A Virginia-based former high-level Trump campaign staffer is crowdfunding an effort to use a call center to fish for accounts of alleged voter fraud in Pennsylvania and other swing states.
The Voter Integrity Fund was launched a week ago by Matt Braynard, who says he’s raised over $500,000 to cross-reference public data in a quest to unearth malfeasance in the election.
“We’re focusing on areas with exceptionally high Democratic turnout,” he said. “This is an effort to better establish whether the election was legitimate.”
Voter ID proponents and other conservative political groups have long struggled to produce hard evidence of mass voter fraud. But Braynard said his group was using a call center to track down people who moved or were otherwise nominally inactive voters, asking them to confirm if they cast a ballot in order to detect possible identity theft. He said he is also cross-referencing databases to find voters that may have cast ballots in the wrong place, voted twice, or were deceased.
The effort moved to a Christian crowdfunding website after another fundraising platform, GoFundMe, “nuked” his initial fundraising effort, said Braynard, who was laid off in 2016 from his job on the Trump campaign’s data team. He asserted that he “will personally receive zero dollars” from the project.
Braynard declined to detail any specific instances of voter fraud uncovered so far, but described high levels of interest in his effort.
“I posted last Thursday to my … Twitter followers about ways to detect if there were fraudulent ballots and it exploded from there,” he said.
The group claims to have called 75,000 people in Pennsylvania and hopes to reach 375,000.
Several Pennsylvanians apparently contacted by the Voter Integrity Fund say they voted normally and described the call as suspicious.
Zach DeRitis, a 29-year-old communications worker in South Philly, said he was confused by a voicemail he received from the group asking if he had voted by mail or in person.
“I was a little concerned about how they had my number or what they would ask me,” said DeRitis, who did vote by mail.
When a WHYY reporter who received a call from the Voter Integrity Fund asked who was behind the group, the caller said they were “free to Google it.” When pressed for more information, the caller hung up.
Others reported similar interactions, with callers indicating that they were investigating voter fraud in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.