The Secretive Billionaire Network Funding ‘Stop the Steal’ 2.0
Wall Street Journal
By Rebecca Ballhaus and Mariah Timms
Oct. 22, 2024 9:00 pm ET
When Donald Trump refused to concede the 2020 election, he and his allies led a chaotic effort to overturn the results, spreading conspiracy theories, filing dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits and encouraging “Stop the Steal” protests that culminated in the assault on the Capitol.
Next month will likely play out differently if Trump loses again. The former president and his allies have spent the last four years laying the groundwork for a more organized, better funded and far broader effort to contest the outcome—a Stop the Steal 2.0—if the vote doesn’t go his way.
A secretive network of GOP donors and conservative billionaires have fueled the effort, giving more than $140 million to nearly 50 loosely connected groups that work on what they call election integrity, according to a Wall Street Journal review of Federal Election Commission filings, tax filings and other records. Among the donors are organizations linked to Wisconsin billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Hobby Lobby founder David Green.
Those groups have been scrutinizing voter registrations on an industrial scale and working to slow down the vote count, bury local election officials in paperwork and lawsuits and elect like-minded politicians at the state and local levels who will support efforts to contest the vote.
Many election officials worry those moves could sow chaos at the polls and confusion about the results. In 2020, Trump seized on the uncertainty as votes were still being counted to declare, “Frankly, we did win this election.”
At the time, many top Republicans and even Trump’s own aides privately expressed skepticism about his claims and his frantic, haphazard effort to contest the results. Subsequent government audits, state investigations and lawsuits turned up no evidence of widespread fraud, and evidence has emerged that Trump aides knew the results to be legitimate as they sought to undermine them. Top election officials, including many Republicans at the state level, say the current election-integrity push is targeting problems that don’t exist.
Trump has made claims about election integrity a central plank of his campaign and repeatedly signaled he would dispute the results if he loses. Pressed three times during the June presidential debate whether he would accept the 2024 election, he said he would only do so if it was a “fair and legal and good election.”
Over the last four years, GOP leaders and donors have fallen in line. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) risked a government shutdown last month to try to pass a Trump-backed measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. Elon Musk, who owns X, has become one of the loudest voices online stoking fears about election fraud.
Conservative groups have trained armies of volunteers to monitor voting on Election Day, including 200,000 poll watchers, poll workers and legal experts recruited by the Republican National Committee alone. One group created an app that is essentially Facebook for election fraud, allowing users to post, comment and share anything they deem to be “election irregularities,” and to file incident reports to the group. Another group advertised in May that anyone reporting election fraud or abuse would be “eligible for payment” from a $5 million fund.
The Trump campaign and the RNC have spent $28 million from 2020 through August of this year on lawyers who have filed more than 100 lawsuits seeking observer access to election facilities and questioning the security of mail-in ballots and the accuracy of voter rolls. An RNC spokeswoman said the party is “protecting every legal vote.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said most of the claims made by the election-integrity movement “are not designed to fix problems now.…They’re designed to set the stage for claiming the election was stolen postelection.”
Partisan watchers have long been a part of U.S. elections. Democrats, too, have been recruiting volunteers. The Harris campaign expects to field tens of thousands to act as poll watchers on Election Day and count observers afterward, as well as to staff hotlines dispensing legal and voter protection expertise.
The GOP effort has been four years in the making. Days after the 2020 election, some conservative scholars lamented in an email exchange that Trump wasn’t doing a more effective job contesting the results, according to emails provided in response to a public-records request.
“This will have to become another crusade of ours,” wrote Carson Holloway, a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, who outlined ways in which Republicans could “clean up elections for the future.” He told the Journal he hasn’t been involved in efforts to change election laws.
Fundraising boom
Fundraising by groups that describe their mission as rooting out voter fraud has skyrocketed in recent years, the Journal’s analysis of tax and campaign-finance filings found. The so-called dark money nonprofits involved in the 2024 efforts aren’t required to identify their donors.
The Journal analyzed grants made by nonprofits associated with conservative donors to groups that have worked on the issue, as well as publicly disclosed contributions to super PACs working on those efforts. For most nonprofits, the most recent filings were through 2022.
Groups linked to the Uihleins, the Wisconsin shipping billionaires, have donated more than $34 million since 2020 to organizations that do election-integrity work, the Journal analysis found. A foundation funded by donors including Green, the Hobby Lobby billionaire, has given $7 million. Two nonprofits in a network of groups operated by conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo gave more than $4.7 million.
Other funders of conservative causes who have backed election-integrity groups include Donors Trust, the Bradley Impact Fund and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which have collectively given more than $48 million to such groups, according to the Journal’s analysis.
Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project—part of the Leo network—said the group is responding to what he described as a yearslong effort by Democrats to change how elections are run, and that the group’s aim is to ensure election security.
Representatives for the Bradley Foundation said its donations were intended to support the groups’ overall missions, not just election integrity. Donors Trust, which allows donors to anonymously direct their money to specific organizations, said it doesn’t take policy positions. The Uihleins didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com and an early proponent of stolen-election claims in 2020, said he has donated as much as $60 million to election-integrity efforts, including to the America Project, a nonprofit he launched with former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn. That $60 million hasn’t been publicly disclosed and isn’t included in the $140 million tracked by the Journal.
In a text message, Byrne called Biden’s victory a “fake election” and said the U.S. was facing a “Chavista revolution.” He called for more to be done to fight purported election fraud, saying: “They have put Band-Aids on cancers.”
Byrne drew $160,000 in salary from that nonprofit, through 2022. Flynn has drawn a total of $300,000 in salary and consulting fees from that group and another nonprofit he worked with. Flynn didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In the 12 months through March 2020, the Servant Foundation, a Kansas-based nonprofit, directed hundreds of millions of dollars in grants mostly to religious organizations. It gave just $11,000 that year to a then-fledgling organization called the Conservative Partnership Institute, which aimed to support conservatives.
The following year, the Conservative Partnership Institute launched the Election Integrity Network, which it said would serve as a hub for volunteers, elected officials and activist groups focused on “securing the legality of every American vote.” The network also recruits and trains poll watchers and workers.
The Servant Foundation’s contributions to the institute shot up. It gave $1 million in the year ending March 2022 and $5.4 million the year after. It donated another $700,000 to three other groups that describe themselves as focusing on election integrity and voter fraud.
The Servant Foundation, which is also known as the Signatry and bills itself as a Christian ministry, is funded in part by Green, the billionaire founder of Hobby Lobby. Green also helped fund the “He Gets Us” TV advertising campaign, initially operated by the Servant Foundation, that aims to enhance Jesus’ appeal across partisan lines and to younger audiences.
The Servant Foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment. A statement provided by Hobby Lobby said the foundation’s leadership decides how its funds are spent, and that neither Hobby Lobby nor the Greens were aware of the Conservative Partnership Institute and hadn’t directed the foundation to support it.
The head of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Election Integrity Network is Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican election lawyer who participated in the January 2021 phone call in which Trump pressed Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” some 12,000 votes for him.
Mitchell and other activists have said they are responding to changes in voting processes put in place during the pandemic in 2020, including expanded use of mail-in ballots. Speaking to a Michigan group last year, Mitchell said Democrats had “used charitable dollars from foundations and billionaires to change the system,” according to a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Journal.
The Election Integrity Network’s efforts were on display in the 2022 midterm elections in Maricopa County, Ariz. In an episode of her online show last year, Mitchell said the group’s poll watchers had “full coverage” of all the county’s election observer slots in that election.
Sixteen days after that election, the group posted on its website a 50-page report about what it said were “technology, equipment, management and leadership failures in epic proportions,” which Mitchell said had “robbed countless voters of their political voices.”
A spokeswoman for the Maricopa County recorder’s office, which handles part of the county’s election procedures, said she was unaware of the report but that there was no evidence of fraud in 2022.
Mitchell said in an email: “I am very proud of the Election Integrity Network and the thousands of patriotic Americans” who are working on the effort.
Maricopa County election workers preparing for this year’s election have been conducting active-shooter drills and learning how to repel armed mobs.
New rules
Tens of millions of dollars have been spent in battleground states such as Georgia, where GOP lawmakers are responsible for a slew of legal changes and new rules that could make the election harder to administer.
Three members of Georgia’s State Election Board pushed through new rules in recent months, with public encouragement from Trump and Mitchell, including a mandate to hand count paper ballots at every polling site. In two separate rulings, judges in Georgia last week blocked the rules from going into effect so close to the election. Democrats had sued to try to stop the 11th-hour changes, contending they were intended to delay the tabulation of results long enough for Trump to capitalize on the uncertainty.
Across the country, the Democratic Party has been pushing back against GOP litigation that aims to restrict the early voting and access to mail-in ballots that Democrats had pushed for during the 2020 pandemic election. Earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit challenging recent changes in Georgia’s election rules that it claimed could create confusion for election officials during certification and ballot counting.
In the 2020 election, private donations—including $400 million from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan—helped state and local governments pay for election infrastructure. Republicans claimed the grants were used to bolster Democratic turnout in battleground states, which Zuckerberg and election officials in both parties deny.
Under pressure from conservative groups, 28 states, including Georgia, Virginia and other battlegrounds, have banned, limited or regulated private such grants since 2020, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A spokesman for Zuckerberg and Chan has said they are no longer donating such funds.
Most states that banned the grants didn’t allocate government funds to bridge the gap, which some election experts said has left state and local election officials underfunded and understaffed—and could lead to disorganization and chaos on Election Day.
‘Resource drain’
Election officials in Georgia and elsewhere also are facing serial challenges of voter registrations by local activists—including 30,000 challenges by a single volunteer in Fulton County, Ga.
Online databases, including one known as EagleAI NETwork, have fueled the effort. EagleAI pulls in data from 29 state voter rolls, county property records, the National Change of Address database and other sources. It highlights names that it says could be improperly registered voters, inviting users to investigate them and flag them to election officials.
Its creator, John Richards Jr., a retired physician, said the program is nonpartisan. He has joined Zoom calls hosted by Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network to demonstrate how EagleAI works.
Some election officials have criticized EagleAI and other databases like it for incorrectly flagging voter registrations for review as potentially fraudulent, creating more work for election offices. Seven counties in Georgia refuse to consider the challenges, Richards said.
Ben Hovland, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that works to ensure the voting process is secure, said mass voter challenges are part of a “weaponization” of open-records laws. EagleAI doesn’t rely on open records requests, but other similar tools do.
“You can often tell that these are either coordinated or they’re spinning out from internet conspiracies,” Hovland said. “They have real world consequences on the people that administer our elections. They are a resource drain.”
After Trump left office in 2021, Flynn launched the America Project with Byrne, the former Overstock CEO, and took over another dormant group, America’s Future, which began raising funds to pay for an election audit in Arizona, among other things.
One donor who answered the call was Julie Fancelli, the Publix Super Markets heiress, who previously had offered to spend $3 million to fund protests on Jan. 6, 2021, according to congressional documents. Her family foundation gave $500,000 to America’s Future in 2021, according to tax documents.
Flynn has since parted ways with the America Project, but he continues to talk up the threat of election fraud, including on PatriotTV, a streaming service owned by a company where he is a board member.
In an episode of his online PatriotTV show last month, he warned viewers to be vigilant about a potential “black swan scenario” in which the Biden administration had strategically registered millions of noncitizens to vote in battleground states.
Last week, Flynn again sounded the alarm. “This is a warning to those who may decide to cheat or commit fraud during our elections,” he posted on X. “The [government] may be watching us, but someone is watching you.”
By Rebecca Ballhaus and Mariah Timms
Oct. 22, 2024 9:00 pm ET
When Donald Trump refused to concede the 2020 election, he and his allies led a chaotic effort to overturn the results, spreading conspiracy theories, filing dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits and encouraging “Stop the Steal” protests that culminated in the assault on the Capitol.
Next month will likely play out differently if Trump loses again. The former president and his allies have spent the last four years laying the groundwork for a more organized, better funded and far broader effort to contest the outcome—a Stop the Steal 2.0—if the vote doesn’t go his way.
A secretive network of GOP donors and conservative billionaires have fueled the effort, giving more than $140 million to nearly 50 loosely connected groups that work on what they call election integrity, according to a Wall Street Journal review of Federal Election Commission filings, tax filings and other records. Among the donors are organizations linked to Wisconsin billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Hobby Lobby founder David Green.
Those groups have been scrutinizing voter registrations on an industrial scale and working to slow down the vote count, bury local election officials in paperwork and lawsuits and elect like-minded politicians at the state and local levels who will support efforts to contest the vote.
Many election officials worry those moves could sow chaos at the polls and confusion about the results. In 2020, Trump seized on the uncertainty as votes were still being counted to declare, “Frankly, we did win this election.”
At the time, many top Republicans and even Trump’s own aides privately expressed skepticism about his claims and his frantic, haphazard effort to contest the results. Subsequent government audits, state investigations and lawsuits turned up no evidence of widespread fraud, and evidence has emerged that Trump aides knew the results to be legitimate as they sought to undermine them. Top election officials, including many Republicans at the state level, say the current election-integrity push is targeting problems that don’t exist.
Trump has made claims about election integrity a central plank of his campaign and repeatedly signaled he would dispute the results if he loses. Pressed three times during the June presidential debate whether he would accept the 2024 election, he said he would only do so if it was a “fair and legal and good election.”
Over the last four years, GOP leaders and donors have fallen in line. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) risked a government shutdown last month to try to pass a Trump-backed measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. Elon Musk, who owns X, has become one of the loudest voices online stoking fears about election fraud.
Conservative groups have trained armies of volunteers to monitor voting on Election Day, including 200,000 poll watchers, poll workers and legal experts recruited by the Republican National Committee alone. One group created an app that is essentially Facebook for election fraud, allowing users to post, comment and share anything they deem to be “election irregularities,” and to file incident reports to the group. Another group advertised in May that anyone reporting election fraud or abuse would be “eligible for payment” from a $5 million fund.
The Trump campaign and the RNC have spent $28 million from 2020 through August of this year on lawyers who have filed more than 100 lawsuits seeking observer access to election facilities and questioning the security of mail-in ballots and the accuracy of voter rolls. An RNC spokeswoman said the party is “protecting every legal vote.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said most of the claims made by the election-integrity movement “are not designed to fix problems now.…They’re designed to set the stage for claiming the election was stolen postelection.”
Partisan watchers have long been a part of U.S. elections. Democrats, too, have been recruiting volunteers. The Harris campaign expects to field tens of thousands to act as poll watchers on Election Day and count observers afterward, as well as to staff hotlines dispensing legal and voter protection expertise.
The GOP effort has been four years in the making. Days after the 2020 election, some conservative scholars lamented in an email exchange that Trump wasn’t doing a more effective job contesting the results, according to emails provided in response to a public-records request.
“This will have to become another crusade of ours,” wrote Carson Holloway, a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, who outlined ways in which Republicans could “clean up elections for the future.” He told the Journal he hasn’t been involved in efforts to change election laws.
Fundraising boom
Fundraising by groups that describe their mission as rooting out voter fraud has skyrocketed in recent years, the Journal’s analysis of tax and campaign-finance filings found. The so-called dark money nonprofits involved in the 2024 efforts aren’t required to identify their donors.
The Journal analyzed grants made by nonprofits associated with conservative donors to groups that have worked on the issue, as well as publicly disclosed contributions to super PACs working on those efforts. For most nonprofits, the most recent filings were through 2022.
Groups linked to the Uihleins, the Wisconsin shipping billionaires, have donated more than $34 million since 2020 to organizations that do election-integrity work, the Journal analysis found. A foundation funded by donors including Green, the Hobby Lobby billionaire, has given $7 million. Two nonprofits in a network of groups operated by conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo gave more than $4.7 million.
Other funders of conservative causes who have backed election-integrity groups include Donors Trust, the Bradley Impact Fund and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which have collectively given more than $48 million to such groups, according to the Journal’s analysis.
Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project—part of the Leo network—said the group is responding to what he described as a yearslong effort by Democrats to change how elections are run, and that the group’s aim is to ensure election security.
Representatives for the Bradley Foundation said its donations were intended to support the groups’ overall missions, not just election integrity. Donors Trust, which allows donors to anonymously direct their money to specific organizations, said it doesn’t take policy positions. The Uihleins didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com and an early proponent of stolen-election claims in 2020, said he has donated as much as $60 million to election-integrity efforts, including to the America Project, a nonprofit he launched with former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn. That $60 million hasn’t been publicly disclosed and isn’t included in the $140 million tracked by the Journal.
In a text message, Byrne called Biden’s victory a “fake election” and said the U.S. was facing a “Chavista revolution.” He called for more to be done to fight purported election fraud, saying: “They have put Band-Aids on cancers.”
Byrne drew $160,000 in salary from that nonprofit, through 2022. Flynn has drawn a total of $300,000 in salary and consulting fees from that group and another nonprofit he worked with. Flynn didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In the 12 months through March 2020, the Servant Foundation, a Kansas-based nonprofit, directed hundreds of millions of dollars in grants mostly to religious organizations. It gave just $11,000 that year to a then-fledgling organization called the Conservative Partnership Institute, which aimed to support conservatives.
The following year, the Conservative Partnership Institute launched the Election Integrity Network, which it said would serve as a hub for volunteers, elected officials and activist groups focused on “securing the legality of every American vote.” The network also recruits and trains poll watchers and workers.
The Servant Foundation’s contributions to the institute shot up. It gave $1 million in the year ending March 2022 and $5.4 million the year after. It donated another $700,000 to three other groups that describe themselves as focusing on election integrity and voter fraud.
The Servant Foundation, which is also known as the Signatry and bills itself as a Christian ministry, is funded in part by Green, the billionaire founder of Hobby Lobby. Green also helped fund the “He Gets Us” TV advertising campaign, initially operated by the Servant Foundation, that aims to enhance Jesus’ appeal across partisan lines and to younger audiences.
The Servant Foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment. A statement provided by Hobby Lobby said the foundation’s leadership decides how its funds are spent, and that neither Hobby Lobby nor the Greens were aware of the Conservative Partnership Institute and hadn’t directed the foundation to support it.
The head of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Election Integrity Network is Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican election lawyer who participated in the January 2021 phone call in which Trump pressed Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” some 12,000 votes for him.
Mitchell and other activists have said they are responding to changes in voting processes put in place during the pandemic in 2020, including expanded use of mail-in ballots. Speaking to a Michigan group last year, Mitchell said Democrats had “used charitable dollars from foundations and billionaires to change the system,” according to a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Journal.
The Election Integrity Network’s efforts were on display in the 2022 midterm elections in Maricopa County, Ariz. In an episode of her online show last year, Mitchell said the group’s poll watchers had “full coverage” of all the county’s election observer slots in that election.
Sixteen days after that election, the group posted on its website a 50-page report about what it said were “technology, equipment, management and leadership failures in epic proportions,” which Mitchell said had “robbed countless voters of their political voices.”
A spokeswoman for the Maricopa County recorder’s office, which handles part of the county’s election procedures, said she was unaware of the report but that there was no evidence of fraud in 2022.
Mitchell said in an email: “I am very proud of the Election Integrity Network and the thousands of patriotic Americans” who are working on the effort.
Maricopa County election workers preparing for this year’s election have been conducting active-shooter drills and learning how to repel armed mobs.
New rules
Tens of millions of dollars have been spent in battleground states such as Georgia, where GOP lawmakers are responsible for a slew of legal changes and new rules that could make the election harder to administer.
Three members of Georgia’s State Election Board pushed through new rules in recent months, with public encouragement from Trump and Mitchell, including a mandate to hand count paper ballots at every polling site. In two separate rulings, judges in Georgia last week blocked the rules from going into effect so close to the election. Democrats had sued to try to stop the 11th-hour changes, contending they were intended to delay the tabulation of results long enough for Trump to capitalize on the uncertainty.
Across the country, the Democratic Party has been pushing back against GOP litigation that aims to restrict the early voting and access to mail-in ballots that Democrats had pushed for during the 2020 pandemic election. Earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit challenging recent changes in Georgia’s election rules that it claimed could create confusion for election officials during certification and ballot counting.
In the 2020 election, private donations—including $400 million from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan—helped state and local governments pay for election infrastructure. Republicans claimed the grants were used to bolster Democratic turnout in battleground states, which Zuckerberg and election officials in both parties deny.
Under pressure from conservative groups, 28 states, including Georgia, Virginia and other battlegrounds, have banned, limited or regulated private such grants since 2020, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A spokesman for Zuckerberg and Chan has said they are no longer donating such funds.
Most states that banned the grants didn’t allocate government funds to bridge the gap, which some election experts said has left state and local election officials underfunded and understaffed—and could lead to disorganization and chaos on Election Day.
‘Resource drain’
Election officials in Georgia and elsewhere also are facing serial challenges of voter registrations by local activists—including 30,000 challenges by a single volunteer in Fulton County, Ga.
Online databases, including one known as EagleAI NETwork, have fueled the effort. EagleAI pulls in data from 29 state voter rolls, county property records, the National Change of Address database and other sources. It highlights names that it says could be improperly registered voters, inviting users to investigate them and flag them to election officials.
Its creator, John Richards Jr., a retired physician, said the program is nonpartisan. He has joined Zoom calls hosted by Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network to demonstrate how EagleAI works.
Some election officials have criticized EagleAI and other databases like it for incorrectly flagging voter registrations for review as potentially fraudulent, creating more work for election offices. Seven counties in Georgia refuse to consider the challenges, Richards said.
Ben Hovland, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that works to ensure the voting process is secure, said mass voter challenges are part of a “weaponization” of open-records laws. EagleAI doesn’t rely on open records requests, but other similar tools do.
“You can often tell that these are either coordinated or they’re spinning out from internet conspiracies,” Hovland said. “They have real world consequences on the people that administer our elections. They are a resource drain.”
After Trump left office in 2021, Flynn launched the America Project with Byrne, the former Overstock CEO, and took over another dormant group, America’s Future, which began raising funds to pay for an election audit in Arizona, among other things.
One donor who answered the call was Julie Fancelli, the Publix Super Markets heiress, who previously had offered to spend $3 million to fund protests on Jan. 6, 2021, according to congressional documents. Her family foundation gave $500,000 to America’s Future in 2021, according to tax documents.
Flynn has since parted ways with the America Project, but he continues to talk up the threat of election fraud, including on PatriotTV, a streaming service owned by a company where he is a board member.
In an episode of his online PatriotTV show last month, he warned viewers to be vigilant about a potential “black swan scenario” in which the Biden administration had strategically registered millions of noncitizens to vote in battleground states.
Last week, Flynn again sounded the alarm. “This is a warning to those who may decide to cheat or commit fraud during our elections,” he posted on X. “The [government] may be watching us, but someone is watching you.”
