A Trump operative whose previous anti-voter fraud effort failed to disclose any information about its finances has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for a new effort: an attempt to expose dead people who supposedly cast ballots in the 2020 elections.
He’s asking donors to take him at his word that he won’t pocket a dime of the funds.
Matt Braynard led the Trump campaign’s data team in 2015 and early 2016. He’s now trying, against all odds and with little success so far, to help win the president a second term in office. He’s formed an initiative called the Voter Integrity Project, which has raised nearly $650,000 through an online crowdfunding effort.
ADVERTISEMENT
The goal, Braynard says, is to identify ballots that may have been illegally cast by cross-referencing lists of deceased people with state voter files and other public records databases, and gathering affidavits from voters who will attest to irregularities in mail-in ballot programs in states around the country.
Collaborating with Braynard in the effort is Camilo Sandoval, the federal government’s top information security official and a former colleague on the Trump campaign, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. Braynard says he’s also been inundated with offers of assistance from Trump supporters around the country. But “given the timeline,” he said in a video released the day after the presidential race was called for Joe Biden, “right now all we really need is cash.”
That cash came pouring in. More than 8,500 donors have given between $5 and $15,000 to its crowdfunding campaign on the website GiveSendGo, where Braynard migrated the fundraising effort after it was kicked off of the website GoFundMe a day after it launched for violating its prohibition on election disinformation.
The GiveSendGo platform provides plenty of information about the people providing funds for the effort. Where it’s going, though, is not something that Braynard is required to disclose. In an effort to be as transparent as possible, he says he plans to post images of invoices and receipts documenting the Voter Integrity Project’s expenditures. But little such documentation has been posted so far. Braynard offered to put The Daily Beast in touch with his vendors “once all the bills are in front of me [are] paid,” but hadn’t provided any contact information by press time.
The huge sums that the Voter Integrity Project has raised make it a far more successful fundraising venture than Braynard’s last political startup. In late 2017, he founded a nonprofit called Look Ahead America, which he billed as an “ACORN of the right,” referring to the defunct community organizing group that ran voter registration efforts before being caught up in a James O’Keefe sting. Look Ahead America’s dual goals, he said at the time, would be to register and turn out potential Trump voters, and root out “fraudulent” votes through the use of poll watchers and the sort of data work Braynard is now bringing to bear on Trump’s behalf through the Voter Integrity Project.
In the three years since, Look Ahead America didn’t do all that much. “Unfortunately it was stillborn,” Braynard told The Daily Beast in an email last month. The group “never got funding; it was a tough sell for some reason,” he said. “You’d be shocked by the names I reached out to who blew me off or ignored it.”
Precisely how much money LAA actually raised or spent remains a mystery, as Braynard never filed the legally required financial disclosure paperwork with the Internal Revenue Service. In May, citing that lack of disclosure, the IRS revoked LAA’s tax exempt status. Braynard said he “fell down on properly maintaining the paper work but am working with the IRS to try to reclaim the C3 status (and posting the [IRS filings] to our website).”
As of Monday afternoon, not only were those filings not available on LAA’s website, but that website was down altogether.
Braynard said that the Voter Integrity Project is operating independently of LAA, but that the money he’s raised for the former may end up financing his defunct nonprofit group.
“If there is any money left over, I'll say how much and any donors that want it back may request it,” he said. “If there's any left after that, it goes to LAA.”
The Voter Integrity Project isn’t actually an organization unto itself. ”I'm just an independent contractor for the many donors who contracted with me to complete a project,” as Braynard explains it. That means there are no financial reporting requirements that would force the group to reveal information about its finances, such as precisely how Braynard and his team have spent the substantial sums they’ve raised, or how much is left over when the presidential election is officially settled. It also means that donors will have to take Braynard at his word that he will “receive zero dollars” from the effort.
He is, however, building a substantial email list from the effort. “If you donated on [GiveSendGo], we have your email address,” he told donors on the Voter Integrity Project crowdfunding page. “If you didn't, hit the 'pray now' button and enter your email address. A prayer is not required, but it seems to be the easiest way to make sure we can reach you via email.” As of Monday evening, about 3,600 had “prayed” for the effort.
The huge success of the Voter Integrity Project crowdfunding campaign comes as a separate group of prominent conservative activists, most notably former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, face federal fraud charges over their own massive online fundraising efforts. Prosecutors say Bannon and his co-conspirators, all of whom have pleaded not guilty, solicited donations to privately finance construction of a southern border wall and pocketed significant sums of the money or diverted it for personal use.
“I think it's important that I conduct all of this in a way that doesn't make me seem like a grifter,” Braynard said. He also pointed out that the Voter Integrity Project stopped soliciting donations on Friday, though the crowdfunding page shows people have continued to give since then.
In his Nov. 8 video explaining the project, he stressed that he “absolutely want[s] to be as transparent as possible about what I'm trying to do here and what my team is trying to do.” To that end, Braynard told his crowdfunders that he would provide regular updates on how the money was being disbursed, including copies of receipts and invoices documenting the Voter Integrity Project’s spending. So far, however, he’s posted just one such invoice, a $60,000 payment for voter data.
The Voter Integrity Project’s efforts come as even the Trump campaign pares back its official allegations of election irregularities. While Trump himself continues to insist that he was the victor in this month’s election, his campaign’s attorneys have dropped their most explosive courtroom arguments against the final vote tallies in key states such as Pennsylvania (notwithstanding their insistence to the contrary) and Arizona, all but admitting that they do not have evidence of fraud that would overturn sufficient votes to change the election’s outcome.
Braynard’s work appears to be doing little to undercut Biden’s victory. After completing his analysis of data in one of the six states his team is analyzing (he didn’t say which one), Braynard tweeted on Sunday, “We have not found evidence of a targeted effort to cast the ballots of deceased voters...We didn't find zero cases, but very few that may have incidentally been cast as part of a broader fraud effort targeting inactive voters or clerk errors.”
But Braynard says that such findings could help improve Americans’ confidence in future elections. “If this was a clean election, we can dispel a lot of the concern out there,” he told the Washington Post.
For Braynard, it’s a return to an activism model for which he says he could muster little Republican support prior to the 2020 election. “The left has bonkers money for this stuff but on the right...” he said, trailing off, in his email to The Daily Beast last month. “Maybe fundraising just isn’t my thing?”
