A conservative Houston-based group known for spreading conspiracy theories has been massively challenging the voting rights of police officers, senior citizens, and people in assisted living facilities. So far, the group has challenged more than half a million records – often without strong evidence to support their claims – wasting government resources and taxpayer money.
According to a CNN investigation, the conservative nonprofit group True the Vote, has been spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories to encourage volunteers to massively challenge the voting rights of thousands of citizens.
“My simple right as a voter is being attacked,” Daniel Moss, a university administrator from Denton County, told CNN. “It’s kind of un-American to do that.” He added that he has lived in the country and voted there for about two decades
True the Vote has encouraged volunteers to help clean up voter rolls using an app called IV3. The app allows users to research voter data and submit voter eligibility challenges to election officials.
So far, the group claims that nearly 7,000 volunteers have used the app and submitted nearly 650,000 challenges in 1,322 counties. However, these massive challenges have already consumed election office time and wasted government resources. Some officials have warned that the challenges contain errors, and that the data IV3 is using appears to be outdated.
“These people are actually trying to help but they did not understand the procedures we have in place,” Matt Webber, the registrar of voters for Yavapai County, Arizona, told CNN. He explained that offices have a methodology for challenging potentially ineligible voters that a volunteer without training can not understand.
For example, CNN reported that many of the challenges were against police officers, airmen, senior citizens, and people who live in assisted-living facilities. Police officers, for example, sometimes have their addresses listed on a government building for protection; on the other hand, senior citizens and others living in assisted living facilities all live in the same building, raising doubts among the volunteers verifying the data.
True the Vote co-founder Catherine Engelbrecht has told volunteers to challenge people living in “sketchy” addresses, such as those where hundreds of people are registered to vote.
In addition, volunteers may be fueled by conspiracy theories to challenge people’s eligibility to vote. True the Vote claimed it had evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and fueled the theory in Dinesh D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules.”
Georgia sued the organization and in 2024, True the Vote admitted it had no evidence to support its claims.
In addition, Engelbrecht has been involved in fraud and scandal. In 2022, she was jailed for contempt of court for refusing to disclose the name of a person who allegedly helped her organization investigate an election software company that sued the organization for defamation. That same year, she helped a former True the Vote board member solicit donations for a supposed $25 million hospital in Ukraine, but the effort was exposed as a scam.
While officials acknowledge that volunteers are people of goodwill, they also said the app doesn’t help combat voter fraud and that it fuels conspiracy theories.
“A lot of these people are people of goodwill. They have just been fed a constant diet of lies,” David Becker, founder of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, told CNN.
“These kinds of rash activities can do much more harm than good,” said Moss. “If you want to be part of the solution and you want to help … maybe push to get people to vote versus trying to find answers that don’t even have problems to begin with.”
