Eighteen months after Donald Trump lost the White House, loyal supporters continue to falsely assert that compromised balloting machines across America robbed him of the 2020 election.
By Alexandra Ulmer and Nathan Layne
Schroeder, a Republican, later testified that he was receiving instructions on how to copy the system’s data from a retired Air Force colonel and political activist bent on proving Trump lost because of fraud. The episode is among eight known attempts to gain unauthorized access to voting systems in five U.S. states since the 2020 election. All involved local Republican officeholders or party activists who have advanced Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods or conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, according to a Reuters examination of the incidents.
“You need to make sure that those ballots are maintained under strict chain of custody at all times,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “It's destroying voter confidence in the United States.” In three other attempts–in Ohio’s Lake County, Michigan’s Cross Village and North Carolina’s Surry County–no data is believed to have been accessed. In two other cases, Reuters was unable to determine what data, if any, was stolen.
The American right’s fixation with voting machines intensified in the days after Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump. The defeated incumbent and his lawyers, including former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, started making outlandish claims of rigged machines. The accusations were soon deemed bogus by courts and Trump’s own election-security chief, and spurred ongoing defamation lawsuits against Giuliani and others from a prime target of the Trump camp, voting-machine provider Dominion Voting Systems.
William Keith Senter, chair of the Surry County Republican Party, told elections director Michella Huff that he would have her fired if she didn’t comply, the state board of elections told Reuters, which first reported news of the incident on April 23. "I'm very concerned for the voters," Huff told Reuters. "Democracy starts here. It starts here in our office."
But the Emmet County prosecutor cut a deal with Jackson, 56, who in late February pleaded no contest to a single misdemeanor count of creating a disturbance. The felony charges of fraud and unauthorized access to a computer were dropped. She served no jail time. Jackson did not respond to requests for comment.
A judge signed an arrest warrant for Jackson in March, but she wasn't arrested until late October. Her whereabouts were unknown for months, said Leirstein, the detective. Sweet was at the scene of the incident about the time law enforcement arrived, according to bodycam video footage reviewed by Reuters. The detective said Sweet told conflicting stories about how she knew it had happened. Phone records, he said, showed that Sweet and Jackson were in contact before the police were called to investigate.
So is the state’s own lawsuit against Schroeder. In legal filings, the clerk admitted to making a copy of the county election server’s two hard drives on Aug. 26. He said he got help from Shawn Smith, a retired Air Force colonel and self-styled election fraud activist, and Mark Cook, an IT specialist who supplied Schroeder with a digital forensic imager costing about $4,000 and capable of transferring data at high speeds.
“The heat is more on Republican clerks,” said Crane, a Republican who served as Arapahoe County clerk until 2018. “They really look at us like traitors.” Schroeder said he feared a state-ordered upgrade to the voting system would erase records relating to the 2020 election. State officials, however, said the 2020 election records would be retained after the upgrade.
Lindell told Reuters that Cause of America is just a small part of his overall effort to prove the 2020 election was stolen and to change election rules. He said he funds South Dakota-registered Cause of America and pays other election-focused employees through Lindell Management, a Minnesota-based LLC registered in 2018.
Schroeder wasn’t the only Colorado clerk approached by the USEIP’s Smith for access to secure voting data. In May 2021, Smith told El Paso County clerk Chuck Broerman in a meeting that USEIP would conduct a “forensic investigation” of his voting systems, Broerman said.
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