Investigation reveals so called 'election integrity' groups are undermining NC elections

Since 2020, groups devoted to investigating election processes and hunting for alleged voter fraud have sprung up across the country. A new story in The Guardian by reporters Jordan Wilkie and Laura Lee examines those efforts in North Carolina through the lens of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT) – a group that claims to be nonpartisan but is backed by several conservative power players. WFDD’s April Laissle spoke with Wilkie about the group’s origins, and how some of these efforts may affect the midterm elections. 

Interview Highlights

On using legal means to stress election systems:

"This group has taken the idea of requesting public records to an entirely new level where they're basically spamming records requests to county boards of elections that have never seen this frequency of records requests or even the scope of individual records. And now in order to fulfill their legal obligation to answer this records request, elections officials are standing at scanning machines, scanning one scanner's length of poll tape at a time. They go through these really long tapes to these records that are from 2020, which is a settled election that was audited, that was certified in a bipartisan way. And it sort of seems like an absurd use of their time."

On undermining voter trust:

"There's an interesting separation between the calls to action, the things that people say they're going to do, and what actually happens. And in a lot of these cases, what actually happens is sort of irrelevant because the point of a lot of this action nationally – the point of Donald Trump coming through in 2020 and saying 'vote by mail, and then go in person' is to make people distrust the election process. So once people distrust the election process, and it doesn't really matter whether or not they have a bunch of poll observers showing up on Election Day harassing people, the point is that people already distrust what's happening."

*Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that Laura Lee co-reported The Guardian's story.