James
O’Keefe Recruits Election Workers to Secretly Record at the Polls
Mr. O’Keefe
has sought volunteers willing to wear hidden cameras and hunt for voting
problems. Dozens of election judges and poll monitors responded, records show.
Ken
Bensinger
By Ken
Bensinger
Nov. 3, 2024
James
O’Keefe, the conservative influencer who founded and formerly led Project
Veritas, has assembled a corps of election workers and poll monitors planning
to secretly film voting and ballot counting in states across the country.
The group
intends to use hidden cameras to record and then publicize video to support
their claims of fraud or other irregularities at voting sites, according to
records shared with The New York Times by a former employee involved in
planning. Nearly 70 people had signed up for the effort by mid-October,
including people claiming to be election judges and volunteer poll watchers,
the documents show.
Mr.
O’Keefe’s project is one of several conservative groups that have been
mobilizing to try to document fraud and corruption at the polls. In many cases,
the activists involved are convinced of former President Donald J. Trump’s
false claims about a rigged election in 2020 and are on the lookout for a
repeat. Mr. Trump has already declared that Pennsylvania election officials are
“cheating.”
The efforts
worry election officials, who say that election workers who come to the job
steeped in misinformation and hunting for misdeeds might interfere with the
process. Last month, intelligence officials issued a warning about what they
consider to be “insider threats” that could “derail or jeopardize a fair and
transparent election process.”
Many states
prohibit filming at election sites, and have laws protecting voter privacy and
barring election interference. Mr. O’Keefe acknowledged the legal risk on
social media last week, writing that in some cases it is illegal for the
activists in the field to record, but “it is legal for me to publish what you
send me so long as I ‘play no part’ in the recording.”
In response
to questions from The New York Times, Mr. O’Keefe posted a video on social
media calling his project “fully legal,” saying that had told his volunteers to
follow the law and not to interfere with the elections.
“Why on
earth would I have arranged all this if I were secretly planning a criminal
enterprise?” he said, promising that he would “publish an avalanche of these
recordings in the coming days.”
The Mission
Mr. O’Keefe,
who left Project Veritas last year amid questions about his excessive spending
and management style, is known for using secret cameras, ambush interviews and
deceptive tactics meant to embarrass or discredit his targets. He has a long
history of focusing on elections.
In March
2023, he started a new company, O’Keefe Media Group, stating that it would rely
on a “citizen army of journalists” to create new content.
He first
offered to send cameras to poll watchers in early September, asking in a post
on X that “anybody working in elections” reach out to him. His website sells
the specialized cameras, which can be concealed behind a shirt button, in a
coffee cup lid or on a car key fob, for as much as $449.
In company
group chats, Mr. O’Keefe celebrated as inquiries began rolling in. “KEEP IT
GOING!!!” he wrote on Sept. 10, responding to a woman who asked if she could
get a camera for her husband, a poll worker in Loudoun County, Va. “Changing
the world,” he added.
The records
were shared with The Times by Kayla Dones, a former employee at O’Keefe Media
Group. Ms. Dones said she quit her job just over two weeks ago, in part,
because she felt the project could land people in legal trouble.
“I remember
our being scolded for not being about the mission,” Ms. Dones said. “I just
don’t want people to go to jail.”
A
spreadsheet maintained by Ms. Dones and another employee listed volunteers from
25 states with notes from screening interviews.
One woman,
who described herself as a poll worker in Sarasota, Fla., said she was “willing
to break the rules” despite admonitions in the county’s training session that
filming was not permitted, the notes read. An elections judge in Pennsylvania
told an employee of Mr. O’Keefe that she was “willing to do anything.” A woman
in New Jersey said she was worried about would-be fraudsters “harvesting
ballots from elderly,” according to the notes.
Reached by
The Times, the Florida woman, Debra Garrett, acknowledged contacting Mr.
O’Keefe, but said she no longer planned to be a poll worker and was “not going
to do anything that’s illegal.” The woman from New Jersey, Denise Bolognese,
who is a Republican candidate for the Haddon Heights Borough Council and serves
as an election challenger, also said that she did not plan to participate.
Ms.
Bolognese inquired about the project, she said, only because she “wanted to
know what their efforts would be in the state.”
The
spreadsheet includes nine people who described themselves as election judges,
and volunteers in five of the seven battleground states. Several people on the
list said they had trained with Trump Force 47, a group of volunteer
neighborhood organizers coordinated by the Republican National Committee.
In a podcast
appearance last Monday, Mr. O’Keefe claimed his list of volunteers had grown to
200 people, a number The Times could not independently verify. On Thursday, he
posted on X that he had shipped out 50 hidden cameras to “election officials.”
‘We Have
Nothing to Hide’
Mr.
O’Keefe’s plans have spurred warnings from public officials. After he posted
footage of poll-worker training sessions in Maricopa County, Ariz., a county
supervisor, Bill Gates, responded with a post saying that surreptitious
recording “endangers the safety” of poll workers.
“It’s
awful,” Mr. Gates said in an interview, noting that Arizona state law prohibits
photographs or videos within 75 feet of a polling place. He said he was
concerned that the project was encouraging people to break the law and violate
poll workers’ privacy.
Amanda López
Askin, the county clerk in Doña Ana County, N.M., said she had dismissed a
temporary elections clerk last week after learning that he had posted online
about his interest in secretly recording while working at a polling place in an
elementary school in Garfield, N.M.
In an
anonymous post on a pro-Trump message board, the man, Alfred Cabrales, said he
had reached out to Mr. O’Keefe for help with “discreet video recording
options.”
“We have
nothing to hide,” Ms. López Askin said in an interview, noting state election
law had privacy protections that make filming in a polling place illegal. “But
this person is saying he wants to go far beyond the scope of what he’s been
assigned and is already approaching the election as if there is something
amiss. That disqualifies him from working for us.”
In an email
to the Times, Mr. Cabrales criticized what he called the “insidious lack of
transparency surrounding our supposed election security, and those who defend
it,” adding that “the citizens are aware of the misjustice against them, and
they will pass judgment.”
While some
states allow voters to photograph their own ballots, sometimes called “ballot
selfies,” others prohibit any photography or recording at polling places. Many
other jurisdictions have rules preventing election interference that experts
say could include covert recording. The prospect of being filmed could
intimidate voters, elections experts said, and could lead to harassment of
officials involved in vote counting.
Even legally
obtained recordings can be used in deceptive ways. After the 2020 election,
Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, poll workers in Fulton County, Ga., were accused
by Rudolph W. Giuliani, then one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, of “illegal activity.”
Mr. Giuliani
pointed to surveillance video to claim the women were sharing a USB drive used
to scan hidden ballots. They were actually passing around ginger mints. Late
last year, he was ordered to pay the two women $148 million in a defamation
suit.
(In 2020,
Project Veritas accused The Times of defamation for its reporting on a video
that made claims of voter fraud in Minnesota. The lawsuit is ongoing.)
Ms. Dones,
who started working for the O’Keefe Media Group late last year, said she was
assigned to screen people who had volunteered to take part in the project.
She and
another employee reached out to nearly 300 people who had answered Mr.
O’Keefe’s request in a single week, she said, many of whom largely wanted to
share their theories about how the election was being stolen. Only about one in
10, she estimated, “were saying, ‘I’m willing to throw away everything to save
my country.’”
Ms. Dones
said volunteers were given little, if any, training, other than video tutorials
on using the equipment, as well as a link to a tip sheet where they could
submit “newsworthy undercover footage.”
“James just
wants one story of undercover hidden-camera footage of someone documenting some
type of election interference on Election Day so he can have his big story,”
Ms. Dones told The Times.
Ms. Dones
said the O’Keefe Media Group typically pays its “citizen journalists” between
$1,000 and $5,000 for the footage it publishes, although most of the video
submitted to not make the cut.
Company
chats show that Mr. O’Keefe consulted with a First Amendment lawyer about the
legality of the project in late September and commissioned a review of state
laws.
Ms. Dones,
who also worked with Mr. O’Keefe on a documentary about immigration, said she
did not identify with either political party. She said she believed election
officials were working in good faith to keep the vote secure, and grew worried
that she was involved in a project that might be encouraging other people to
break the law.
“I’m
genuinely concerned people are going to throw their lives away for something
that’s only going to last 24 hours in the news cycle,” she said.
Ken
Bensinger covers right wing media and national political campaigns for The
Times. More about Ken Bensinger
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