This County Chose an Election Denier, 9/11 Truther, and QAnon Conspiracist to Run Its Elections

A man with no experience running elections and who believes the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, the 9/11 attack was faked, and QAnon is real has been chosen by a county in Iowa to oversee its elections, including the critical 2024 presidential election.

David Whipple was appointed last week by the Warren County Board of Supervisors to serve as Interim Warren County Auditor, a position responsible for overseeing elections in the county. The appointment was made in a special meeting after former Warren County Auditor Traci Vanderlinden announced her retirement last month.

One of the board supervisors, Crystal McIntyre, acknowledged in the meeting that it “looks weird” to be appointing Whipple—who she admitted knowing personally—but they voted for him anyway.

Whipple’s belief in baseless conspiracy theories was not secret or hidden. Days after the 2020 election, Whipple was sharing baseless allegations of voter fraud, according to screenshots of the posts published by the Iowa Starting Line website. On the same day, Whipple wrote a post calling President Joe Biden a “crooked pedophile child sniffer” where he referenced QAnon conspiracies about the president. 

Whipple continued to post disinformation about the election and Biden in the following weeks and months, as well as anti-vaxx disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccination. On Jan. 2, 2021 he shared a link to a video entitled Q: The Plan To Save The World, a 2018 video that has become one of the foundational texts of the QAnon conspiracy movement. 

On January 6, 2021, as the insurrection was taking place, Whipple shared a link to a video about the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The video, entitled Nina Eleven, falsely claims the images broadcast on television of the planes slamming into the towers were computer generated.

All of these posts were freely accessible at the time of the Warren County board meeting on June 6, but have since been scrubbed. 

Screenshots of the posts have been shared widely online, however, and have been used by the Warren County Iowa Democrats as part of their drive to obtain the 2,500 signatures necessary to call a special election to vote for a new auditor.

“If you don’t believe in elections how can you be in charge of elections?” Warren County Democratic Party Chair Jim Culbert said on  local radio station KNIA-KRLS. “If you don’t think that they were fair and honest, how is that going to inform how you do the job? We just don’t know this guy, he came out of nowhere.”

The Warren County Board of Supervisors and Whipple did not immediately respond to VICE News’ request for comment on Whipple’s conspiratorial beliefs.