An “election crime” group helmed by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell sent out emails requesting personal information from local election officials as well as information about security programs designed to detect threats in those counties, according to emails obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom.
Lindell is a prolific supporter of election denial causes and one of the most prominent voices of a movement that falsely claims the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden, was beset with widespread fraud.
On Sept. 5, the Lindell-backed group, the Election Crime Bureau, emailed at least one Georgia county requesting they take a survey about the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit focused on cybersecurity, and its Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to protect local election offices.
The survey asked election officials to provide personal information such as their home addresses and cell phone numbers. It also queried whether the counties are using monitoring systems, called “Albert” and “Falcon,” developed by CIS to help counties detect online threats to election systems.
“The Election Crime Bureau has been investigating what steps have been taken in all 3,143 counties across America to ensure the security of the upcoming 2024 election,” reads the email from Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau. “In support of this investigation we have enclosed a very short survey for your response.”
CIS issued an advisory warning election officials of an “Email Impersonating CIS,” noting it had “received multiple reports of emails from [the] ‘Election Crime Bureau’ being disseminated that could lead a recipient to believe these emails are from the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center.”
The organization recommended that election officials instruct their staff “to not click on any links in these emails or respond to them.”
Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in Bartow County, confirmed to Rolling Stone and American Doom that he received the message from the Election Crime Bureau, though he says the email was in his spam folder.
He says he learned about the Lindell group’s message to election officials on Sept. 5 in an advisory from CIS, and forwarded the warning to his county IT director. The next day, Kirk says, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office sent emails to county election offices in Georgia warning them of the messages from Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau.
“Georgia election officials are some of the best in the country, and we remain vigilant and stand ready to defend our election from all threats,” Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs says in a statement.
After Rolling Stone and American Doom contacted Lindell and his Election Crime Bureau, Patrick Colbeck, a staffer for the group, claimed in a post on X that CIS “is engaging in a disinformation campaign targeting Mike Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau.” Colbeck also called the organization’s warning advisory an “attempt to restrict access to important information about the security of our elections.”
Lindell passed along the post in a text message. “I haven’t been following this but I do know the Election Crime Bureau is helping secure our elections for all people,” he says.
He adds, “Not sure why the media is attacking the Election Crime Bureau. My guess is like always they do not want to go to paper ballots hand counted in our country. 132 countries have outlawed computers and electronic voting machines… the uni-party wants to keep the machines!!”
Lindell’s conspiratorial claims about the 2020 election have been debunked by a wide and bipartisan variety of elected officials, watchdog groups, media outlets, and courts. In February, a judge ordered Lindell must pay $5 million to a man who disproved his claims that China was involved in swaying the 2020 election.
The email from Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau begins by providing background on DHS’ Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which was established in 2017 under the agency’s Critical Infrastructure and Security Agency. The CIS initiative, which is supported by the federal government, “offers state and local election officials a suite of elections-focused cyber defense tools,” according to its website.
The message goes on to note that the CIS initiative is responsible “for securing election infrastructure components such as those under your jurisdiction,” before asking officials to fill out the survey.
Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau includes a fact sheet on its website about CIS’ Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center. The fact sheet links to a Gateway Pundit story about the Albert sensor monitoring system. The story ties the system to debunked conspiracies that various election equipment across the U.S. is connected to the internet, making it vulnerable to foreign hacking.
Colbeck, the Election Crime Bureau staffer, similarly questioned in his X post the idea that election equipment “is not connected to the internet.”
The message to local election officials comes as Republicans preemptively lay the groundwork to challenge the results of the 2024 presidential election in Georgia, which Biden won by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, amid Trump’s campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump was already indicted in Fulton County over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Winning the state is crucial to his efforts to regain the White House — which is, itself, critical to his effort to stay out of prison.
The Trump campaign has long seen Georgia as crucial for the former president’s efforts to regain the White House. Trump, his conservative allies, and other Republican Party power centers have spent years pouring vast resources into battleground states in order to concoct a variety of novel ways to tilt the 2024 race in Trump’s favor — with a special focus on Georgia.
Sources familiar with the matter say Trump personally intervened to have a Republican forced out from the Georgia State Election Board. The board’s new MAGA majority — whom Trump called “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” — quickly implemented controversial rules designed to give more power to local election officials to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results. Officials across the state have already been refusing to certify results in recent years; they are now getting support from state officials.
Republican sources close to Trump who have been working diligently on these anti-democratic operations have been referring to Georgia as, among other things, their “laboratory” for developing Trump-friendly election rules and policies they hope to take to other states, or even nationwide.
This story is being published in partnership with American Doom, a newsletter that focuses on right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.
From Rolling Stone US
