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A national election-denier group with a history of funneling large sums of its donors’ money into its leaders’ pockets.
A law firm that once admitted to falsely accusing thousands of voters of being non-citizens.
A self-proclaimed election integrity advocate fundraising off disproven claims that spread across conservative media.
These groups and others have been making dozens of requests for public records from California election officials in the lead up to the November election.
As Republican Party leaders continue to make false and unproven allegations about California and national elections, CalMatters obtained public records request logs from the elections offices of 13 California counties to learn more about the organizations seeking information.
Under California public records law, everyone has the legal right to request government documents. But election-fraud activists have a proven history of using information obtained from public agencies to add the veneer of credibility to disproven claims of election irregularities.
And some law enforcement agencies are taking them seriously.
Earlier this year, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office relied on an activist group’s questionable findings when it seized 650,000 ballots from last November’s election, and the FBI recently paid a visit to Shasta County to inspect its June primary ballots. Both cases raise concerns that law enforcement might interfere with California's elections.
Other groups that have requested public records from California elections officials have histories of spreading misinformation and using it to enrich themselves with little regulatory oversight.
There’s always a donate button. There’s always a newsletter that says 'donate.'David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research
“It’s always accompanied by a plea to donate,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit whose mission is to restore trust in the American election system. “There’s always a donate button. There’s always a newsletter that says ‘donate.’ They’re trying to get you to, you know, ‘Give us $25 from your Social Security check’ every time.”
He called it an “economy of grift.”
After the 2016 presidential election, for example, True the Vote said it had evidence of 3 million illegal votes. It launched a fundraising campaign, saying it needed $1 million to verify its data before releasing the evidence. It never released the evidence, according to an investigation by Reveal based on court and tax records.
Similarly, the same organization raised $2.5 million from one donor following the 2020 presidential election on promises that it had evidence of fraud and a legal strategy to prove it. It routed much of that money to founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, as well as to a longtime board member’s company and to an attorney for the nonprofit, Reveal reported.
Earlier this year, CalMatters filed requests for public records logs from registrars in several geographically and demographically diverse California counties to assess which election activist groups were making requests about what.
The records show that Engelbrecht and others at True the Vote made requests in at least Fresno, Orange, Riverside and Sacramento counties.
True the Vote spokesperson Megan Denning said the group wants to “document, directly from election officials, how jurisdictions are responding and what actions, if any, they are taking” in response to one of President Donald Trump’s election executive orders, key provisions of which courts blocked for being unconstitutional.
True the Vote has filed 250 such requests across the country, Denning said in an email.
“Regardless of political perspective, Americans should be able to agree on the importance of transparency in government processes, including how states and local jurisdictions respond to executive orders — especially those concerning our elections,” she wrote.
No one from True the Vote responded to interview requests.
The group posts the documents on its website, urging followers to take “on-the-ground action in your state.”
In a podcast last month, Engelbrecht and her guest, Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis, hinted about the election-fraud movement’s end goal: To get the information in front of Trump.
“If it actually gets to the president, he’ll be able to make some significant changes,” Curtis said on the podcast, though it was unclear what changes he was referring to. “And there’s still time to do that, even before this election.”
FBI and other federal agents visited Curtis’ election office in Redding in September and inspected ballots after the longtime election denier claimed that the June primary election he oversaw in the heavily Republican rural county could be fraudulent.
He told reporters the ballots looked, felt and smelled funny, which he said could be proof of a nefarious group stuffing drop boxes with fake ballots. Curtis also advised the activist group behind Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s ballot seizures earlier this year.
Engelbrecht, whose name Trump has been known to shout during his rallies, agreed with Curtis that the time to act is now.
“Whatever happens, whatever level of chaos it causes, let it come today,” she said on the podcast. “It’s better than tomorrow. Let’s just get ’er done.”
Group with Trump ties seeks records
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit “public interest law firm dedicated to election integrity,” has also been requesting records from California.
Trump appointed the foundation’s president, J. Christian Adams, to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and he was once a member of Trump’s election integrity team. The foundation’s former board chair, Cleta Mitchell, was on the call with Trump when he demanded Georgia’s secretary of state find the votes needed to overturn the 2020 election results.
In 2019, the foundation settled a lawsuit in which it admitted it falsely accused thousands of legal voters in Virginia of being part of an “alien invasion” of noncitizen voters. It based those claims on public records it obtained and shared publicly. The records included voters’ Social Security numbers, home addresses, emails and phone numbers.
As part of the settlement, Adams agreed to apologize, and the foundation said it would redact personal information before sharing records again.
Seven years later, its research director, Logan Churchwell, has requested information from California’s 58 counties seeking election personnel records, including organizational charts, job descriptions and resumes, including those of people who applied but didn’t get jobs.
In an interview with CalMatters, Churchwell said the firm is doing standard research into election worker qualifications “to see if there were any patterns to glean.”
“Part of our organizational mission is putting out open records on all kinds of subjects within the elections space, so whenever we’re called to testify in Sacramento or Washington or whatever as subject matter experts, we can handle a broad variety of questions beyond, ‘What do you think happened in 2020?’” he said.
Churchwell also defended the foundation’s decision to publish the records from Virginia. He said Virginia election officials had mistakenly listed those voters as non-citizens, an example of poor record keeping that he says his foundation finds all the time.
He said the foundation is not an election denier group, has “never challenged the outcome of an election,” and it does not fundraise off false claims as other groups do.
“They’re looking for grand conspiracies and smoking guns,” Churchwell said. “And there are people out there that are happy to fundraise off that mentality, and that’s really unfortunate.”
Local election skeptics hunt for fraud
Lesser known local fraud hunters also are requesting records as they try to gather evidence validating their unproven beliefs that California elections are corrupt.
They’ve already had success catching the attention of one MAGA-aligned lawman, Riverside County Sheriff Bianco.
One of the members of New California State, a group trying to carve a piece of California into a 51st state, pushed Bianco behind the scenes to investigate election fraud claims in Riverside County, CalMatters reported.
New California State members requested a wide range of records in multiple California counties, including ballots, internal communications, voting machine records and voter registration numbers.
The group’s leader, Robert Paul Preston, said in a brief phone call that the group has found “massive voter fraud in all 58 counties.” He didn’t elaborate.
One of the group’s members, Darcia Stebbens, is an activist and conservative talk radio show host in San Luis Obispo County, where she regularly makes unfounded claims about election fraud.
She has filed close to 50 requests for election records in that county since 2022. Her requests include duplicate ballots, ballot counts, video footage and discipline reports on elections staff.
Noting that she wasn’t speaking on behalf of New California State, Stebbens said she is a private citizen exercising her right to obtain public records. Those records, she said, led her to conclude California election results aren’t accurate and that mail-in voting can’t be trusted. Stebbens said she has no financial motive. The accountant noted she has spent thousands of dollars to pay for recounts in San Luis Obispo County.
“I assure you I haven’t made any money,” she said.
Members of the main group behind Bianco’s ballot seizures, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, also filed at least 30 records requests with the Riverside County elections office since 2025.
The group’s spokesperson, Greg Langworthy, said his team is focused on ensuring that Riverside County’s elections are conducted properly. He said the group will continue to request records so its members can conduct independent election reviews. There is no “donate” button on his group’s website, as other groups have. Langworthy said the group doesn’t fundraise.
Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco declined an interview request.
Some lawmakers might be tempted to respond to the spread of election misinformation by making it harder for the public to obtain records, as they have repeatedly sought to do.
Ginny LaRoe of the First Amendment Coalition said that would be a mistake.
“I think it would be dangerous for California lawmakers to limit public access to information further in a time when misinformation flourishes,” she said. “That’s when we need greater transparency and more access to public records.”
Influencer’s history of unproven claims
Shiloh Marx has built a political brand by using voter roll information he collects to accuse Democrats of rigging elections. He promotes himself and fundraises off the misinformation he shares. He’s filed requests for election records across California.
Marx is the son of Christian influencer and author Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for governor in Colorado. Victor Marx has a history of making outlandish claims, including that his stepfather ordered him to kill a man when he was seven and that he oversaw commando-style ministry missions that rescued thousands of victims from captivity. Marx has not provided any evidence to back those claims.
Shiloh Marx, a paid consultant for his father’s gubernatorial campaign, filed paperwork to incorporate a nonprofit called the Integrity First Alliance earlier this year. He declined an interview request.
He quickly amassed more than 44,000 followers on X by sharing a steady stream of misleading information, often about the number of inactive or duplicate voters on state election rolls, including California’s. He has told prominent California conservative media figures he suspects that is how Democratic politicians are cheating in elections.
Last year, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton had Marx on his podcast. Hilton, the Trump-endorsed candidate, said Marx caught his attention with “these amazing updates on cleaning up the voter rolls in California.”
Hilton did not respond to an interview request.
Democrats, Marx told Hilton, “have been using inactive voters to either manipulate, affect, or, for all intents and purposes, mess with the ecosystem of California elections.”
On former Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder’s radio show last year, Marx was blunt when Elder questioned why Democrats resist his efforts: “It’s how they’ve rigged elections for 30 years,” he said.
California election officials note that inactive voters, whose mail bounced or whom election officials suspect have moved, aren’t sent ballots. That means they can’t simply vote without first reactivating their registration.
“If a voter is on the inactive roll, the only way for them to vote is to show up at our office, or show up at a voting location, a polling place, or a vote center, and, you know, present themselves and update their registration to be able to get a ballot,” said Bob Page, Orange County’s registrar of voters.
In other words, to make sure nothing shady is going on, election officials verify inactive voters’ information before giving them ballots.
Inactive voters aren’t activating in large numbers prior to California elections. Of the 9.4 million Californians who cast ballots in June, only around 10,000 were listed as inactive voters who took those steps to become eligible to vote just before the primary, according to figures from the California secretary of state.
Marx has made similar debunked claims implying duplicate voters are swaying elections in Arizona and North Carolina.
His assertions are like those of other conservative groups that obtain publicly available ineligible voter rolls and use them to make claims of widespread voter fraud.
Becker, the election expert, said those making the claims are either “ignorant about election policy … or they’re bad-faith actors who know they’re selling lies in order to profit.”
Marx also has filed at least five lawsuits against California counties last year. Marx has used the publicity from the suits to fundraise.
“I am bringing a lawsuit to force SLO to produce voter records, if you want to help contribute to cleaning California voter rolls. The link is below,” he posted on X, referring to a short-lived suit he filed against San Luis Obispo County.
Marx’s claims are shared widely across the MAGAsphere.
Victor Marx shared the clip of his son on Elder’s show with his 680,000 Instagram followers, and made a fundraising pitch on Facebook when Elon Musk shared one of his son’s posts to his X account’s 241 million followers.
“Can we count on your contribution today to help continue funding ongoing research that exposes voting irregularities going into 2026?” Victor Marx asked his 2 million Facebook followers.
Various state and federal agencies regulate tax-exempt nonprofits, of which there are around 2 million in the U.S. Few get investigated, experts say.
Plus, political speech has exceptionally strong First Amendment protections, making enforcement a challenge when groups spread falsehoods and use it to fundraise. Courts have been leery of laws that make the government the arbiter of political truth, said Laurie Styron, the CEO and executive director of CharityWatch.
“In theory California election code restricts knowingly distributing materially deceptive communications,” she said in an email. “In practice, by the time justice prevails, if it ever does, the damage is usually already done.”
Stephen Richer, the former Republican elections chief in Maricopa County, Arizona, knows just how well fraud-hunting activists can erode trust in elections and make life difficult for election workers.
Maricopa County was one of the counties where Trump claimed, without evidence, that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him.
“We had this all the time in Arizona,” he said. “People requesting video footage, people requesting records, people requesting photocopies, and then presenting them with no context or no understanding. Sometimes intentionally so; sometimes unintentionally so.”
Richer got death threats as Trump’s fraud hunters shared the “evidence” they’d found on social media.
“If you’re giving money or time to these people at this point, you’re a mark,” he said. “I’m sorry, you’re a mark.”
CalMatters reporters Robert Lewis and Deborah Brennan contributed to this story.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
