The pro-Trump conspiracy internet is moving from Facebook to your doorstep
The man at the door said he was just there to verify some publicly available information.
In the home security video, he seems nervous and out of breath as he waits at the doorway, glancing frequently at his phone. Strangers don’t knock on doors much in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, a small ski town. For a decade, it had just 250 year-round residents, until the pandemic hit and a bunch of Massachusetts residents decided to cross state lines and turn their rural vacation spot into a home. But the man at the door wasn’t one of them. He said his name was Dean and he was with the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group.
The homeowner knew right away something was up, he said later in an interview. He didn’t go to answer the door, but spoke to the man through his Ring camera, pressing him on what exactly the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group was and who they represented. In the video shared with BuzzFeed News, Dean, haltingly, says they are volunteers. They don’t represent anybody but themselves. They are just trying to verify the town’s voter rolls. The homeowner keeps pressing, and finally Dean gets to the point: “[We] took a look at the election so we’re a little concerned about what happened, so we’re, uh, checking.”
The homeowner, a Democrat, tells him to go to hell and get off his property. “That’ll be a nice trip, thank you,” Dean replies cheerfully in the security footage as he turns to leave. “I’ll see you there.”
Around town that Saturday in early October, other people were knocking on doors — specific ones, the rare ones where people actually live year-round — asking about the 2020 election. They had information on the residents, their names, whether they voted and if they did so in-person or absentee. In response, two Waterville Valley residents called the cops, according to a police report.
Across the country, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory internet is manifesting itself into knocks at the door. Individual election deniers and grassroots groups are canvassing for election fraud in states lost or even won by former president Donald Trump in 2020, including New Hampshire, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, and Nebraska. Despite 60-plus court losses and countless official audits and recounts confirming the 2020 election results, many of Trump’s supporters are still so convinced of his lies that they’ve turned to this kind of vigilantism. [Continue reading…]
An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.
Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.
The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not. [Continue reading…]