Wednesday, February 25, 2026

TIKTOK ISN’T ANTI-ISRAEL: IT’S HIRED UNIT 8200 AGENTS TO RUN ITS AFFAIRS

https://www.mintpressnews.com/288710-tiktok-isnt-anti-israel-its-hired-unit-8200-agents-to-run-its-affairs/288710/

TikTok isn’t anti-Israel: It’s Hired Unit 8200 Agents to Run its Affairs

TikTok has been under intense pressure as of late from U.S. officials, who accuse the video platform of being a hub of anti-Israel hatred. “TikTok is a tool China uses to spread propaganda to Americans. Now it’s being used to downplay Hamas terrorism,” wrote Republican Senator Marco Rubio. “TikTok needs to be shut down. Now,” he added.

Nikki Haley, another top Republican, claimed that every 30 minutes spent on the app makes Americans “17% more antisemitic [and] more pro-Hamas.”

The platform’s future remains uncertain, as President Biden approved a law that could see it blocked in the U.S. Incoming president, Donald Trump, however, has intimated that he does not favor an outright ban.

This investigation is part of a series on TikTok. A previous investigation found that, far from being a Chinese spying tool, the platform has actually hired a plethora of U.S. national security state officials to run its internal affairs. A second article explored TikTok’s fraternization with the U.S. State Department.

Spies In Our Midst

Likewise, for all the discussion that it is a hotbed of anti-Semitic prejudice turning the youth against Israel, this MintPress News investigation has found that TikTok has hired a myriad of former spooks from Israeli spying agency, Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) most controversial organization. Responsible for covert operations, spying, surveillance and cyber warfare, Unit 8200 has created a vast digital surveillance dragnet for Palestinians, uses AI-generated kill lists to target Gazans, and pioneered worldwide spying software used against politicians, activists, journalists and world leaders. It was widely reported to be behind the recent Lebanese pager attack that injured thousands of civilians.

Reut Medalion, for example, enjoyed a long career at Unit 8200, serving as an intelligence commander and later becoming head of its cybersecurity operations team. In the wake of Israel’s attack on Gaza, she moved to New York City to work as a global incident manager for TikTok’s trust and safety division. Considering the events going on in the world at the time, it is fair to wonder with what sorts of “global incidents” is she helping TikTok.

Asaf Hochman is also a longtime veteran of Unit 8200, spending far longer than standard Israeli military service requires. In 2021, TikTok hired him as their global head of product strategy and operations. Hochman now works at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Omer Carmeli is currently TikTok’s global marketing manager. But this was not always so. Between 2004 and 2007, he was a field operations specialist with Unit 8200, serving throughout Israel’s 2006 War on Lebanon and Operation Summer Rains, the IDF’s four-month attack on Gaza.

Einav Meir was an intelligence analyst with Unit 8200 until 2015. She is now a client solutions manager at TikTok.

Omri Hollander, a client solutions lead with the global video platform, followed the same Unit 8200 intelligence analyst to the TikTok pipeline.

Diana Shpakovsky Magen, meanwhile, was once both an intelligence analyst and training commander at Unit 8200. After she left the military, she worked in tech and is now an account manager for TikTok. Shpakovsky Magen’s dates of service align with Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-2009 campaign against Gaza widely seen as one of the worst war crimes of the 21st century (until Israel’s current campaign vastly surpassed it). What her role as a commander was during the campaign is unknown.

An Elite Israeli Spying Unit

Why should it be of concern that TikTok is hiring so many former Israeli intelligence agents? Firstly, Unit 8200 is the centerpiece of Israel’s repressive and hi-tech state apparatus. It is responsible for pioneering the technology that has allowed it to create both a gigantic digital dragnet to surveil, harass and intimidate the Palestinian population and for creating spying tools aimed at penetrating and compromising foreign governments and individuals.

Unit 8200 agents use facial recognition technology to track Palestinians’ every move and listen to their phone conversations, the information they glean being used as material for blackmail. One Unit 8200 whistleblower revealed that, as part of their training, they were assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that they could listen out for them in conversations.

The unit is also behind Project Lavender, a giant, A.I.-generated kill list of tens of thousands of Gazans that the Israeli military uses to target the strip’s civilian population. Earlier this year, it planned and carried out an attack on Lebanon, exploding thousands of pagers at the same time, injuring thousands of civilians. The event was widely described, even by former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, as an act of terrorism.

Former Unit 8200 agents, working hand-in-hand with the Israeli national security state, have gone on to create some of the world’s most notorious malware and hacking products. A case in point is the Pegasus software used to spy on more than 50,000 journalists, politicians, diplomats, business leaders and human rights defenders. This included heads of state, such as President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan, and President Barham Salih of Iraq.

Known purchasers of Pegasus include the Central Intelligence Agency and the government of Saudi Arabia, who used Pegasus to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye. All sales of Pegasus had to be approved by the Israeli government, who reportedly had access to the data Pegasus’ foreign customers were accruing.

Former agents of Unit 8200 doubtless possess highly desirable tech skills and knowledge. However, given the organization’s past and present actions, it is highly questionable that global tech companies hire them, especially in roles that give them access to sensitive user data or decision-making power over the content on their platforms.

Don’t Mess with Project Texas

Since the October 7 attack, senior U.S. politicians have been demanding a complete government ban on TikTok, citing what Missouri Senator Josh Hawley described as a “ubiquity of anti-Israel content.” “The Chinese Communist Party is doing this on purpose,” added his Nebraska colleague, Pete Ricketts, “they are pushing this racist agenda with the intention of undermining our democratic values.”

This is not the first time the app has faced total deletion in the U.S. In 2020, Washington branded it a Chinese Trojan horse and threatened to close it down. To appease the government, TikTok launched “Project Texas,” a $1.5 billion initiative to move the company’s data to Austin and partner with Oracle, a corporation with exceptionally close ties to the CIA.

A lesser-known aspect of Project Texas, however, was the company’s hiring of scores of U.S. national security state officials, which gave Washington significant control over the platform's direction.

For example, Jade Nester, TikTok’s director of data public policy for Europe, was a top official in Washington, previously serving as the State Department’s Director of Internet Public Policy.

Mariola Janik, meanwhile, was a senior diplomat in the State Department and a former high official in the Department of Homeland Security before being hired in 2022 to become TikTok’s Global Trust and Safety Operations Program Manager.

Beau Patteson is one of a host of ex-CIA officials now working at TikTok. Until 2020, Patteson was a targeting analyst with the agency. TikTok hired him to identify “extremist” content on the platform, and he is now a data security manager for the company.

The company’s product policy manager, Greg Andersen, has an even more intriguing past. According to his LinkedIn profile, Andersen went from working on “psychological operations” at NATO to being a policy specialist at X (formerly known as Twitter) and then onto TikTok two years later. Shortly after, MintPress first publicized this fact in a previous investigation in this series entitled “The NATO to TikTok Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?” Andersen deleted all references to the military alliance from his social media profiles.

Media Wars

It is little wonder why Washington, Tel Aviv, or any other government would wish to control TikTok. The app has grown rapidly and now boasts over 1 billion global users, including around 170 million in the U.S. The platform is particularly popular with young people. It is a primary source of news and information for Generation Z, who spend nearly one hour per day, on average, using it.

While there is no doubt that pro-Palestine content is more popular than pro-Israel videos, it appears that U.S. politicians reflexively consider this to be down to algorithmic bias, and not simply a representation of global sentiment. The United Nations continues to vote overwhelmingly to condemn Israel’s attack on its neighbors, and global polls show the country’s image has dropped precipitously in the past 12 months.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that TikTok is biased in favor of pro-Palestine voices. Last year, MintPress News had its account suspended without warning and has not been reinstated. Popular Middle East News website Mondoweiss was also suspended, and other figures calling for Palestinian liberation have claimed their content is being suppressed.

TikTok has also taken steps to align itself with U.S. government policy, deleting more than 320,000 Russian accounts and removing at least 41,000 videos it claims were spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine. This includes Russian state-owned media such as RT and Sputnik, which it removed in September.

Other state enemies of Washington are also suppressed. The platform attaches “state-controlled media” warning labels to China’s CGTN and Iran’s PressTV. It does not, however, do the same to Britain’s BBC, Canada’s CBC, or TRT World of Türkiye.

The hiring of individuals who were openly former agents of Israel’s most notorious spying agency – one implicated in gigantic data gathering and blackmail operations – is another sign that TikTok does not plan on being a haven for radical, anti-imperialist politics. Decisions such as the hiring of Israeli spooks to oversee proceedings are messages to Western governments not to be alarmed. It should, however, be a cause for concern for the rest of us.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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MARCO RUBIO: FROM ‘PERFECT LITTLE PUPPET’ TO MOST DANGEROUS MAN ALIVE

https://www.mintpressnews.com/marco-rubio-perfect-little-puppet-most-dangerous-man-alive/288757/

Marco Rubio: From ‘Perfect Little Puppet’ to Most Dangerous Man Alive

With the appointment of Marco Rubio to the post of Secretary of State, the Trump administration has elevated one of the most pro-war extremists ever to serve in the cabinet of the United States of America.In this article, MintPress highlights Rubio’s history as one of the most reliable warmongering voices in Washington, an individual who has led or supported many of America’s most aggressive foreign policy decisions, including military interventions, coups, and sanctions.

Trump, who promises to be the “most pro-Israel president ever,” has picked a cabinet replete with neoconservative, pro-war voices. Rubio, however, may be the most belligerent of all of them, and his ascension to the most powerful position in Trump’s team does not bode well for the world.

Sanctioning China, The World

Of all the situations to trigger a global nuclear war, a confrontation with Beijing appears among the most likely. The U.S. has constructed a network of over 300 military bases encircling China – another nuclear-armed state. Rubio is doing more than almost anyone to make that doomsday scenario an eventuality. He has made clear that he supports Taiwanese independence, breaking more than a half-century of official U.S. policy in the process. His “Taiwan Peace Through Strength Act” promotes direct military collaboration between the U.S. and Taiwan and calls for increased arms spending on the island.

Rubio was also one of the faces of the 2014 Hong Kong protest movement, a U.S.-backed attempt to wrest the island city from Chinese influence. He invited the movement’s leaders to Washington, D.C., and attempted to introduce legislation to force the United States into supporting Hong Kong’s independence.

At home, he has led the clampdown on Chinese businesses such as Huawei and has spearheaded a movement to uncover and stamp out China’s supposed undue influence over American media and educational institutions.

Unsurprisingly, then, the former Florida senator also supports a trade war and sanctions against China and, indeed, much of the world, including Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Iran.

Unilateral sanctions, of course, are illegal under international law. However, Rubio believes the United States can and should use its economic might to crush countries resisting Washington’s dictates. The waning power of the dollar as the global reserve currency, though, makes this increasingly difficult. As Rubio lamented on Fox News last year, Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, signed a comprehensive trade agreement with China whereby goods and services would be paid for in local currencies rather than the dollar:

They’re creating a secondary economy in the world, totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

U.S. Senator @MarcoRubio slams Brazil-China deal to do trade in own currencies for undermining U.S. power to impose sanctions:

"In 5 years... there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won't have the ability to sanction them." pic.twitter.com/RbWTn6tpIB

— No Cold War (@NoColdWar) April 11, 2023

Genocide Denier

Rubio has strongly supported Israel in its campaign against its neighbors. “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses,” he said during a solidarity visit to Tel Aviv earlier this year, adding that the problem is that its enemies “don’t value human life.”

“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians… Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he wrote in a letter to his predecessor, Antony Blinken.

When asked by activists from peace group CODEPINK whether he supports an end to Israeli atrocities, he answered in the negative, stating, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”

Narco Rubio

Hailing from the notoriously conservative Cuban-American community in Florida, Latin American policy has always been among Rubio’s chief interests. Described as the unofficial “Secretary of State for Latin America” during Trump’s first term, he will undoubtedly hold enormous influence over U.S. policy in the region in the years to come. This is bad news for the people of Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela, all of whom have watched as Rubio supported coup attempts against their countries. In 2019, for example, he went as far as directly tweeting images of the capture, death and bloody assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at Nicolás Maduro during an ongoing U.S.-backed coup against the Venezuelan president.

.@marcorubio tweets bloodied Gaddafi photo as he calls for Maduro to step down in Venezuela. https://t.co/eNYdUPaUyI pic.twitter.com/dzVp3jPBTt

— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) February 24, 2019

Rubio has always favored a more aggressive, punitive approach to Cuba. Last year, for example, he introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. State Sponsor of Terrorism List, offering no evidence of the island’s supposed support for such groups.

A right-wing conservative Christian, Rubio has also made well known his contempt for much less radical Latin American leaders, such as Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Brazil’s Lula da Silva. On the other hand, he has openly embraced far-right presidents, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (in power between 2019 and 2023) and Argentina’s Javier Milei.

Rubio has attempted to link Maduro with the organized drug trade, insisting, with little evidence, that the Venezuelan leader is a narcotics kingpin. On this issue, he appears to be living in a glasshouse; his own brother-in-law is a cocaine drug lord. Orlando Cicilia spent 12 years in a Florida prison for crimes related to the smuggling and distribution of cocaine. Rubio enjoys a very close relationship with Cicilia and, after the latter’s release from prison, used his political position to pressure a Florida regulator to grant him a real estate license. Across much of Latin America, the new Secretary of State is known as “Narco Rubio.”

Neocon Warmonger

A consummate Washington insider, Rubio cheerled the U.S. action in Libya that led to Gaddafi’s execution and the country being turned into a failed state replete with open-air slave markets. He also supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, condemning Biden for his pullout from Kabul in 2021. In addition, he helped Saudi Arabia in its genocide against Yemen while expressing outrage over alleged Houthi human rights abuses, minuscule in comparison with the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed genocide.

Studies by Brown University have shown that America’s post-9/11 wars have killed at least 4.5 million people and displaced at least 37 million more. One of the most shocking stories arising from the Global War on Terror is the torture camp at Guantánamo Bay. By the mid-2010s, the facility was causing such negative publicity for the U.S. that the Obama administration was reportedly considering shutting it down. Rubio, however, was enthusiastic in his support for the center, promising to reopen it if elected president.

He also supported the dramatic expansion of the surveillance state into American life, voting to continue the practice of collecting vast amounts of data on ordinary American citizens, and has effectively argued that First Amendment protections should not be applied to anti-Israel campus protestors.

Sheldon Adelson’s “Perfect Little Puppet”

Few in 2016 would have predicted Rubio’s rise to become arguably the most powerful man in Trump’s cabinet. The Floridian was once one of Trump’s fiercest critics, describing him as a fraud when the two were battling for the Republican Presidential nomination. “I think it is time to unmask [Trump] for what he is,” he said during a campaign speech in Oklahoma City, adding:

He’s trying to take over the conservative movement even though he’s not a conservative, but more importantly, he’s a con. I mean, he’s a conman who is taking advantage of people’s fears and anxieties about the future, portraying himself as some sort of strong guy. He’s not a strong guy.”

Trump was, if anything, even more scathing towards Rubio, stating that “[Pro-Israel billioniare] Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!”

One of Adelson’s key issues is stopping the rise of clean, renewable energy, and in that, he found an ally in Rubio, who consistently denied the reality of man-made climate change, stating that there was “no scientific evidence” to back up the theory. Funded by big money donations from the oil and gas industries, he even voted against legislation protecting low-lying cities such as Miami from severe weather events.

Since their public spat, Trump has clearly buried the hatchet with both Rubio and Adelson. The latter’s widow, Miriam, contributed a gigantic $100 million to Trump’s recent presidential run, becoming his biggest donor in the process. Clearly, then, both Trump and Rubio are willing to make major concessions in the pursuit of power. However, given Rubio’s track record, his appointment as Secretary of State does not bode well for either America or the rest of the world.

Feature photo | Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., talks to reporters at an election night watch party for Donald Trump, Nov. 5, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. Alex Brandon | AP

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Moms for Liberty Co-Founder Admitting to Threesome

Moms for Liberty Co-Founder Admitting to Threesome Sparks Backlash

https://www.newsweek.com/moms-liberty-co-founder-admitting-threesome-sparks-backlash-1849054

What Is Project 2025

What Is Project 2025? Inside the Far-Right Plan Threatening Everything from the Word 'Gender' to Public Education

Trump's allies started Project 2025 as a blueprint for marrying church and state at the highest levels of government

https://people.com/what-is-project-2025-inside-far-right-plan-trump-presidency-8622964

Tell Congress: NO more funding for ICE and Border Patrol violence

Everyone deserves to live free from harm. But ICE and Border Patrol are making our communities less safe—assaulting people in the streets, tearing families apart, and creating fear.

The murders of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Keith Porter Jr., and Geraldo Lunas Campos are among the most recent examples of the deadly violence inherent in ICE and Border Patrol. This moment demands urgent action. But right now, our members of Congress are considering sending even more money to both agencies.

Tell Congress to stop funding violence. NO more money for ICE and Border Patrol!

American Friends Service Committee

Desperate migrants are met with cold, no room at shelters after crossing the border

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/03/07/billionaire-backed-group-promotes-hunt-for-voter-fraud-uses-discredited-techniques/

Billionaire-backed group promotes hunt for voter fraud, uses discredited techniques

by Megan O'Matz, Wisconsin Examiner
March 7, 2022

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

At a wedding hall in rural northwest Wisconsin, an evangelist hollered a question to an eager crowd of conferencegoers: “Who thinks Wisconsin can be saved?”

He was answered with enthusiastic whistles and cheers. The truth, he said, would be revealed. “We need transparency!”

The subject: the nation’s election systems. The preacher was among a group of conservative speakers, including politicians, data gurus and former military officers, who theorized on the mechanics of voter fraud in general — and specifically distrust in the voter rolls, the official lists of eligible voters.

“Voter rolls are very, very important to the process,” Florida software and database engineer Jeff O’Donnell told the gathering of 300 in late January in Chippewa Falls, deeming the rolls “the ground zero” of what he called Democratic plots to steal elections. The only way former President Donald Trump could have lost his reelection campaign in 2020, O’Donnell said in an interview, was if voter rolls had been inflated with people who shouldn’t have been able to cast ballots.

Ever since Trump failed to convince the world that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, like-minded people across the country have been taking up the same rallying cry, revisiting that vote with an eye toward what will happen in 2022.

Now, a new group is stepping into a more conspicuous role in that world by providing easily accessible tools for people in Wisconsin, other Midwest battleground states and, eventually, the entire country to forge ahead with a quest to prove election irregularities.

Calling its work unprecedented, the Voter Reference Foundation is analyzing state voter rolls in search of discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters credited by the rolls as having participated in the Nov. 3, 2020 election.

The foundation, led by a former Trump campaign official and founded less than a year ago, has dismissed objections from election officials that its methodology is flawed and its actions may be illegal, ProPublica found. But with its inquiries and insinuations, VoteRef, as it is known, has added to the volume in the echo chamber.

Its instrument is the voter rolls, released line by line, for all to see.

In early August, the foundation published on its website the names, birthdates, addresses and voting histories for 2 million Nevada voters, information that is normally public but only available on request, for a fee. It claimed to have found a significant discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, despite being warned by state election officials that its findings were “fundamentally incorrect.”

In the months since, VoteRef has reported similar discrepancies in rolls posted for 18 other states, including the 2020 election battlegrounds of Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. Most recently, it added Texas. It intends to post the rolls of all 50 states by year’s end.

“Voter File Transparency site adds Michigan; large discrepancy found,” read a headline on a Dec. 6 press release put out by the organization, which is led by Gina Swoboda, a high-ranking officer in the Republican Party of Arizona.

The project is still in its early stages, and the people at the Chippewa Falls conference did not mention VoteRef specifically.

Still, the VoteRef initiative is an important indication of how some influential and well-funded Republicans across the country plan to encourage crowdsourcing of voter rolls to find what they consider errors and anomalies, then dispute voter registrations of specific individuals. Visitors to the VoteRef site are able to scroll through data on more than 106 million people in a free, easy-to-use format. The VoteRef data includes personal identifying information of every voter and the years they voted, but not how they voted.

VoteRef’s methods have already led to pushback from state officials. The New Mexico Secretary of State believes posting data about individual voters online is not a permissible use under state law and has referred the matter to the state attorney general for criminal investigation.

And an attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of State notified VoteRef in January that state law prohibits publishing the voter rolls on the internet and asked that the data be removed. VoteRef complied.

ProPublica contacted election officials in a dozen of the states where VoteRef has examined voter rolls, and in every case the officials said that the methodology used to identify the discrepancies was flawed, the data incomplete or the math wrong. The officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, were in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

“The accuracy and integrity of Michigan’s election has been confirmed by hundreds of audits, numerous courts and a GOP-led Oversight Committee analysis,” said Tracy Wimmer, director of media relations for Michigan’s secretary of state.

“This is simply another meritless example of election misinformation being disseminated to undermine well-founded faith in Michigan’s election system, and from an organization led by at least one former member of the Trump campaign,” Wimmer said.

VoteRef, records show, is an initiative of the conservative nonprofit group Restoration Action and its related political action committee, both led by Doug Truax, an Illinois insurance broker and podcaster who ran unsuccessfully in the state’s GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in 2014.

A ProPublica review found that VoteRef’s origins and funders are closely linked to a super PAC predominantly funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline. A descendant of one of the founders of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Uihlein is a major Trump supporter and a key player in Wisconsin and Illinois politics. Among his political donations: $800,000 in September 2020 to the Tea Party Patriots political action committee, a group that helped organize the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection.

Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, have contributed in excess of $30 million combined over two decades to mainly Republican candidates on the state and local level, particularly in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign donor information. The total includes money given to groups that advocate on behalf of candidates as well as direct contributions.

Voter rolls are public information, typically used by campaigns to identify potential supporters, target messages or persuade people to go to the polls. Journalists and some businesses also at times use the rolls for newsgathering or commercial purposes.

VoteRef has said its aim is to increase transparency in the elections process, echoing the language used to justify door-to-door address checks, painstaking ballot audits and other efforts that Trump supporters are continuing to employ to parse the 2020 election. To publicize the results of its analysis of ballot inconsistencies, it crafted press releases that then were parroted on sites that purport to be legitimate news outlets and were connected to a media network that received large sums of money from VoteRef.

“VoteRef is the beginning of a new era of American election transparency,” Swoboda, VoteRef’s executive director, said in its Nevada press release. “We have an absolute right to see everything behind the curtain.”

Until a few months before the 2020 election, Swoboda, a resident of Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb, was a professional in Arizona’s election system, working as the campaign finance and lobbying supervisor in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.

Swoboda then served as Election Day operations director for the Trump campaign in Arizona, according to a sworn court affidavit she gave in Arizona in November 2020 as part of Trump’s legal challenge to election results there. She described how she took complaints from people who thought poll workers allowed defective ballots to be submitted, in what later became known as “SharpieGate.” (Votes made with a Sharpie do count, the state said.)

She and others associated with VoteRef declined to be interviewed for this story. But Swoboda did respond via email.

“In each of the states we’ve researched to date, the election data math simply doesn’t add up,” she wrote. “That requires reform. We seek to spur this reform through the sustained spotlighting of inaccuracies or wrongdoing.”

Flawed methodology

As of late February, VoteRef showed 431,173 more ballots cast overall than people credited by voter rolls with having participated in the 2020 election.

To those unschooled in the mechanics of elections, VoteRef’s approach could seem reasonable: Compare the total number of ballots cast in the Nov. 3, 2020 election with the number of current voters on the rolls who have recorded histories of having participated in the vote.

For example, the VoteRef table for Nevada shows 8,952 more ballots cast than individuals credited with voting, based on histories obtained in February 2021.

“Theoretically, these numbers should match,” VoteRef claimed in an August press release.

But there are valid reasons the numbers do not match.

Nevada election officials explained it this way in a press release: “If ‘John Doe’ votes and has his ballot counted in Lander County, then moves to Mineral County, once he is registered in Mineral County, he will show no vote history because he has no vote history in Mineral County. The farther away from the election the data is acquired, the more it will have changed.”

In Connecticut, there were 1,839,714 ballots cast in 2020, according to VoteRef, but the group’s examination of voter histories in October, 2021, showed 1,802,458 people voting. VoteRef’s conclusion is that there was a discrepancy of 37,256 ballots.

But state election officials said that the registration database is “live,” and voting histories of those who moved out of state or died in the months after the election would have been removed from the rolls, accounting for the discrepancy.

“The list is not a static list,” said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill. “It changes all the time.”

In Michigan, where VoteRef found a difference of more than 74,000 votes, an elections official said that state’s qualified voter file also constantly changes as it’s updated, making the data the foundation relied on in late May 2021 — more than six months after the election — out of date.

In a recent email to ProPublica, Swoboda conceded as much.

“It’s up to election officials who run election offices to reconcile their data, not the Voter Reference Foundation, which merely publishes their information in a consumer-friendly format,” she said. “Of course, our election experts are well aware of the time lag between certification and data pulls — we posted the documents online for all to see!”

Federal law requires that election supervisors make reasonable efforts to update voter lists, but provides leeway in how states carry out the task. The law prohibits administrators from removing people for simply not voting in repeated elections, unless notices go unanswered and officials wait for two federal election cycles before putting the voters on an inactive list.

Counties haven’t always done a good job, however, in maintaining the voter rolls, leading some people to distrust the system. One of VoteRef’s key aims is to task ordinary people with the chore of finding anomalies.

Scrutinizing voter rolls and neighbors

In announcing the launch of its website, the Voter Reference Foundation touted it as a “first of its kind” searchable tool for all 50 states “that will finally give American citizens a way to examine crucial voting records.”

“Citizens will be able to check their voting status, voting history, and those of their neighbors, friends and others. They will be able to ‘crowd-source’ any errors,” the press release stated.

The group’s backers have encouraged scrutiny outside of one’s own household.

“With VoteRef.com you can find out who voted and who didn’t. Did your aunt who died 10 years ago ‘vote’ after she died? Did your ‘neighbor’ who moved to another state vote? Did 55 votes emerge from a five-unit apartment complex?” Jeffrey Carter, a partner in a venture capital group who earlier had appeared on Truax’s podcast, wrote on the newsletter site Substack in December.

Matt Batzel, whose organization American Majority recently highlighted VoteRef’s efforts in Wisconsin, said in an interview with ProPublica that VoteRef’s vision is for citizens to detect and then report potential problems with the voter rolls, such as people who are registered to vote at vacant lots or unusually high numbers of votes coming from nursing homes.

Election experts say the type of work being done by VoteRef risks leading to further misinformation or being weaponized by people trying to undermine the legitimacy of the past election or give the sense that voter fraud is a more encompassing problem than it’s proven to be. Or it could be used to harass or intimidate valid voters under the guise of challenging their legitimacy.

Even without any clear evidence of fraud during the 2020 election, the vast, decentralized election system still is drawing scrutiny from those who believe that the system can be easily manipulated. At the daylong voter integrity conference in Chippewa Falls, speakers invoked war imagery, spoke of coverups, and urged people to “expose the tactics” of the political left. The group — saluted via video by Trump acolyte and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — is seeking to put like-minded individuals in vote-certifying secretary of state offices nationwide.

The voter rolls have been targeted, too, by others in Wisconsin, including special counsel Michael J. Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice and Trump supporter who the state’s Republican Assembly speaker appointed in June to conduct a review of Wisconsin’s administration of the 2020 election. On March 1, Gableman released a report blasting what he called “opaque, confusing, and often botched election processes.”

Gableman urged the Legislature to consider legal methods to enable citizens or civil rights groups to help maintain election databases.

“As it stands, there is no clear method for individuals with facial evidence of inaccurate voter rolls to enter state court and seek to fix that problem,” he wrote. He envisioned a system that “could even provide nominal rewards for successful voter roll challenges.”

While information about voters is available in most states, it comes at a cost and with limits on how it can be distributed to avoid having some private information be easily accessible.

Having voter registration data ‘blasted out across the internet’ violates state law limiting use of the voter rolls solely for campaign or government activities

– Maggie Toulouse Oliver, New Mexico secretary of state

In January, an official with the Pennsylvania Department of State wrote to Truax warning that it appeared that the Voter Reference Foundation had “unlawfully posted Pennsylvania-voter information on its website” and demanding that the organization “take immediate action” to remove the information.

Soon, Pennsylvania data disappeared from the website. Swoboda declined to answer questions about the matter. Attempts to reach Truax were unsuccessful.

In New Mexico, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver also said the undertaking is not an allowable use of voter data. By state law, she said, the rolls can only be used for governmental or campaign purposes.

“Having voter registration data ‘blasted out across the internet’ violates state law limiting use of the voter rolls solely for campaign or government activities,” she said. In December, Toulouse Oliver’s office referred the matter to the state attorney general for investigation and possible prosecution.

Associates of the Voter Reference Foundation dismiss these privacy concerns.

“You are joking, right?” said Bill Wilson, chairman of the conservative-leaning Market Research Foundation of Fairfax, Virginia, which paid more than $11,000 to the state of Virginia in March 2021 for the voter roll data and shared it with the Voter Reference Foundation.

“Big tech, both political parties and big media have no interest or concern for privacy and have mountains of data on individuals that is shared and sold on an hourly basis. You called me at my home, after all.’’

Support in GOP circles

Restoration Action/PAC describes itself on its website as an “effective dynamo against those trying to destroy our country.” It produces ads on behalf of state and national candidates, castigates Planned Parenthood, “biased liberal media” and “Big Tech” and advocates for fair elections.

Truax, the group’s head, frequently assumes the role of news anchor to host the First Right video podcast, interviewing far-right conservatives. In early June last year, he introduced his audience to VoteRef, telling them: “We helped create the organization, and we’ll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks.”

Richard Uihlein’s quiet role was essential. He’s been the primary funder of Restoration PAC since its inception in 2015, contributing at least $44 million, according to the data from OpenSecrets. In May 2021, Federal Election Commission records show, Uihlein donated $1.5 million to Restoration PAC. That same month, the Voter Reference Foundation was incorporated in Ohio.

Two weeks after the Uihlein donation, money started flowing from Restoration PAC to a media network that did some data procurement and analysis for VoteRef, with payments totalling more than $955,000 as of the end of 2021, the FEC records show.

The network, which includes Pipeline Media, is operated by Bradley Cameron, a Texas business strategist, state corporation records show. Brian Timpone is listed as a manager at Pipeline Media. He made headlines a decade ago after his firm, then called Journatic, came under fire for outsourcing hyperlocal news offshore using phony bylines.

In recent months, VoteRef has released press releases about its activities that have been turned into stories on sites owned by Metric Media, which Cameron leads, according to his online profile. The sites mimic legitimate news outlets but print press releases, shun bylines, do little to no original reporting and rely on automated data. “New website to publish which Arlington residents voted, did not vote in gubernatorial election,” read an Oct. 28 headline in the Central Nova News of Virginia, a Metric Media site.

Uihlein did not respond to calls or emails from ProPublica seeking comment. Cameron and Timpone also did not reply to messages seeking an interview.

Political figures with ties to Trump have been touting the efforts of VoteRef.

Among them: former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner appointed by Trump to serve as acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Cuccinelli now heads the Election Transparency Initiative, a Virginia organization opposed to expanding early voting or easing registration requirements. The initiative, a project of the conservative group Susan B. Anthony List, says it partners with The Heritage Foundation’s political arm.

Cuccinelli spoke in September to about 100 party loyalists at a gathering at a suburban Milwaukee hotel about how they could use the VoteRef tools and become involved in securing the elections process.

Similarly, J. Hogan Gidley, former national press secretary for the 2020 Trump campaign, promoted the work of VoteRef on Philadelphia conservative talk radio before Christmas.

“We’re doing some work with them, too. We know the folks over there really well,” said Gidley, who is now with the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit packed with Trump administration alums.

Truax, meanwhile, brought in Swoboda for his podcast last summer. They talked about the Arizona ballot audit and briefly referenced her work with the Voter Reference Foundation.

“It always feels like to me that the states, in general, have gotten a little sloppy in different areas and just you know nobody’s really paying a lot of attention to it,” Truax said.

He added: “Now I think as conservatives we’re in a place we really got to pay a lot more attention. There’s a lot of energy now on this.”

Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.

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Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.

Billionaires Hunt For Voter Fraud