Trump Allies Breached U.S. Voting Systems To Prove 'Poll Fraud'

Chasing proof of vote-rigging conspiracy theories, Republican officials and activists in eight US locales have plotted to gain illegal access to balloting systems, undermining the security of elections they claim to protect, Alexandra Ulmer and Nathan Layne wrote in an exclusive for Reuters.

Photo Insert: (on left) Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder was captured on video fiddling with cables and typing on his phone as he copied computer drives containing voting information.

Eighteen months after Donald Trump lost the White House, his loyalists continue to assert that balloting machines across the US robbed him of the 2020 election. Some of them are taking the law into their own hands – by attempting to compromise the voting systems themselves.

Surveillance video captured such an effort in August in Kiowa, Colorado, and showed Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder, the top election official, fiddling with cables and typing on his phone as he copied computer drives containing voting information.

Schroeder, a Republican, testified that he was receiving instructions on how to copy the system’s data from a retired Air Force colonel and political activist bent on proving Trump lost because of fraud.

That day, Aug. 26, Schroeder made a “forensic image of everything on the election server,” according to his testimony, and later gave cloned hard drives to two lawyers. Schroeder refused to identify one of the lawyers who got the hard drives. The other is an attorney who works with an activist backed by Mike Lindell, the pillow mogul, and election conspiracy theorist.

The episode is among eight known attempts to gain unauthorized access to voting systems in five US states since the 2020 election. All involved local Republican officeholders or party activists who have advanced Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods.

Some of the breaches were inspired in part by the false belief that state-ordered voting-system upgrades or maintenance would erase evidence of alleged fraud in the 2020 election.

The incidents include a North Carolina case in which a local GOP leader threatened to get a top county poll official fired or have her pay cut if she didn’t give him unauthorized access to voting equipment.

In southern Michigan, a pro-Trump clerk defied state orders to perform maintenance on a voting machine on the unfounded belief that doing so could erase proof of fraud.

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