Election Deniers Are Out in Full Force. We Went Where They Did

Mindy Robinson has spent four years telling her hundreds of thousands of followers online that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But just days away from the 2024 vote, she has a unique new tactic to prove it’s getting stolen again: not casting her ballot at all.

“I’m not voting, I want to see if [my ballot] gets counted while I didn’t do anything,” Robinson, who desperately wants Trump to win, tells WIRED at a Las Vegas restaurant on Saturday morning. “I want to see it magically show up as counted. It’s the only fucking thing I can do at this point.”

Just miles away, JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr. were at the Whitney Recreation Center, where they urged their supporters to get out and vote.

As Tuesday’s vote looms, the well-funded and lucrative election denial movement that sprung up after former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is already calling foul, pushing conspiracies about immigrants voting and harassing election workers.

The weekend ahead of the election, Robinson and thousands of others like her are challenging election officials and spreading conspiracy theories online and in person. Right-wing election observers are already at polling sites and voting tabulation centers; this weekend, election officials in Shasta County, California, walked off the job because of the aggressive behavior of election observers.

These election deniers have spent years building and buying an alternative reality sold by far-right groups that have been working around the clock to activate and train them. The groups are well connected: The Election Integrity Network is run by former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a Texas-based group, was cofounded by election denial superstar Catherine Engelbrecht, who has worked on dropbox monitoring and voter roll purge initiatives around the country for more than a decade. Election observers have also been trained in online calls by pro-Trump groups like Turning Point USA and the campaign’s own TrumpForce47.

Over livestreams and in conferences around the US, these groups have prepared thousands of activists for this very moment.

Since the 2020 presidential election, Robinson has become something of a celebrity in MAGA world. She calls Laura Loomer a friend and says Roger Stone phones her to get the lowdown on breaking news. She has more than 400,000 followers on X, and also has her own show—called Conspiracy Truths—on the America Happens Network, a platform she founded with her business partner Vem Miller, who was recently arrested at a Trump rally in possession of a shotgun and a handgun. There are few conspiracy theories Robinson, an actress with more than 150 credits to her name on IMDB, doesn’t indulge in: In addition to believing the 2020 election was stolen, she also thinks most major school shootings are perpetrated by crisis actors, that shadowy organizations are implementing digital currencies to control the population, that Covid-19 was released as a bioweapon, that Covid vaccines are untested and kill people, and that January 6 was an inside job. She even believes the moon landing didn’t happen.

She has also run for political office twice. In 2020, Robinson ran in the Republican primary for a state senate seat, and in 2022 she ran as a Libertarian Party candidate for the Nevada State Assembly where she secured less than 4 percent of the vote. “I’m fully aware how they cheat. It’s pretty bad,” she claims.

Robinson is part of a close knit network of activists in Nevada and around the US who share “intel” on chat groups and Telegram channels about the latest baseless election fraud allegations. WIRED spoke to one woman who alleged issues at a voting tabulation center in Las Vegas, where some of her friends were working as observers. They didn’t have any proof, but were convinced nonetheless.

Susan Profitt, another election denial activist who knows Robinson, tells WIRED that she was acting as an observer in a tabulation center last week when an election official warned her she would be expelled from the building and even threatened to file felony charges against her for harassing election officials. Profitt denied harassing any election officials. She is convinced there is a grand conspiracy to keep her silent, and claimed the incident was related to her support dog, who was with her. WIRED contacted the Clark County Recorder’s Office but did not receive a response.

For the past four years, even though evidence conclusively shows that the 2020 election was not stolen. election officials have been the ones who have been harassed and threatened. Thousands have quit and election offices have been forced to take extreme measures to protect their workers.

And leaders in the election denial movement are continuing to promote ideas that are going to make the situation much worse. This weekend, conservative activist James O’Keefe said that he was sending out more than 1,000 cameras to election officials who have signed up to covertly film the voting process.

Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser and a leader of the election denial movement, used his social media platforms to urge his “army of digital soldiers” to “VOTE like our very survival as a constitutional republic depends on it.”

On a much smaller scale, Ellen Gifford, a retiree in Las Vegas, is also training election observers.

On Saturday, sitting in her living room in a Las Vegas suburb facing her computer screen, Giffords walked a group of observers through her incredibly detailed 93-page handbook.

The handbook, reviewed by WIRED, is the result of months of painstaking work by Gifford and about seven others who make up the Volunteer Nevada! group, which is dedicated to election integrity efforts. In total, Gifford has trained around 50 people who have been observing at early polling locations across Nevada.

Gifford is not a newcomer to election integrity work, having spent a decade in California in the space, before moving to Las Vegas in 2019. It was while in California that she met Engelbrecht, the cofounder of True the Vote, which has been at the forefront of pushing false narratives around the 2020 and 2024 elections.

Engelbrecht and True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram.

Gifford is still in contact with Engelbrecht and has also taken part in some of the online meetings held by the Election Integrity Network, the group run by Mitchell which has been pushing the baseless narrative that a flood of illegal immigrants will vote in this week’s election.

Engelbrecht, Mitchell, True the Vote, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

On Thursday, Mitchell held the group’s final online meeting before the election, to hammer home the conspiracy that huge numbers of illegal immigrants will be voting illegally on Tuesday.

The group has spent months promoting its “Only Citizens Vote” campaign, and during the call on Thursday, a recording of which WIRED reviewed, Mitchell once again urged her followers to be on the lookout for non-English speakers.

“It’s math, it’s not racism,” Mitchell said in response to criticism of her group targeting minority voters with signs being placed at polling stations warning voters that casting a ballot illegally could result in long prison sentences.

The constant drumbeat of election denial conspiracy theories for the past four years has resulted in a heightened risk of violence, which is happening even before the election begins. The election denial movement has merged with the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs group as leaders have said they are working with militias and sheriffs to be prepared to respond to reports of election fraud. In Arizona, the leader of one militia group who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity said he was convinced that the only way Trump was going to lose was if the election was rigged, something he believes is already happening.

When asked if his group was planning to take any action around the election he said they were not, but added that if Harris was declared the winner, then “someone, somewhere will take kinetic action and when that happens, things get very bad, very quickly.”

But, if violence broke out, he says his group would be “ready to defend themselves, and the Republic.”

Gifford says her work is more focused on transparency rather than partisanship. But when asked whether she believes the 2020 election was stolen, she quietly admits she does. When asked why, Gifford doesn’t really have an answer: “I have no idea. It’s just, I don’t know. It’s just a gut feeling. I’m sorry. I have no evidence.”

You can follow all of WIRED’s 2024 presidential election coverage here.