A group of wealthy conservatives are pouring millions into a shadowy network of organizations meant to help former President Donald Trump contest the results of the November election should he lose.
The list of donors includes Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, shipping billionaires from the critical swing state of Wisconsin, David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby, and longtime conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. Since 2020 the Uihleins have donated about $34 million to various organizations that bill themselves as election integrity groups, according to the Wall Street Journal. A foundation that lists Green as a donor gave $7 million to such groups. And Leo gave $4.7 million through two nonprofits.
The Uihleins and Green did not respond to requests for comment made through their respective companies. Leo did not respond to a request for comment made to the Federalist Society, of which he is co-chair of the board of directors.
Election integrity crusaders have often sought to cast their efforts as innocent reactions to chicanery in the Democratic Party. Their arguments are that Democrats used the pandemic as an excuse to change the rules regarding mail-in and early voting during the 2020 election. The most salacious versions of these arguments include the notion that Democrats plan to register people who are not U.S. citizens to vote.
After losing the last election to President Joe Biden, Trump and his political allies undertook a haphazard and failed effort to overturn the results. Their principal defense was that there had been rampant voter fraud in favor of Biden. The Trump campaign and other conservative activists filed dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits that failed to prove any claims of voter fraud. The efforts to do the same for the upcoming election are already in motion, funded by a total of nearly $140 million directed to a network of 50 different groups across the country, according to the WSJ.
Another major donor to these causes and a longtime Trump backer is former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Byrne was an avid believer in the invented claim that the 2020 election was stolen. During the chaotic months between the 2020 election and Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, Byrne was extremely involved in the various machinations from the Oval Office to try and undo the election. The Journal reported that Byrne donated $60 million to election integrity groups.
The work these groups do consists of examining voter rolls, pushing for certain types of legislation, and working to elect state and local officials who share their views about alleged election fraud. Another main pillar of election integrity efforts is to train volunteers to be watchdogs at polling places during the election. A major effort sponsored by the Republican National Committee in June aimed to train thousands of volunteers in swing states. The program was “to stop Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules,” according to a press release announcing the initiative.
There were a series of other election integrity claims. There were efforts to discredit mail-in ballots that were counted later on in the process. A conspiracy theory that two Georgia poll workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, had wheeled in suitcases full of ballots to a polling location resulted in a smear campaign. (Moss and Freeman won a $148 million defamation suit against Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.) Perhaps most memorable was the effort to submit alternate electors under the misguided belief that they could vote to hand the presidency to Trump. That effort ultimately precipitated the events of the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.
In a recent NBC News interview, Vice President Kamala Harris said these events weren’t far from her mind. When asked if her campaign was prepared should Trump reject the election results again, Harris replied, “of course.”
