Even before such sentiments would serve as a catalyst for the riot that befell the U.S. Capitol on January 6, one could hardly find a clip of former president Donald Trump after the 2020 Presidential Election that didn’t feature accusations of widepspread voter fraud.
But while his claims regarding this conspiracy theory began before the vote counting had even concluded and persisted for months after the election was called, it became increasingly clear over that period of time that he was making them without any substantial evidence.
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However, the Trump Campaign was far from the only party pursuing them anyway and one of the organizations involved is now facing a lawsuit from one very unhappy donor.
On the morning of November 4, Trump voters woke up to discover that the lead their candidate seemed to enjoy during the previous night had evaporated.
But while The Washington Post reported that election experts predicted this as the expected outcome once mail-in ballots would be tabulated, Trump and many of his supporters were convinced that something nefarious had affected the election results in the wee hours of the morning.
Such a belief would turn out to be lucrative for the Trump Campaign and the Republican Party, as they were able to raise $255 million over the course of two months by promising to fight this perceived fraud with a series of legal challenges.
However, they weren’t the only organizations to have this idea.
While this was going on, a Texas-based nonprofit called True The Vote would end up amassing a budget of $7.3 million to wage a similar campaign.
According to The Washington Post , their plans involved setting up cash rewards for whistleblowers, analyzing voter data for “patterns of election subversion,” and filing lawsuits in battleground states with the aim of overturning their results.
But while most of these challenges are recent, an ABC News report found that True The Vote has been operating under the assumption that voter fraud is a national epidemic for over a decade. They were accused of trying to intimidate Democratic voters by issuing citizens challenges to people’s votes during the 2012 Presidential Election.
The majority of these challenges that arrived at the Hamilton County Board of Elections in Ohio would end up being thrown out and one even incorrectly stated that one voter’s property was a vacant lot.
But by the time a former pharmaceutical company owner and financier named Fred Eshelman developed his own voter fraud suspicions, he hadn’t heard of True The Vote before.
Nonetheless, after a 20-minute conversation with the group’s president Catherine Engelbrecht on November 5, The Washington Post reported that he pledged a $2 million donation to the group, which marks the largest such gift they’ve ever received.
By the next morning, Engelbrecht would make a public statement saying, “Unfortunately, there is significant tangible evidence that numerous illegal ballots have been cast and counted in the 2020 general election, potentially enough to sway the legitimate results of the election in some of the currently contested states.”
At first, Eshelman’s representative Tom Crawford had heard from True The Vote that three whistleblowers had passed through the group’s initial screening.
According to The Washington Post , this compelled Eshelman to send an additional $500,000 to the group, but that seemed to be the last positive development between him and the group.
The most promising lead was a supposed whistleblower from Yuma, Arizona who claimed to witness a large-scale “ballot harvesting” effort by Democrats but it turned out that he had already spoken to law enforcement and his information wasn’t helpful to the general election.
Other supposed witnesses seemed to materialize and dematerialize in an instant, and Crawford eventually complained to Eshelman that he couldn’t get any information out of the group.
As Crawford put it, “We were just not getting any data or proof. We were looking at this and saying to ourselves, ‘This just is not adding up.'”
Meanwhile, remember that “significant tangible evidence” Engelbrecht mentioned in her statement?
Well, The Washington Post reported that when the group actually filed federal lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they stated that evidence for their claims was still being developed.
Ultimately, the group would withdraw all of these lawsuits as they were apparently hinging on support from the Trump Campaign that never came and decided they had little chance of achieving anything.
While Eshelman had grown frustrated with the group up to this point, news of the abandonment of these lawsuits sent him into a fury.
On November 17, he sent Engelbrecht a letter demanding the return of his money and her group replied with an offer to return $1 million.
This led him to file a federal lawsuit two days later, which he has since withdrawn on February 1 in favor of pursuing the matter in a Texas state court.
He now alleges that his money wasn’t spent on any of the efforts he thought he was supporting and that much of it was directed to business and individuals with ties to Engelbrecht.
In response, True The Vote’s lawyer James Bopp said Eshelman’s donation were not made under any specific conditions and that he’s not entitled to get it back just because he’s unsatisfied with the outcome. The group has also stated that Eshelman’s money was spent properly and that their investigation remains ongoing.
From this point on, it seems that how properly this money was used will be up to the courts to decide.
h/t: The Washington Post
