Obscured by the clownish conspiracy bombast of a mile-a-minute pillow salesman is a democracy-threatening network of national, state, and local organizations coordinating efforts and preparing to flood the zone with misinformation to cast doubt on the 2024 election.

While tremendous work has gone into tracking the election denier voter suppression legal challenges and charting the political and legislative landscape of election denial, a sober assessment of the size and scope of the movement behind election denial has largely been missing from this vital conversation about the ongoing assault on democracy.[1]

Drawing on field reports, countless hours of video, legal documents, FOIA requests, financial documents, and social media data, this IREHR special report maps the size and scope of Mike Lindell’s Big Lie Machine, the largest grassroots network in the election denial movement. The Lindell network uncovered in this report includes several national election denial groups and sixty state-level grassroots outfits. Combined, these groups have a social media reach of 642,902 followers.

Through four years of scheming and organizing, the Big Lie Machine plans to pick up where Stop the Steal and the January 6^th insurrection left off.

The Election Denial Landscape

Beyond the resources the Republican National Committee committed to “voter integrity” in 2024, a surprisingly large number of national election denial networks make up the bulk of the election denial movement.

Here are the major national networks:

The America Project is the effort of Ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and former general Michael Flynn. The group has crisscrossed the country with events to churn QAnon-style conspiracies about the election. Byrne recently called for militias to team up with sheriffs to stop the “expected flood” of immigrant voters.

Former Trump election lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network (EIN) has been categorized as “one of the largest groups leading the voter challenge efforts.”[2] EIN’s well-funded efforts include using a flawed, incomplete database of voter rolls to challenge voter registrations in several states. EIN is also fusing election denial with anti-immigrant sentiment through their coalition Only Citizens Vote. As ProPublica first reported, the initial draft of a new rule by the GOP-controlled Georgia Election Board, which created an additional avenue to delay the certification of election results, was provided by a regional EIN leader.[3]

Fight Voter Fraud is a political advocacy nonprofit led by failed Republican candidate for the Connecticut state House of Representatives, Linda Szynkowicz. The group offers its own flawed program for volunteers to analyze registered voter data to purge voting rolls. The group borrowed guidelines for state challenges from True the Vote.[4] Szynkowicz claimed that her team gathered evidence of felony election violations committed by over 40,000 people across the country.[5]

Far-right billionaire Dick Uihlein bankrolls multiple election denial efforts. The Uihlein-backed Election Transparency Initiative is a joint effort of the anti-abortion rights Susan B. Anthony List and American Principles Project, led by former Virginia Attorney Ken Cuccinelli. Uihlein is also funding the election denial “hub” of Restoration Action, the 501(c)4 effort of the Restoration of America network, as well as the offshoot Voter Reference Foundation (VoteRef).^[6] VoteRef disclosed the personal information of millions of voters in the search for alleged “errors” in voter rolls.

However, the most energetic grassroots election denial network is under the control of Minnesota MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell. As infused with election conspiracies as the others, Lindell’s network has become the most extensive umbrella for election denial activity, primarily by focusing on the machinery of elections.

Mapping the Lindell Network

Mike Lindell is a man with a plan. Despite mounting legal and financial troubles, in the years since the failed effort to overturn the presidential election results, the MyPillow CEO fostered multiple projects to advance Big Lie election denial—a legal “offense” arm, a media outlet, and a grassroots network.

A full financial accounting for the breadth of the Lindell network is challenging, as the organizations are a mix of for-profit and nonprofit entities with little transparency.

From available data, the Lindell Legal Offense Fund, the 501(c)4 Lindell organization registered in Wisconsin, received $3,417,092 in 2022 and $2,835,842 in 2021. Of the $6,252,934 raised during the first two years, $4,566,298 was spent on legal fees, $126,904 on advertising and promotion, $208,558 in web hosting fees, and a $250,000 grant to the Florida group America Restored.[7]

Meanwhile, the social media and streaming projects fall under the umbrella of the publicly traded over-the-counter for-profit entity FrankSpeech Network, Inc. On September 30, those entities will rebrand as “VOCL.”[8]

At his 2023 Election Summit, Lindell released a 42-page “Anti-Steal Dossier,” outlining how his multiple far-right projects fit together. The Lindell election denial machine is fueled by the volunteers organized under his Cause of America group or the many independent state groups under the Lindell umbrella.

Before elections, activists are encouraged to work on trying to pass legislation making it harder to vote and to count votes: shrinking elections to single-day voting, requiring hand-counted paper ballots, eliminating ranked-choice voting, eliminating mail-in voting, eliminating drop boxes, requiring local clerks manage registration, precinct-level counting, and stricter voter ID requirements. Based on conspiracy-driven false narratives about the accuracy of states’ voting rolls, several of the network partners have also attempted to purge voter registration rolls.

For election periods, activists are trained to keep an eye out for alleged irregularities and report those through the Lindell Election Crime Bureau App or the FrankSocial platform. When ballots are coming in, Lindell’s Cause of America has an app activists can use for “early detection and tracking of voting anomalies” used for canvassing of homes. Lindell even showcased a device strapped to a drone called the WMD that can hover around polling places and sniff for alleged connections between voting machines and the internet.

Once submitted to the Election Crime Bureau, these claims will circulate through the alternative media channels Lindell built after the post-January 6^th de-platforming of election deniers. Those alternate channels include FrankSpeech, a streaming video and podcast site, and the social media site FrankSpeech. Those platforms provide a base to spread the allegations to mainstream platforms.

(Lost) Cause of America

The core of the Lindell network is Cause of America, which is the network effort to connect local activists across the country. According to group videos, “Cause of America (CoA) is an independent, non-partisan, nonprofit organization focused on election integrity. CoA facilitates grassroots citizen action to conduct, control, manage, monitor, and verify their elections on local, state, and national levels.”[9] A search of IRS Tax Exempt Organizations returned no records for “Cause of America,” but it may be functioning under the umbrella of the 501(c)4 Lindell Legal Offense Fund.

According to the plan rolled out by Mike Lindell at his 2023 summit, “Cause of America communicates with representatives of organizations in all 50 states. Cause of America was formed to coordinate election integrity efforts across America and give a platform for individuals to share their discoveries.”[10]

The Cause of America section of Lindell’s FrankSocial social media site includes 51 groups across 47 states, with 497,712 members. In addition to Cause of America’s national group with 38,800 members, seventeen states have more than 20,000 members.

Cause of America Group Membership

State Leadership

In addition to the national figures, IREHR has identified 130 different state and local leaders platformed at Lindell-organized election denial conferences over the past three years.

It’s easy to dismiss this coalition as a hodgepodge of MAGA conspiracy cranks. Local leadership includes figures like an activist who cited the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, to prove election fraud, another who said she would “lynch” an election official, an official found guilty of election machine tampering, and January 6^th insurrectionists.

At the same time, state-level network leadership consists of attorneys, accountants, realtors, and other professionals. It also includes several candidates for elected office and Republican party officials. The Lindell network has even attracted a slew of current and former elected officials, including a former Minnesota mayor; current/former state legislators from Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, South Carolina, Washington, Wisconsin, and West Virginia; and a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice.[24]

Lindell Summit State Speakers

How far are the Lindell network leaders willing to go? In one answer to this question, in March 2022, just months before representing North Carolina at the 2^nd Lindell election summit, William Keith Senter, chair of the Surry County Republican Party, threatened to get a county elections director fired or have her pay cut unless she helped him gain illegal access to voting equipment.[25]

National Groups in the Lindell Network

The Lindell network includes several national election denial efforts, most notably United Sovereign Americans and True the Vote.

Democracy Docket has described United Sovereign Americans as “a nascent far-right legal group that’s organizing to disrupt the 2024 election with a series of lawsuits aimed at upending the voting process in a handful of states.”[26] The group has sued several states voting roles and tried to block election certification.[27] United Sovereigns of America CEO Marly Hornik (also the executive director of New York Citizens Audit) declared the group’s “second stage” would be to go after the personal assets in lawsuits of election officials and law enforcement personnel.[28]

True the Vote grew out of Tea Party voter suppression efforts back in 2011 and became infamous for its role in the debunked and retracted election Big Lie documentary 2,000 Mules. As part of the group’s strategy to remove voters, it launched the app IV3, which features inaccurate voter registration data used to challenge voter rolls nationwide.

During an early September Cause of America call, the Michigan election denier coordinating Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau efforts, former Michigan state Senator Patrick Colbeck, announced that True the Vote was officially “partnering” with the Lindell network.[29]

United Sovereign Americans and True the Vote have a combined social media footprint of 315,009 followers over five platforms.

State Groups in the Lindell Network

No official list of state groups is publicly available from any of the Lindell network projects. The IREHR research team has pieced together a list of the groups mentioned during the Lindell election summits. In total, Lindell’s summits highlighted 60 state groups from 41 states.

The 60 different state groups identified in the Lindell election denial network have a total of 327,894 followers across 100 accounts over 14 different social media platforms.[30]

Lindell Network State & Local Groups

Hunting for a Predicate

In four years of nonstop conspiracy promotion, the Lindell Big Lie Machine built an army of followers looking to monkey-wrench the 2024 election process. In a recent Cause of America video conference call preparing for the 2024 election, Cause of America leader Shawn Smith declared,

“Keep in mind, you don’t need to see a hundred thousand anomalies in your county or in your state in order to know there’s a problem. If you see one person who doesn’t have the right ID and is being allowed to vote, or who you know doesn’t have correct residence information is being allowed to register or to vote, or you see ballots mishandled, that’s proof of a flaw or failure or breakdown in the safeguards, and now you have a complaint basis as a citizen. And your public officials, where you have friendly and allied public officials, you have something you can take to them and say, ‘Look, we know there’s a problem; we just don’t know how big it is.’ And that should be all of our mentality, we’ve got to flip that script from we have to prove fraud—an election outcome altering fraud or misconduct—to they have to prove there’s none. And if we find one, now there’s a cause, now there’s a reasonable predicate to say, ‘Ok, now you show us what the scope of that problem is.’”

In other words, if the Cause of America election deniers can find anything slightly incongruous, they believe it opens the door to challenging the entire election. By “flipping the script,” election deniers contend that election officials will be forced to prove the absence of fraud rather than needing actual evidence of fraud.

Cause of America’s Smith, a January 6^th insurrectionist, is also a founder of the Colorado group, U.S. Election Integrity Plan (USEIP). In the fall of 2021, USEIP “volunteers went door-to-door in majority Democratic and racially diverse areas and interrogated voters about their addresses, if they voted in the 2020 election, and who they voted for. Some were armed, donned badges, and claimed to be from ‘the county’ as they falsely accused residents of casting fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election.”[31]

In early September, Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau sent emails requesting personal information from local election officials and information about security programs designed to detect threats in those counties, according to emails obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom.[32]

Mounting Up Constitutional Sheriffs

Preparing to take action even when local or state election officials won’t, Lindell has also courted far-right “Constitutional sheriffs” to intervene in elections. “I wanna bring the sheriffs up because I’ll tell you what, everybody, there’s two things when we’re done with this call to action that are going to get our country back, the sheriffs and the judges,” declared Lindell at his 2022 election summit.

The Lindell network has developed a close relationship with the far-right pro-paramilitary group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). Network partner True the Vote initially cultivated the relationship with CSPOA in 2022.[33] Lindell himself spoke at both the 2022 and 2024 CSPOA conferences.[34] Network partner True the Vote also created an election-centered project with current Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff Mark Lamb’s far-right Protect America Now.

Lindell also made far-right sheriffs a centerpiece of the 2022 election summit, featuring onstage not only CSPOA founder Richard Mack but also a panel of election-denying sheriffs. They highlighted the efforts of sheriffs, like CSPOA board member Dar Leaf, to intervene in challenged elections, discussed threatening uncooperative election officials and even confiscating voting machines.[35]

Election deniers spent the last three years preparing to deny, delay, deceive, and disrupt the 2024 election: deny access to the ballot and deny the validity of election results, delay processing and certification of results, deceive the public by promoting baseless conspiracies and election misinformation, disrupt—by force or violence, if necessary—the certification of results.

The intervention of election deniers, particularly those with a badge, significantly increases the potential for volatility around the election. Having already gone through the horrors of the January 6^th insurrection and an unprecedented number of threats to election officials in the years following, it’s essential to monitor the movement driving the Big Lie machine and intervene with boots on the ground to defend democracy on Election Day and beyond.

NOTES

[1] See, for instance, Democracy Docket, Replacing the Refs.

[2] Cohen, Matt. “These Right-Wing Groups Are Trying to Remove Millions of Voters Around the Country.” Democracy Docket. August 20, 2024. https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/these-right-wing-groups-are-trying-to-remove-millions-of-voters-around-the-country/.

[3] Bock Clark, Doug. “Election Deniers Secretly Pushed Rule That Would Make It Easier to Delay Certification of Georgia’s Election Results.” ProPublica. August 18, 2024. https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-election-board-vote-certification.

[4] “Data Request Form – Double Registered Voters.” Fight Voter Fraud Inc. Undated. Last Accessed September 25, 2024. https://fightvoterfraud.org/request-data/

[5] Roth, Zachary. “Republican National Committee courts election conspiracy theorists to help watch polls.” Georgia Recorder. April 9, 2024. https://georgiarecorder.com/2024/04/09/republican-national-committee-courts-election-conspiracy-theorists-to-help-watch-polls/.

[6] Sollenberger, Richard. “Inside the Billionaire-Backed ‘Hub for Election Denial.’” Daily Beast. November 28, 2022. https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-billionaire-backed-dick-uihlein-hub-for-election-denial-restoration-action

[7] Lindell Legal Offense Fund. IRS Form 990 2022, 2021. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/862993382/202333179349305553/full. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/862993382/202243149349304309/full.

[8] “FSBN Unveils Bold Rebranding: FrankSocial Becomes VOCL.” FSBN. FrankSpeech Broadcast Network. Undated. Last Accessed Septermber 25, 2024. https://fsbn.com/fsbn-unveils-bold-rebranding-franksocial-becomes-vocl/.

[9] See videos on the Cause of America FrankSpeech channel. https://frankspeech.com/channel/cause-america

[10] Lindell, Mike. “Mike Lindell Presents The Plan. The Anti-Steal Dossier.” Lindell Legal Offense Fund. August 17, 2023. https://lindelloffensefund.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/The-Plan-Detailed-Whitepaper.pdf.

[11] Dereuck, Kelly. “Conspiracy theorists gather at Missouri summit to discuss rigged voting machines, 2020 election.” USA Today. August 17, 2023. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/08/17/mike-lindell-summit-election-crime-event-conspiracy-theories/70615033007/.

[12] Young, Quentin. “Jan. 6 videos said to show Colorado election denier Shawn Smith clashing with police.” Colorado Newsline. February 13, 2022. https://coloradonewsline.com/2022/02/13/jan-6-videos-said-to-show-shawn-smith-clashing-police/.

[13] Woodruff, Chase. “Judge rules in favor of defendants in Colorado voter intimidation case.” Colorado Newsline. July 18, 2024. https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/07/18/judge-tosses-out-voter-intimidation-lawsuit-colorado/.

[14] Yin, Alice. “Michigan candidate criticized over anti-Muslim remarks.” Washington Post. April 26, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michigan-candidate-criticized-over-anti-muslim-remarks/2018/04/26/669ff1f6-49ba-11e8-8082-105a446d19b8_story.html.

[15] Berzon, Alexandra and Bensinger, Ken. “Fueled by Falsehoods, a Michigan Group Is Ready to Challenge the Vote.” New York Times. November 2, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/us/politics/michigan-elections-group.html.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Glawe, Justin, Perez, Andrew, and Suesaeng, Asawin. “Mike Lindell Group Accused of ‘Impersonating’ Election Cybersecurity Initiative.” Rolling Stone. September 15, 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/mike-lindell-group-accused-impersonating-election-cybersecurity-1235102625/.

[18] Murray, Sara and Simon, Jeff. “The 2020 election wasn’t stolen. But Douglas Frank and his bogus equation claiming otherwise are still winning over audiences.” CNN. January 19, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/18/politics/douglas-frank-big-lie/index.html.

[19] “Lindell Offense Fund Inc. – 2021 990.” Instrumentl IRS Filing Viewer. Last Accessed September 25, 2024. https://irs-efile-renderer.instrumentl.com/render?object_id=202243149349304309

[20] Marshall, Andrew C. Tanfani, Joseph, and Ulmer, Alexandra. “A Reuters Special Report

Ex-academic forges a new career rallying Trump faithful behind voter-fraud claims.” Reuters. December 21, 2022. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-clements/.

[21] Ibid.

[22] “Board Members.” FSBN FrankSpeech Broadcast Network. Undated. Last Accessed September 25, 2024. https://fsbn.com/board-members/

[23] Helderman, Rosalind S. “With violent rhetoric and election denial, podcaster becomes GOP force.” Washington Post. June 27, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/27/with-violent-rhetoric-election-denial-podcaster-becomes-gop-force/.

[24] Timothy Ramthun, former Wisconsin State Assembly member 59thAD. Adrienne Southworth, Kentucky State Senator – District 7. Chris Rose, West Virginia State Senate District 2. Robert Harris, South Carolina State Representative. Tatum Lee, Kansas State Representative, District 117. Derrick Evans, former West Virginia House of Delegates, District 19. James Knox, former Montana State Representative (now a member of the Queen Creek AZ School Board).

[25] Layne, Nathan. “Exclusive: Local election chief threatened by Republican leader seeking illegal access to voting equipment.” Reuters. April 25, 2022. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-local-election-chief-threatened-by-republican-leader-seeking-illegal-2022-04-23/.

[26] Cohen, Matt. “How United Sovereign Americans is Radicalizing an Anti-Voting Movement.” Democracy Docket. May 29, 2024. https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/how-united-sovereign-americans-is-radicalizing-an-anti-voting-movement/.

[27] Cohen, Matt. “United Sovereign Americans Lawsuit Targets Texas Voter Rolls, Asks Court to Block Election Certification.” Democracy Docket. August 28, 2024. https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/united-sovereign-americans-doubles-down-on-its-legal-efforts-targeting-voter-rolls/.

[28] https://x.com/visionsurreal/status/1822013794647785728

[29] “What to do in case of an election emergency.” Cause of America Teams Call. September 16, 2024.

[30] It’s worth noting that there is overlap in the membership of the various groups, as such totals of the overall number of individuals involved in the network are likely smaller.

[31] “Colorado Voter Intimidation Challenge” Democracy Docket. March 9, 2022. https://www.democracydocket.com/cases/colorado-voter-intimidation-challenge/.

[32] Glawe, Justin, Perez, Andrew, and Suesaeng, Asawin. “Mike Lindell Group Accused of ‘Impersonating’ Election Cybersecurity Initiative.” Rolling Stone. September 15, 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/mike-lindell-group-accused-impersonating-election-cybersecurity-1235102625/.

[33] Tanner, Chuck. “CSPOA to boost Sheriff’s ‘Election Fraud’ project at ‘Freedom Fest.’” IREHR. July 9, 2022. https://irehr.org/2022/07/09/cspoa-to-boost-sheriffs-election-fraud-project-at-freedom-fest/

[34] “Mike Lindell Speaks at CSPOA.” FrankSpeech 2024. https://frankspeech.com/v/3fbxr. “Mike Lindell Speaks at CSPOA Press Conference in Las Vegas.” FrankSpeech. 2022. https://frankspeech.com/v/3enxs.

[35] “Constitutional Sheriffs with Call to Action at The Moment of Truth Summit.” FrankSpeech. 2022. https://frankspeech.com/v/3fs58.