Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
A shady voting group represented by a far-left trans activist got caught this week texting thousands of swing state voters, suggesting they had already cast ballots in this year’s election in a classic case of voter suppression.
This week alone, thousands of voters in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania received text messages from a group called “AllVote” reading, “Records show you voted,” along with a hyperlink to more voting information, reports say.
Charlotte Clymer, a male who claims to be a female and the reported spokesman for AllVote, told CNN that over the weekend, “several thousand registered voters were affected by our error.” According to the group, “the messages contained errors and should have told voters they had cast their ballots in 2022,” but the “in 2022” was somehow left out of the message, CNN reported.
A follow-up message was sent out, but may not have been received by those who had already unsubscribed from the messages or marked them as spam, reports say.
The mistake was an “unfortunate copy-editing error by staff working long hours,” Clymer said according to CNN. And, as the Philadelphia Inquirer explained, the spokesman also said that elections offices and news outlets were “incorrect” in labeling AllVote’s “recent efforts” as “phishing scams.”
In July, an Arizona ABC affiliate reported that Arizona voters were receiving potentially spam text messages that said: “We have you in our records as not registered to vote.” Some of these messages included a link to the domain “all-vote.com,” along with the claim that recipients could “register in 2 minutes,” according to the outlet.
The Pennsylvania Department of State reported that similar text messages in Northhampton County in August were a “scam” and voters were warned to “be more cautious as we get closer to the November 5th Election, as other bad actors may attempt to send similar phishing emails/texts.”
A similar scheme also hit North Carolina, another key swing state. The Durham County Board of Elections flagged the text messages, warning voters “to stay vigilant for election scam text messages,” and reminding them that “[t]he Board of Elections will never notify [them] via text about [their] voter registration status.”
The Wisconsin Election Commission also flagged a group called “AllVote” last week after the group contacted voters “with information about their voting or registration status that may have been inaccurate,” the local news outlet WMTV15 reported. According to CNN, Clymer said last week roughly 15,000 voters in Wisconsin out of the 750,000 the group contacted “received texts … linking to the voting website for the wrong municipality.” Biden won the state by a roughly 20,000-vote margin in 2020.
According to the AllVote website, the group claims to “take seriously the responsibility of providing correct information.”
“Some of our communications include information about whether a voter has cast their ballot – we take every step to ensure that this information is up-to-date and based on the freshest version of the voter file that excludes those who already voted,” the website reads.
The site does not list any personnel associated with AllVote or indicate who its founders are.
A group with the same name registered with the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 1. The associated filing page is largely blank, but indicates that the group is based in Los Angeles, California, and that its treasurer is someone named Howie Stanger.
Last year, online prankster Douglass Mackey was sentenced to seven months in federal prison for posting a spoof Hillary Clinton ad on social media ahead of the 2016 election that encouraged people to vote by text. As Evita Duffy-Alfonso previously noted in The Federalist, “[t]he meme posted to Mackey’s now-suspended troll Twitter account was clearly a joke, and no one appears to have been foolish enough to actually cast a sincere vote for Hillary via the provided phone number.” Nonetheless, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice announced in 2023 he was convicted for committing “election interference.”
In response to a request for comment from The Federalist, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice neither confirmed nor denied an investigation into AllVote.
For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.