2011–2019
True the Vote’s first major effort to try to force elections to yield the results they want outside Texas was their attempt to thwart the attempted recall of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker by using their own methods, mostly consisting of making systematic errors, to “check” petition signatures. The TtV concluded that only about half the signatures were genuine, a claim that was of course dismissed by all legal bodies because it was false and stupid, but which nevertheless allowed Engelbrecht and TtV to claim that fraud was “rampant”. The scary part, though, was that TtV apparently easily managed to recruit some 17 000 volunteers (mostly out of state) to help do the footwork to build their conspiracy theory, and they placed hundreds of people to monitor the polls – the justification being that the monitors were necessary because of “discrepancies” in the recall petition process (a claim that had already been thoroughly refuted) as well as what TtV claimed to be “Wisconsin’s long history of election fraud.” Interestingly, though unsurprisingly, TtV themselves don’t apply their own standards for judging whether signatures are genuine when they sign their own petitions.
TtV was instrumental in spreading fear and conspiracy theories (“flood of illegal voters”) surrounding the 2016 election as well, e.g. arguing that reported cyberattacks against elections systems in two states were really orchestrated by the Obama administration to justify taking control of elections in the states. The evidence, according to TtV board member Gregg Phillips, was that it’s “what the left always does”. The incident, whose existence was based solely on it being ‘what the left always does’ will subsequently be used as evidence that this is, in fact, what the left always does, which will be evidence that the next incident is a false flag, and so on in a closed epistemic loop ad infinitum. Indeed, Engelbrecht has accused Obama of running a “political machine” that makes “Watergate seem like a stubbed toe” to target … well, herself in particular.
With regard to the same election, Engelbrecht claimed that polling places staying open late – referring to an entirely legitimate practice – is evidence of voter fraud. She also claimed, based entirely on her own imaginative capacities as a village idiot, that Obama was intentionally signing up noncitizens to commit voter fraud, and TtV released a report falsely claiming that mass-murderer Arcan Cetin had illegally voted as a noncitizen in three elections because Cetin had in fact voted in those elections – TtV did of course not bother to check whether he was a citizen, which he was.
TtV did, however, since the early 2010s, manage to ally themselves with politicians and government bodies to aggressively suppress voter registration efforts under the guise of combatting a (completely mythical) “epidemic” of voter fraud. Ultimately, however, for Engelbrecht the voter fraud conspiracy theories are a religious issue: the fight over vote-by-mail, for instance, is a “spiritual battle” for “control of the free world”.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Engelbrecht was attempting to raise $1.2 million “to conduct a comprehensive forensic audit of the entire election – all 136+ million votes” under the false assumption that “between 800,000 to 3,000,000” votes may have been cast by noncitizens, so as to ensure that then-president Trump’s claim to have won not only the electoral vote but the popular vote as well became true.
2020 Election
Shortly after the 2020 election, TtV launched its Validate the Vote campaign led by Engelbrecht herself. Officially, the purpose was to ensure that the 2020 election was proper and to “ensure public confidence and acceptance of election outcomes”. The campaign promptly went about using any conceivable effort to support Trump’s Stop the Steal claims, including finding (or creating) whistleblower witnesses to election wrongdoing, data analyses to locate irregularities, and a number of lawsuits to obtain access to voter rolls. Their whistleblower locating efforts included creating a “whistleblower compensation fund” to “incentivize election malfeasance reporting”, i.e. to pay people to make accusations of voter fraud – or, in other words, to undermine public confidence in the vote and acceptance of election outcomes, by any means possible.
None of their efforts provided a shred of evidence, of course, but since the goal of the effort was of course not to verify the integrity of the election or to help ensure public confidence that it was legit, but rather to promote the Stop the Steal Agenda, Engelbrecht continued to state that the group’s investigations are “ongoing”. Rather shortly after the election, TtV was sued by North Carolina money manager Fred Eshelman, who had donated $2.5 million to the group, for failing to come up with convincing evidence for voter fraud (that suit was also quickly dismissed by the courts but the fact that it was filed is pretty telling).
2021 and Beyond
Ahead of the 2021 Senate runoff in Georgia, TtV tried to challenge the validity of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. According to the courts, though TtV’s efforts didn’t quite amount to illegal voter intimidation, the group had facilitated “a mass number of seemingly frivolous challenges […] TTV’s list utterly lacked reliability. Indeed, it verges on recklessness […] The Court has heard no testimony and seen no evidence of any significant quality control efforts, or any expertise guiding the data process.” In 2022, TtV officially partnered with Mark Lamb’s militant conspiracy organization of “constitutional sheriffs” Protect America Now.
2000 Mules nonsense
TtV was heavily involved in – and indeed largely responsible for the misinformation that served as the premise for – Dinesh D’Souza’s 2022 conspiracy theory flick 2000 Mules. The premise of the film was, based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analyses of cellphone location data, that Democrat-aligned individuals had been paid to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin during the 2020 election, and the claims were quickly picked up and endorsed by Donald Trump. Among TtV’s main claims was that phone pings to cellphone towers could help identify individuals who had passed near ballot drop boxes and various unnamed nonprofit organizations multiple times per day, and they concluded that such people – rather than having legitimate businesses or living in the areas or being e.g. postal workers, delivery drivers or police officers – were paid mules for ballot collection and deposits. The claim is as insane as it sounds. But TtV went on to assert that some of the geolocated alleged mules were present at what they called “antifa riots” in Atlanta in 2020.
D’Souza and Gregg Phillips also claimed to have matched their geolocation data with data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). ACLED, on their side – who do not track cellphone data anyways – asserted that Phillips’s claims were categorically false. Engelbrecht tried to help him out by claiming that Phillips was actually referring to a different organization, but declined the invitation to name that different organization.
TtV’s claim that there were 1155 paid mules in Philadelphia alone is false, and the Arizona claims were based on a single anonymous witness who said she saw people picking up what she “assumed” to be payments for ballot collection in Arizona. They didn’t even bother to try to provide evidence of payments in any of the other states they covered. Nor did they bother to provide evidence that ballots were collected from a nonprofit to be deposited in drop boxes. As for the claim that individuals dropped off ballots more than once, it is not remotely supported by any of the surveillance videos they actually show – TtV claimed to have a video of multiple drops by an individual, but that they had to have “it taken out because the video is extremely poor quality.” So it goes. TtV also claimed to have helped solve the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Atlanta, which turned out to be a ridiculously false claim as well.
Of course, the movie doesn’t find room to mention that even if the events it claims took place, actually took place, it couldn’t imply voter fraud since absentee ballots deposited in a drop box must anyways be inside an envelope sent to each registered voter that includes the voter's registration information, signature, and a barcode for verification.
Legal issues
It is somewhat telling that the TtV has refused to cooperate with official state boards and officials trying to launch investigations into their claims, and Engelbrecht and Phillips have landed themselves in some legal trouble as well over lies, refusing to comply with subpoenas and illegal political donations. Indeed, in February 2024, TtV admitted in a filing with the Fulton County Superior Court in response to the Election Board lawsuit that “it doesn’t have documents about illegal ballot collection, the name of its purported informant or confidentiality agreements it previously said existed.”
TtV’s Phillips also landed himself in some trouble when he falsely asserted that Konnech, a poll worker management software company, had stored data on a Chinese server and allowed the Chinese government to access it. That one actually ended up providing Phillips and Engelbrecht with a brief stint in jail.
Other Antics
Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were also the founders of “The Freedom Hospital”, a much-hyped effort to solicit donations ostensibly for a mobile hospital to Ukraine, marketing the effort through lies, fraud and disinformation; the hospital never materialized, of course.
It is worth pointing out that serious questions have been raised on several occasions about Engelbrecht and Phillips using TtV funds for personal gain. This one is illuminating in that respect. Here is another one.
Diagnosis: Insane and zealous conspiracy theorist and myth maker with an enormous amount of influence, especially given that her conspiracies and FUD tactics are largely aimed toward serving the political interests of people in power. Indeed, Engelbrecht must be considered a significant component of one of the most severe threats to democracy and civilization that the US is currently facing.
"True" is an adjective, not a verb.
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