New Hampshire towns are being bombarded by pro-Trump conspiracy theorists, banging on doors and invading people’s privacy—all in the name of the ongoing albatross of the “big lie,” aka voter fraud.
Beginning in October, the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group has been going door to door in towns such as Waterville Valley to “verify the town’s voter rolls,” according to reporting from BuzzFeed News. Homeowners, many of whom are Democrats, are being forced to deal with the self-appointed information gatherers asking residents about the 2020 election. They’re asking for names, polling stations, and whether people voted in-person or absentee. Waterville Valley residents have started to simply call the police.
BuzzFeed reports that these vigilante groups have begun canvassing in multiple states including New Hampshire, Nebraska, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Utah, and North Carolina. And it’s all linked to the denial by Trump supporters that President Joe Biden rightfully won the election. It’s what led to Jan. 6 and what’s leading to voter suppression laws in states such as Georgia.
The Justice Department has warned these groups to stop their in-person arrivals, as it could violate federal voter intimidation laws, but volunteers are continuing the schemes, even taking their “findings” to social media with evidence or credibility.
The Colorado Times Recorder reports that members of a right-wing, QAnon-connected group called the U.S. Election Integrity Plan (USEIP) have been going door to door, using public voter lists to identify precincts they believe have fraudulently cast ballots and demand residents confirm their addresses and how they voted.
USEIP is led by Cory Anderson, a member of the “Three Percenter” militia group and former member of “Bikers for Trump Colorado.”
Anderson tells Colorado Times Recorder he’s leading a team of over 20 volunteers to go door to door in Mesa County, looking for evidence of election fraud by asking voters if they indeed cast a vote last November.
The New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group is led by Marylyn Todd. The group claims to be nonpartisan, and Todd told BuzzFeed many of the volunteers voted for Biden. She claims the group “is just trying to get to the bottom of the truth, nothing more, nothing less.”
The group uses an app to locate voters, providing their addresses and whether they voted in 2020, how they voted, and asks the volunteers to confirm the information and to get voters to sign an affidavit.
Waterville Valley residents told BuzzFeed they believe they were targeted because the town surged with year-round residents during the pandemic. Many of the homes in the town were solely used for vacation prior to COVID-19 until residents moved from their homes in Massachusets to live a more isolated life during the lockdowns.
In Utah, a group called Utah Voter Verification Project (UVVP) has recruited a group of volunteers through the messaging app Telegram, to go door to door asking questions about the 2020 election.
The Salt Lake Tribune investigation found that UVVP has direct ties to USEIP, QAnon, Three Percenters Militia, and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Group members are told to keep their work confidential. “We want to make sure that we keep our information very quiet,” one of the training manuals said. “As we’ve seen happen over and over again, when you release little bits and pieces, they destroy documents, they destroy evidence. We don’t want to release anything until we’re ready.”
An Arizona-based group, Election Integrity Fund organized a door to door canvassing event, led by Liz Harris, who also recently spoke at a Lansing, Michigan, event.
“They can dress it up however they want but this is straight-up voter intimidation and voter harassment,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum told Fox17 in West Michigan. Byrum, a former Democratic state lawmaker, says the effort is "attacking the integrity of our elections.”
Byrum added that “November 2020 was nearly a year ago. So those voters who lived at 123 East Main Street, may very well have moved, we have a very transient population,” Byrum said. “I know from knocking doors as a candidate years ago, that people move and they move often, just because someone's not at the house that they were at in 2020 when they voted, doesn't mean they weren't a proper voter at that time. So this is very concerning.”
Todd, who left her full-time job as an auditor for an accounting firm in February to lead the fraud crusade, alleges to BuzzFeed she didn’t even realize the group’s Facebook page was chock full of QAnoners and anti-vaccine content.
“Did I know that I was still going to be here almost a year later on a leave of absence?” she said, laughing. “No. But, you know, auditing a whole state isn’t as easy as I originally thought it was.”
Todd may be laughing, but residents of Waterville Valley and Rye say the claims of fraud are “ridiculous.”
The New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group has raised under $75,000 this year is planning to produce a documentary on “election corruption” in New Hampshire.