The Fraud Squad
The GOP’s obsession with imaginary voter fraud presents an existential threat to American democracy. But where did it originate? From an office building in Miami to a parking lot in Philadelphia, this is the story of The Fraud Squad, and how they manufactured the narrative that gave birth to the Big Lie.
1. “I Don’t Believe in Conspiracies”
One year ago, on a chilly November morning in suburban Philadelphia, a curious scene was playing out in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Nestled between the Delaware Valley crematorium and the Fantasy Island adult bookstore, this 28-year-old staple of its Northeast Philly community was now playing host to a press conference by Rudy Giuliani, attorney to the President of the United States.
Initial confusion over the location of the event, stoked by the president’s quickly corrected claim on Twitter that it would be taking place at the Four Seasons Hotel, located 10 miles away in Center City, swiftly gave way to mockery. “All great Americans in PA use Four Seasons Total Landscaping,” explained Trump Senior Advisor Cory Lewandowski, to the raucous amusement of the Twitterati. “They love this country and are American Patriots.”
The 2020 presidential election was not going well for Giuliani’s client. Early election night leads in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had evaporated as absentee and mail ballots, the preferred voting method of Trump’s Democratic opponents, slowly trickled in. Mere seconds after the press conference began, major television networks began calling the race for Joe Biden. “Which ones?” a visibly flustered Giuliani asked the assembled reporters. “All of them,” a reporter replied. Some members of the press began packing up their equipment and preparing to leave. America had decided.
But the election of 2020 was far from over. “America’s Mayor” had not travelled to the Keystone State to deliver a concession speech on behalf of his boss. Instead, in an unhinged 37-minute conspiracy-laden rant, Giuliani alleged that the election had been systematically stolen from the president by a shadowy cabal of Democratic operatives, poll watchers, election officials, and other assorted nefarious characters.
His claims quickly picked up traction with the president’s supporters, and were echoed by conservative talk show hosts, campaign officials, and the White House itself. They spawned sham election audits, frivolous lawsuits, and even a full-fledged attempted coup. The battle lines had been drawn, at a podium in front of a garage door plastered with Trump signs in the City of Brotherly Love. “As a friend of mine says, I don’t believe in conspiracies,” Giuliani explained, to the general bemusement of those present, “but I also don’t believe in coincidences.”
The repeated invocation of massive and widespread fraud in the wake of the 2020 election was no coincidence. Trump’s Big Lie did not arrive in the world fully formed, plucked from the recesses of his dark and paranoid imagination. It was a monstrous mutation of the oft repeated truism about Democratic cheating that originated in the bygone days of party-political machines – the ballot box stuffing of New York’s Tammany Hall and the Chicago-style politics of Mayor Richard Daley – that had now metastasized into a bald-faced attempt to subvert and overturn a legitimate democratic election. The Big Lie was constructed on the foundations of earlier, smaller lies, the culmination of a decades-long narrative that fraud perpetrated by Democrats is endemic in our electoral system.
And behind this narrative, one that has been loudly and repeatedly amplified by GOP candidates, elected officials, and complicit media, lies a surprisingly small group of largely unknown but incredibly influential Republican election lawyers – the Fraud Squad.
2. Too Close to Call
Al Gore was going to win the state of Florida. In fact, he had already won it once, at least in the minds of the viewing public whose eyes had been glued to their television screens on election night, watching Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw break down the increasingly surreal sequence of events that was playing out in the Sunshine State.
At 7:48pm, 12 minutes before the polls had even closed in the Panhandle, NBC called the state of Florida, and its 25 electoral votes, for the Democratic candidate. By 8:02pm, the remaining networks and the Associated Press had followed suit. In Nashville, where thousands had gathered outside the War Memorial Auditorium in expectation of a Gore victory speech later in the night, the mood turned jubilant.
But behind the scenes, those crunching the data in the decision centers were growing increasingly nervous as more results came in. At 9:50pm, the AP retracted their call, followed four minutes later by CNN and CBS. By 10:18pm, all the networks had moved Florida into the “too close to call” column. The champagne in Nashville went back on ice.
Then, in the early hours of the morning, the FOX News decision desk, headed by John Ellis, who happened to be the first cousin of George W., called the state, and the election, for Bush. Within minutes of their 2:16am declaration, NBC and the other networks had also enshrined a new president-elect. Americans went to bed, either secure in the knowledge that their candidate had prevailed or lamenting the defeat that had been cruelly snatched from the jaws of victory. But things were just getting started.
Two weeks later, on a balmy 70-degree day in downtown Miami, the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board was in the middle of a court-permitted hand recount of nearly 11,000 undervotes, ballots for which the state’s antiquated punch-card voting machines had failed to register a selection in the presidential race. The mood among the star-studded group of recount attorneys assembled by the Gore campaign, headed by former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, was hopeful.
Bush’s lead in the state, which had stood at 1,784 votes following the initial election night machine count of ballots, had dwindled to 154, with both Miami-Dade and neighboring Palm Beach County yet to complete their recounts. The clock was ticking. Under the Florida Supreme Court’s order, to be guaranteed of inclusion in the final certification by the Secretary of State, they would need to be completed by 5:00pm on Sunday November 26. That deadline was now only four days away.
When Joe Geller arrived at the government center, things were already becoming tense. Several dozen surprisingly well-dressed protesters mingled in the lobby, and chants of “Stop the fraud!” began to pick up steam. To speed up the process, the canvassing board had moved the proceedings to a conference room on the 19th floor, where the media were forced to observe through a window 25 feet from the counting.
There was no evidence that anything untoward was occurring. But in the minds of the Bush attorneys, who included among their ranks a young volunteer from Georgia’s Fulton County Registration and Election Board by the name of Hans von Spakovsky, the election was being stolen in plain sight. And they were going to have to be the ones to do something about it.
Suddenly, things turned aggressive. A group of paid GOP operatives piled into the elevator and rushed the conference room, pounding on the doors and windows in a scene reminiscent of a postapocalyptic zombie horde attacking the entrance to a shopping mall. Geller, the Chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, had come to the government center that day to collect a blank sample ballot from the clerk. He intended to run it through one of the punch-card machines, hoping to test a theory about how such an unusually large volume of undervotes had been recorded in the county.
But the mere glimpse of a ballot in the hands of an adversary was all it took to turn the mob violent. Geller was surrounded and accosted by angry demonstrators, and eventually chased from the building. “This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me,” he told the Washington Post. “At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death.”
The Brooks Brothers Riot, as the incident came to be known, was the beginning of the end for the attempt to secure a fair and accurate tabulation of every valid ballot in the state of Florida. Two hours later, the canvassing board voted to stop the recount, ostensibly because there was not enough time remaining to complete it before the Sunday deadline, although this assertion has been disputed. Gore supporters cried foul.
Miami’s mayor, the Democrat and putative Gore advocate Alex Penelas, who had been MIA since the backlash from the Elián González custody dispute earlier in the year, was nowhere to be found. On Sunday November 26, when the 5pm deadline set by the court expired, Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified Bush as the winner of the election, by the absurdly narrow margin of 537 votes.
The differential narratives that emerged from these events in Miami would coalesce and harden, in a way that fundamentally defined the next 20 years of partisan conflict over election administration. For Democrats, it was a sign that the GOP would stop at nothing to suppress the votes of their opponents, to place whatever roadblocks they could imagine in the path of the faithful exercise of the franchise in their single-minded pursuit of power.
But for Republicans, the conclusion was the opposite. It was the Democrats who would lie, cheat, and steal their way to victory if given the opportunity. The recounts in Florida were nothing more than a fraudulent attempt by Gore and his supporters to manufacture new votes after the fact, and deny Bush his rightful victory. Almost two decades later, those narratives found themselves on a collision course once again, this time in a courtroom in the state of Kansas.
3. What’s the Matter with Kansas Missouri?
Contrary to what his name might suggest, Hans von Spakovsky is neither a Bond villain nor the member of a prominent European royal family. The veteran GOP attorney, Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow, and former Federal Election Commissioner has been banging the voter fraud drum for years.
And along with figures like Thor Hearne, the founder of the now-defunct nonprofit American Center for Voting Rights, John Fund of the National Review, and former-Senator Kit Bond, he quickly established himself as one of the pioneers of the Fraud Squad in the wake of the 2000 election.
In a 2018 lawsuit featuring another member of the Squad, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, von Spakovsky was called to testify as an expert witness to bolster the case that the challenged state law, which required documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, was justified by the grave threat of fraudulent voting. Their defense was an unmitigated disaster.
Pre-trial statements by both Kobach and von Spakovsky had framed the vanishingly small number of verified cases of fraud as the tip of the iceberg, seldom-prosecuted crimes that concealed the shadowy hulk of pervasive and undetected wrongdoing lurking beneath the surface. But in court, their arguments, like those made by Donald Trump and his conservative allies in the wake of the 2020 election, fell spectacularly flat.
Their first star witness was Jesse Richman, the Old Dominion political science professor, whose peer-reviewed paper on alleged noncitizen voting in the 2008 and 2010 elections had been used by Trump as the basis for his nonsensical claim that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 were it not for the 3 million undocumented immigrants who voted for his opponent.
Richman’s study, which placed the number of noncitizen voters somewhere within the ridiculously wide range of 38,000-2.8 million, had received widespread criticism from fellow political scientists, including Harvard’s Steven Ansolabehere, who published his own peer-reviewed rebuttal.
But even Richman wasn’t buying what Kobach and the Kansas Republicans were selling. During five hours of combative testimony, when pressed to say whether his data supported the wildly inflated estimates of noncitizen voting that were being used to justify the Kansas law, he replied that “I do not believe my study provides strong support for that notion.”
Under cross-examination from Dale Ho, the attorney representing the ACLU, Richman was forced to concede that his methodology was “subjective,” and relied on him and his assistants identifying those with “foreign sounding” last names in the Kansas voter list. “Dr. Richman, if you came across the name Carlos Murguia, would you code that as foreign or non-foreign?” Ho asked. “Probably would code it as foreign” Richman replied. Then Ho delivered the knockout. “Are you aware that Carlos Murguia is a United States District Court Judge who sits in this courthouse?”
But if Richman’s testimony had been a train-wreck, it paled in comparison with what occurred once Hans von Spakovsky took the stand. In 2011, von Spakovsky had written a syndicated newspaper op-ed alleging that a 2010 state legislative primary election in Kansas, which had been decided by a single vote, was contaminated by the inclusion of 50 illegal ballots that were cast by citizens of Somalia. There were two problems with this claim.
First, the election in question had taken place in Missouri, not Kansas, an oversight that the piece was quickly corrected to reflect. Second, almost a year before the article appeared, a panel of judges for the Missouri Western District Court of Appeals had unanimously determined that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that any fraud had taken place. Though von Spakovsky conceded as much on the stand, the published claim was never corrected or retracted. His op-ed still appears, unmodified, on the website of the Heritage Foundation.
District Judge Julie Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, had seen enough. After lambasting von Spakovsky’s “misleading and false assertions,” “cherry pick[ed] evidence,” and “preordained opinions,” and finding that he had “testified as an advocate and not as an objective expert witness,” she proceeded to strike down the Kansas proof-of-citizenship law.
Kobach himself was held in contempt of court for repeatedly defying the judge’s directives, and ordered to pay the ACLU’s attorneys’ fees. “There is no iceberg,” Judge Robinson concluded, “only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”
This is the core of the Fraud Squad’s narrative: take the ordinary glitches, clerical errors, innocent mistakes, and technological malfunctions that occur in every election and blow them out of all proportion. Make loud and wildly inflated claims of thousands or hundreds of thousands of suspected cases of voter fraud to generate headlines, then quietly acknowledge, once those claims are investigated and the media has moved on to other things, that only a handful of them contained even a shred of evidence of actual fraud. The entire enterprise is amply explained away by a simple invocation of Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
In the lead-up to the 2012 election, Florida Governor Rick Scott circulated a quasi-McCarthyist list of 182,000 alleged noncitizen registrants, based solely on highly unreliable driver’s license data, that he believed should purged from the voter rolls. His claims were breathlessly magnified by the Heritage Foundation, conservative media, and Republican politicians.
But soon, Scott’s list of hundreds of thousands of suspected cases had dwindled to just 2,700, one of whom turned out to be a Brooklyn-born World War II veteran. Then it became 85. When all was said and done, only one person was ultimately convicted of illegally voting in the state of Florida.
Kobach’s own wild goose chase for evidence of widespread voter fraud produced similarly unremarkable results. After lobbying Kansas Governor Sam Brownback to give him unprecedented new powers to investigate alleged fraud cases where county prosecutors had declined to do so, his office managed to bring a grand total of six such prosecutions, only four of which resulted in convictions.
Even that did not discourage the Fraud Squad from taking their show on the road. Kobach and his associates reviewed data on more than 84 million individual votes across 22 states, part of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program that was indefinitely suspended in 2019 in a settlement with the ACLU. “In the end 14 cases were referred for prosecution,” the Washington Post noted, “representing 0.00000017 percent of the votes cast.”
And so the Fraud Squad train rumbled on, spewing half-truths, exaggerations, and outright fictions, until finally, in the form of a similarly reality-challenged candidate for president of the United States, it found its most committed and vociferous champion.
4. “We are not a Democracy!”
To say that Donald Trump has occasionally dabbled in conspiracy theories would be akin to suggesting that Jeffrey Dahmer sometimes suffered from particularly severe and acute attacks of the munchies. From birtherism, to the claim that vaccines cause autism, to climate change denial, and even Qanon and pizzagate-level fantasies, there’s nary a grand conspiracy with which America’s 45th president has not at least flirted, if not outright grabbed a hold of. But amid this cornucopia of deceit, few conspiracies have quite as deeply or enduringly captured his limited attention span as the voter fraud narrative.
In 2012, amid the presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Trump took to Twitter on election day to air his grievances about the events that were unfolding. “More reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama,” he claimed during the afternoon. “Pay close attention to the machines, don't let your vote be stolen.” Later in the evening, when it became clear that Obama would comfortably win reelection, things took a darker turn. “This election is a total sham and a travesty,” he alleged, without evidence. “We are not a democracy!”
It certainly came as no surprise, therefore, that the voter fraud myth became a central component of the Trump administration’s message. But few could have predicted how far he would be willing to take it, or how many of his supporters were prepared to come along for the ride.
Trump was certainly not the first Republican president to take the Fraud Squad’s unsupported claims seriously. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he nominated John Ashcroft, fresh off a loss in his Missouri senate race to an opponent who passed away in a plane crash three weeks before election day, to the position of Attorney General. Ashcroft moved quickly to put together an “election integrity” unit at DOJ to investigate and prosecute allegations of voter fraud. The team he assembled included both Kobach, who was tapped first as a White House Fellow, and then Council to the Attorney General, and von Spakovsky, who joined the department’s Civil Rights Division. The Fraud Squad had come to Washington.
And while their efforts yielded little in terms of actual convictions, the narrative helped fan the flames of voter fraud hysteria, with unverified claims of noncitizen voting, voter impersonation fraud, and ballot box stuffing in Democratically controlled cities like St Louis, Chicago, and Detroit providing the justification for ever more restrictive voter ID laws, registration requirements, and other tools of voter suppression.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 shifted the narrative away from the White House and toward the states, with the Republican wave election of 2010 sweeping the party into control of numerous governorships and state legislatures. The insinuations, investigations, and smattering of isolated prosecutions continued apace, yet still the evidence of widespread, systematic voter fraud remained elusive. But then, with the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing, and the 2020 election rapidly approaching, the narrative suddenly shifted.
Prior GOP anti-fraud crusades had tended not to focus too much on absentee ballots. Despite the clear consensus among election law experts that absentee ballot fraud, while still rare, occurs with greater frequency than in-person voting fraud, that method of convenience voting had traditionally been utilized by older voters, overseas military personal, and other Republican-leaning constituencies. Trump’s May 2017 executive order establishing the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, of which Kobach and von Spakovsky were both members, and which was later disbanded without uncovering even preliminary evidence of fraud, makes no mention whatsoever of absentee ballots.
But as soon as it became clear, amid the White House’s constant downplaying of the severity of the pandemic, that many more Democrats than Republicans were likely to make use of absentee or mail balloting in 2020, it immediately became the new boogeyman. America was about to see the culmination of two decades of propaganda, misleading claims, and outright falsehoods. The Fraud Squad’s narrative had been put on steroids.
5. The Big Lie
“I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific answer,” Montgomery Court of Common Pleas Judge Richard P. Haaz told Trump campaign attorney Jonathan S. Goldstein. “Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots?”
It was November 10, three days after Rudy Giuliani’s press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, during which he had promised a blitz of lawsuits in response to the rampant fraud that was alleged to have occurred in the 2020 election. But as it turned out, the president’s PR campaign was writing checks his lawyers couldn’t cash. “To my knowledge at present, no,” Goldstein replied.
Joe Biden’s lead in the state of Pennsylvania was approaching 50,000 votes, with many more absentee and provisional ballots still left to be counted. This placed the outcome far outside what election law experts refer to as the “margin of litigation,” or the maximum vote differential in a race that could plausibly be overturned through recounts or lawsuits. Biden’s victories in the other key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin were also well beyond what any realistic legal remedy the Trump campaign might request could potentially reverse.
Almost none of these post-election suits alleged any of the systemic fraud that the Trump campaign, its surrogates, and the president himself had been insisting was responsible for his apparent defeat. Giuliani himself even dusted off his advocate’s cap for a farcical appearance in federal court, during which he failed to understand or articulate basic legal concepts and procedures, repeatedly mischaracterized his own complaint, and sunk to still lower depths of incompetence and derangement than had been on display at his earlier press conference. The judge, suffice it to say, was not amused.
But to argue that the Trump lawsuits were frivolous, unmeritorious, even legally sanctionable, to say that even if they had been successful, the relief requested would have made absolutely no difference in the final outcome of the presidential election, is to miss the entire point of the Fraud Squad’s narrative.
This is not about winning legal victories. It’s about sowing distrust, energizing the base, and providing ammunition for the next round of voter suppression. Trump may be the latest and loudest mouthpiece for the voter fraud crusade, but the goal of the movement is not to save his presidency, no matter how many times his more deluded supporters may insist that his reinstatement is just around the corner. It’s to bolster the GOP’s chances of prevailing in the 2024 presidential election, and the 2022 midterms.
On November 15, 2020, Hans von Spakovsky published a Fox News op-ed in which he alleged, without evidence, that Democrats were plotting to rig the results of the Georgia Senate runoffs. The plan, which he apparently divined entirely from a now-deleted Tweet by New Yorker journalist Eric Levitz, was for Democrats to temporarily move to the state en masse and falsely claim residency so that they could register and illegally vote in the races that would determine control of the U.S. Senate for the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. None of this, of course, ever happened.
The Trump sideshow is at an end, for now, but the Fraud Squad’s nationwide tour continues indefinitely. And thanks to Trump, millions of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Denials, debunking, and actual evidence matter little. Accusations are facts, insinuations are evidence, and denials only further proof of the existence of the conspiracy. The narrative is king, and the narrative must be fed. “Just like in Philadelphia, one has to wonder,” von Spakovsky wrote for Fox News, deftly transitioning from one vague unsupported allegation to the next, “what were they trying to hide?”