yeah, it's a really hard question to answer. I mean, in some cases, they're completely outnumbered.

You know, when you think about these sorts of people traveling across the country, having events in all these places, they're going against county clerks who have Twitter accounts with a couple hundred followers who also have other full-time jobs. A lot of times the county clerk is in charge of elections and also in charge of death records or marriage licenses. But I think when I talk to local election officials, they really want to try and get some of these people involved in the process. You know, can you come and instead of, you know, maybe you attended this event and heard some of these election conspiracies, but come be a poll worker, come understand actually how the process works, and see if you still have those same concerns. Because I think a lot of the reason this sort of misinformation is effective is because people don't understand how the process works in their community and in their state. And so election officials are really trying to work on

educating people to kind of fight against that. All right. Well, that is a wrap for today. We will be back tomorrow. For now, I am Danielle Kurtz-Lavin. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montaner, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.