Editor’s note: This story is the second in a series about the “election integrity” movement of people who claim recent elections are illegitimate and are preparing to challenge the election result in Pennsylvania this November.
In June, Berks County resident Karl Lampart began emailing county commissioners with a concern: He said he had identified more than 1,300 people who, he believed, should not be allowed to vote.
“If you have any questions or wish to discuss, please feel free to contact me,” Lampart wrote in a June 19 email to Berks County Commissioner Michael Rivera. “Dirty voter rolls is the first step to dirty elections.”
Lampart encouraged the commissioner to watch an election denial propaganda film by David Clements. He suggested the county use resources from Mike Lindell, the entrepreneur who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. And, Lampart said he provided spreadsheets that came from Eagle AI, IV3 and Fight Voter Fraud — three dubious sources of voter data.
That effort worked. On July 25, the board of elections notified the public that it had cross-referenced voter rolls against the Eagle AI data. Responding to questions for this story, county spokesman Jonathan Heintzman said no voters were removed, and the review was not “an attempt to find fraud or impropriety, but rather, to show that any such concerns were unfounded pursuant to the voter list maintenance procedures that are set forth in the law.”
But what Lampart didn’t mention to officials is that over the same period, he was meeting online with upwards of 100 other people, including a conservative activist with powerful friends — part of what an elections expert describes as a coordinated plan to cast doubt on the 2024 election results on the chance that the former president loses narrowly to Democrat Kamala Harris. Lampart didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Counties across Pennsylvania received similar requests. Emails obtained through right-to-know requests show local citizens urging election administrators to remove people from the voter rolls. Often, they provided lists of names.
In several cases, the citizens proffering the spreadsheets had attended meetings with “PA Fair Elections” — a group tied to well-funded national organizations that support Trump’s campaign to return to the White House.
Ties to national groups
PA Fair Elections’ online meetings are open to anyone, promoted in weekly emails that encourage attendees to share the meeting link with others. An LNP | LancasterOnline reporter attended four meetings in June and documented who attended. (After reporting on PA Fair Elections, the group changed its meeting portal to include notes barring press and stating that the meetings are off the record).
PA Fair Elections is run by Heather Honey, a Lebanon County resident who was found to be a frequent source of false and misleading information about elections, according to a February Votebeat report. Honey did not respond to a request for comment.
Honey has worked with attorney Cleta Mitchell, the senior legal fellow at Washington, D.C.-based Conservative Partnership institute. Mitchell was on the infamous Jan. 2, 2021, phone call where Trump told Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes. Mitchell is also a chair at Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has sued states to remove people from voter rolls.
Mitchell spoke to PA Fair Elections attendees during an online meeting in June, where she made baseless claims about undocumented immigrants voting. That month PA Fair Elections members also heard from anti-immigrant activist Rosemary Jenks and attorney John Eastman, who faces felony fraud and conspiracy charges in Georgia and Arizona related to Trump’s 2020 efforts to reverse his electoral losses.
An investigation by ProPublica found that both Eagle AI and its top supporter, the Conservative Partnership Institute, are funded by Ziklag, a group of conservative Christian billionaires. A central force in Ziklag’s efforts is Lance Wallnau, an evangelist who has said that Christians should control all aspects of society.
'Reinventing the wheel'
All three of the data sources pushed by PA Fair Elections attendees lead back to groups dedicated to reelecting Trump.
Eagle AI’s data comes from VoteRef, a system “closely linked to a super PAC predominantly funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein,” according to ProPublica. Uihlein, who founded the Uline packaging supply company, is a major Trump backer.
IV3 is a publicly available database created by True The Vote, a group that has proffered various debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Fight Voter Fraud is a political advocacy nonprofit run by Linda Szynkowicz, a failed Republican candidate for the Connecticut state house of representatives.
Lycoming County Elections Director Forrest Lehman has been outspoken about the problems with using these databases.
“They’re reinventing the wheel, is the silly part of it,” Lehman said. “We’re already getting this data from ERIC” (the Electronic Registration Information center). He said the groups distrust ERIC as a result of misinformation and wild conspiracy theories.
He said that in Pennsylvania, the requests to remove voters come from a “loose coalition” of groups, including PA Fair Elections and Audit the Vote PA, another organization that claims recent elections were rigged or stolen. “And in many cases, it’s the same people behind all of them. That’s how you astroturf. So it seems like a big groundswell of support but it’s actually the same people.”
Lehman said the voters targeted for removal by the activists typically fall into two categories. There are usually a small number of people who moved and would be identified by elections officials during normal voter roll maintenance. And there’s a larger category of people already marked inactive by the counties.
Bucks County
Emails between county officials show that many were being peppered with requests to use the data provided by citizens. Fayette County Elections Director Marybeth Kuznik said a voter sought to remove 1,500 other voters from the rolls. Washington County Elections Director Melanie Ostrander said the county received a spreadsheet “from Eagle AI.”
“I’m sure the spreadsheet was prepared by a certain statewide group and then distributed to their county contacts to present,” Ostrander wrote.
In Bucks County in April, PA Fair Elections members Bill Everett and Beth Roth met with Republican County Commissioner Gene Digorolamo, according to Bucks County spokesman James O’Malley. Emails show that meeting came as the group was pushing the county to use Eagle AI. (Everett and Roth could not be reached for comment).
In emails, they identified themselves as part of a “Bucks County Election Integrity Task Force.” Everett and Roth attended PA Fair Elections meetings in June, and Roth spoke at an event advocating for hand-counting ballots held by Audit The Vote PA.
The Bucks County group regularly poses questions about election security at county board of elections meetings. Of eight members of the public who spoke at the most recent meeting, four had also attended PA Fair Elections meetings in June.
In an email to Bucks County, a group member demanded that the county remove 1,830 people from the voter rolls, based on their data analysis. “These voters should be removed from the voter rolls,” wrote someone whose name was redacted. “What is the process for removing them that does not take 5 years?”
O’Malley said the county doesn’t use “third-party” voter rolls. During summer voter roll maintenance, the county relied on ERIC and U.S. Postal Service National Change of Address lists to change some voters from active to inactive. He was not sure how many voters received letters notifying them their status changed to inactive this summer.
'An orchestrated campaign'
In an email sent May 24, Chester County Election Director Karen Barsoum told other county elections directors, “We recently were presented with a Voter Roll Maintenance List by a Citizens Group. After looking at it, the list was created by Eagle AI.”
Barsoum was warning her colleagues in an email chat for county elections directors. She provided a web link to analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice stating that “Former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s bogus voter verification system is an attack on elections.”
Counties also dealt with other requests to count votes by hand, a move proven to be far more prone to error than machines. This is an initiative popular with Audit The Vote PA, which holds training sessions on hand counting.
Seven counties, including Lancaster County, received nearly identical emails voicing concern about the upcoming election. The emails asked officials to “investigate into the electronic software and database used to administer elections in our county.” The emails included a link to a Supreme Court filing from Arizona former Republican political candidates Kari Lake and Mark Finchem.
Eventually, Cumberland County Commissioner Gary Eichelberger put the pieces together.
“The earlier inquiry on election integrity now appears to be part of (surprise!) an orchestrated campaign,” Eichelberger wrote. “The below letter, just received, nearly mirrors the original letter’s messaging you just reviewed… We apparently should expect a great deal more of this.”
Quiet period
With less than two months before the election, federal law bars counties from mass voter challenges. (A voter may still ask to remove themselves, or challenge an individual voter registration status by providing evidence).
However, according to elections expert Alice Clapman, widespread challenges to voter rolls are causing “social mistrust” that has already led to harassment of election officials and confusion in places like Allegheny County, where in March voters received notices that their voting status had been challenged.
“People are more likely to break the rules if their opponents are breaking the rules,” Clapman said. “It’s an erosion of norms that depends on social trust.”
Clapman is senior legal counsel of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based progressive nonprofit law and public policy institute. She says the findings show an organized group that is poised to launch challenges if Harris wins Pennsylvania in November.
Related networks have pushed the same measures in other swing states to tell a false story that there is a widespread risk of voter fraud, she said.
“The effect of activating this large network of activists, and having them generating these lists of discrepancies — it just helps to feed the narrative that there is a problem with the voter rolls, which there is not, and that election results cannot be trusted, which they can,” Clapman said.
Read more from our partners, LNP/LancasterOnline.
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