Deceptive Tactics to Manufacture Evidence Face Consequences Both In and Out of Court

The Brennan Center is tracking a series of deceptive tactics used by organizations and individuals seeking to manufacture information to create false perceptions of our election processes and voting. Such tactics include making secret recordings, doctoring videos, spreading unreliable or false data, and making false representations to gain access to people and places that would otherwise be inaccessible. In 2024, deceptive tactics have reemerged to target immigrants and sow doubt in our elections. But, as set forth below, many who have employed these tactics and spread lies have been held civilly or criminally accountable for their actions or had their claims discredited.

When false claims about election integrity and voting arise based on “undercover” reporting or other vigilante investigations, they should be met with deserved deep skepticism. Discreditation is likely to follow.

• In 2020, Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, produced videos of a Pennsylvania postal worker who said that he overheard a conversation about the postal office backdating mail-in ballots. The local postmaster sued Project Veritas for defamation. The group ended up settling the lawsuit and publicly apologized, noting that it was not aware of any evidence of fraud in the that city during the 2020 election.
• In November 2020, Project Veritas posted a video on social media of someone seemingly from the U.S. Postal Service in Michigan claiming that his supervisor told postal workers to separate mail-in ballots from regular letter mail so that they could be backdated to appear as though they were postmarked before Election Day. Though the person in the video claims to be a Postal Service employee, their face is blurred and their voice was changed. In any case, in Michigan, a ballot must be received by election officials — not just postmarked — by Election Day to be counted.
• In September 2020, Project Veritas publicly circulated a misleading video with no substantiated evidence that the campaign of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) had collected ballots illegally.
• In September 2016, a Project Veritas member infiltrated a democratic consulting firm and secretly recorded conversations. The firm claimed the footage was then “heavily edited” to suggest that the firm conspired to incite violence at Trump rallies and promote voter fraud. In a civil lawsuit, Project Veritas was found liable for misrepresentation and violating wiretapping laws and was required to pay $120,000 in damages.
• In May 2012, Project Veritas released a video allegedly demonstrating that individuals in North Carolina who were not citizens were registered to vote. The video shows a Project Veritas associate videotaping someone at their home, asking about citizenship status. Additionally, the video shows two men associated with Project Veritas pretending to be noncitizens and attempting to vote. The men misrepresented who they were to election officials, and their questioning of voters at their home video raised concerns of voter intimidation. The video also had an even more glaring issue — at least one of men was confirmed to be a U.S. citizen.
• Even outside the elections and voting context, Project Veritas’s efforts to secretly record people and spread false lies have been repeatedly discredited. In 2017, a woman associated with group attempted to share a false story about a candidate for senate to the Washington Post, but the Post found inconsistency after inconsistency and the woman eventually abandoned her effort. In 2010, the group’s founder James O’Keefe and three other men conspired to go undercover and secretly record a conversation with a senator’s staff. They were convicted of entering federal property under false pretenses and O’Keefe was ordered to pay a fine of $1,500, serve three years of probation, and serve 100 hours of community service the first year of probation. In 2009, O’Keefe secretly recorded and then published edited video of conversations with various staff members at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, an organization dedicated to providing social services for low and middle-class families, portraying a staff member as being willing to smuggle young women into the United States to work as prostitutes. O’Keefe faced a civil suit, which ended in a settlement requiring him to pay the former staff member $100,000.

• In 2019, the head of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an organization that has pressured election officials to purge voters, was forced to apologize for information contained in two reports the group published in 2016 and 2017 attempting to highlight thousands of cases of noncitizen voter registration in Virginia. The reports included the names and addresses of the alleged noncitizens, subjecting them to harassment online. Four of the people affected, who were actually U.S. citizens, sued for defamation and voter intimidation. The suit resulted in a settlement that required a written apology to the four plaintiffs and the redaction of identifying information in both the already published and any future reports.

• In October 2024, a man working for Muckraker, an online media website with “very, very powerful” ties to Washington, DC-based think tank Heritage Foundation, knocked on the doors of residents in an apartment complex in Phoenix. The man misrepresented why he was there — claiming that he was trying to get Latinos registered to vote — and videotaped his interactions, asking the residents whether they are citizens and whether they are registered to vote. Heritage posted the videos to social media and claimed that they had found six people who aren’t citizens who are registered to vote. But, according the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, none of the individuals were found on the voter rolls.
• In July 2024, two men working for Heritage did something similar in an apartment complex outside Atlanta, asking about the residents’ citizenship status and whether they were registered to vote. The pair misrepresented why they were there, also claiming they were helping Latinos get registered to vote, and secretly videotaped their interactions. Heritage posted the videos to social media and claimed that based on a mere seven people identified as saying yes to being registered to vote but not being a citizen, 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia were registered to vote — an estimated 47,000 people. But, as the New York Times reported, state investigators said there was no record of any of the people being registered. At least one of the people recorded told investigators that she was just giving answers she hoped would make the two men go away. She was worried they would try to get her to register, so she gave them a fake name and told them she was already registered. The office of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state dismissed the video as a “stunt.”
• In May 2024, Heritage circulated a doctored flyer on social media, allegedly written by the head of a nonprofit organization helping asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. It urged migrants to vote for President Biden when in the United States and falsely claimed that the organization would close if he was not elected president. The posting of the flyer follows an incident where two men — one of whom founded Muckraker — misrepresented themselves as staff members of an immigrants rights organization seeking to volunteer at a nonprofit providing services to asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. The men kept trying — unsuccessfully — to get staff at the nonprofit to state they would help migrants vote for Biden. 

• In 2022, Salem Media Group, which specializes in “Christian and conservative content,” released “2,000 Mules,” a documentary that claimed Democrats conspired with nonprofit groups to rig the 2020 election by using “mules” to stuff ballot boxes in swing states. True the Vote provided Salem Media Group with cellphone location data, which the film used to claim that individuals had approached ballot boxes several times a day. But later investigations showed that these claims were inaccurate or could not be corroborated by any evidence. For example, an individual shown visiting a ballot box in the film had legally deposited ballots for himself and members of their families. After the film was released, Georgia’s election board subpoenaed True the Vote to provide evidence of its ballot stuffing allegations. When True the Vote refused to share evidence, Georgia officials sued. In 2024, True the Vote admitted to a Georgia judge that it lacked evidence to support its claims of illegal ballot stuffing during the 2020 general election and the runoff election two months later.

• As of July 2024, the Voter Reference Foundation, a national project and tool for scrutinizing voter rolls, has published voter rolls from more than 161 million voters in 31 states. But, in at least a dozen states, officials have concluded that the Voter Reference Foundation’s claims of “discrepancies” between ballots and voters rely on methodology that is flawed or based on inaccurate data or math. State election officials have raised significant privacy concerns since the published data includes personal identifying information like names, dates of birth, party affiliations, and addresses — especially for voters who need protections from doxing and other uses of their personal data. More on the tactics used by the Voter Reference Foundation can be found here.

• In March 2022, members of a group called the New Mexico Audit Force posed as county employees to go door-to-door in Otero County, New Mexico to ask residents for information about their household and how they voted in 2020. The group had been contracted by another company called EchoMail, which Otero County had contracted to conduct an “audit” of its 2020 election results. New Mexico Audit Force’s misleading behavior led to multiple complaints to the secretary of state. An investigation by New Mexico’s state auditor found potential impropriety with the formation and terms of the county’s contract with EchoMail, and the company was later subject to a congressional investigation.

• In May 2021, election clerk Tina Peters in Mesa County, Colorado invited election denier Conan Hayes to a routine software update of the county’s election system, representing that Hayes was a county employee. Peters allowed Hayes to access a county voting machine, where he captured county passwords and other propriety software data. Peters sought to prove that voting machines has been used to steal the 2020 election from candidate Trump. In 2024, the clerk was convicted of seven criminal charges associated with tampering with voting machines under her control and sentenced to nine years in prison. At her sentencing hearing, the judge noted that Peters “abused” her position and characterized her as a “charlatan” who “peddle[d] a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again,” making her a danger to the community.

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Time and again, those who have used deceptive tactics to spread false claims about elections and voting have been held accountable for their actions by our legal system and through further investigation. Conspiracy theories based on these tactics cannot be trusted and should be seen for what they really are — insidious attempts to mislead the public and sow doubt in our elections.