Members of a California organization called Patriot Force recently have started to ask for money and knock on local doors in an effort to fix what they describe as “election fraud in Orange County.”

But that basic claim, according to Orange County Registrar Neal Kelley, is “all a bunch of baloney.”

Just as allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election have been disproved in more than 60 court cases across the country, through multiple ballot recounts and post-election audits, and in volumes of in-depth news investigations, a deep dive on Patriot Force’s claims produced no evidence of even a single case of fraud taking place locally in recent elections, let alone the sort of systemic fraud that would be needed to swing any outcome.

That makes such claims, which only seem to be getting louder, increasingly appear to be less about a pursuit of facts and more about a political strategy by those on the losing side of elections, said Tammy Patrick, senior advisor on elections at Democracy Fund, an independent foundation in Washington, D.C.

It would be easy, then, to dismiss such groups as fringe and refuse to give them any attention. But if the endgame is focused on stirring doubt in the validity of secure elections, data shows ongoing efforts by groups like Patriot Force are having a impact.

Despite the 2020 election being the most scrutinized and litigated public vote in U.S. history, a third of people from all parties (and more than half of Republicans) surveyed by National Public Radio said they’re still not willing to accept the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 7 million vote win over former President Donald Trump. In December, two-thirds of Republicans also told NPR they agree with the false claim that “voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election” — a belief that sparked the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“The next few years will be very telling,” Patrick said.

Noting that acceptance of election results is a hallmark of a healthy Democracy, Patrick described the huge block of 2020 election doubters — who it seems will only be satisfied if the 2020 election results are thrown out and the losing candidate is put into office — as “deeply disturbing.”

“I’m not prone to hyperbole, but we are living through a very tenuous time in our nation’s history.”

Belief or rationale?

Though Patriot Force was founded by activists from San Jose and Roseville, the group is making a push in Orange County. Volunteers are distributing fliers door-to-door and sending out emails with vague or misleading claims about the 2020 election and last year’s failed recall of Newsom.

James Peters, a local financial advisor who said he’s a volunteer in charge of communications for Patriot Force, would not say how many people his group has reached or the number of volunteers involved.

Peters did say his group is targeting Orange County because he and other local residents are concerned about election integrity and worried their votes weren’t being counted.

But in email exchanges and an interview, claims by Peters — who contacted the Register to share his group’s story — quickly fell apart.

Peters acknowledged, for example, that he didn’t know a lawsuit he was citing as evidence of fraud had already been thrown out by a federal judge. And when simple math explained away a question he had about local support for Biden, Peters said he suspects fraud in any election in which voter turnout rises above 70%, though he didn’t offer support for that hunch or why he chose that figure.

Peters also acknowledged that some examples he is using to illustrate problems in local elections — stories his group pitches to potential supporters as evidence of fraud — could be evidence that the system was working, since officials caught the issues and quickly addressed or explained them.

The one specific example Peters offered of something amiss was a claim that five people are registered to vote at his address when it should be only him and his wife. But voter registration records obtained by the Register proved that claim is false.

After such questions were raised, the Patriot Force website came down and Peters asked to retract the interview he’d requested.

But Patriot Force is hardly alone in raising dubious questions about election integrity.

Trump himself launched baseless claims of voter fraud even before the 2020 election, saying he would question any result in which he didn’t prevail. He also previously claimed — without evidence — that millions of undocumented voters in California were the reason he lost the 2016 popular vote to Hillary Clinton. And during his time in office after the 2020 election, Trump claimed, repeatedly, that the election was fraudulent. That claim, many say, has evolved into a political strategy critics describe as “The Big Lie.” Trump repeats it still, making the claim as recently as a Jan. 15 speech to supporters in Arizona.

How many new voters it wins over isn’t yet clear, but the claim of election fraud, for some people, serves as a call to action. Peters, for example, said he became interested in election integrity following Trump’s loss in 2020.

Rick Hasen, a law professor and elections expert who helps run UC Irvine’s Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, said that while some groups and politicians are pushing the idea of fraud for political gain, he also believes others are engaging in “an honest if misguided search for truth.”

“What we’ve seen around the country is people who don’t understand election procedures trying to make something from nothing — like searching for bamboo in ballots (a conspiracy theory that grabbed hold last spring during Arizona’s much-maligned forensic audit) or looking for what they see as odd patterns showing fraud,” Hasen said.

“We know that our recent elections have been investigated and no widespread fraud revealed.”

Ballot security?

Orange County Registrar Kelley — who Patrick acknowledged is widely known as “one of the best election officials in the nation” for running such a “tight ship” — called Patriot Force’s claims “nonsense crafted to fit some internet-spread agenda.”

Kelley does occasionally refer claims of fraud to the District Attorney for investigation. But he noted that in the roughly 18 months since he first heard from Peters, he hasn’t received a single specific claim that could even be vetted.

But Peters is pushing on another front as well, one that might not require evidence. Peters said his group wants Kelley’s office to turn over copies of all ballots cast, something that’s done in a limited fashion in other states but isn’t permitted in California. Kelley noted that under California law ballots can be opened after an election only if a formal recount has been launched, a path Patriot Force isn’t pursuing.

One reason it’s rare to open California ballots is privacy. Kelley said ballots sometimes include markings that might tie them back to a specific voter, which would violate privacy laws.

“Every voter out there in Orange County wants me to protect their ballot,” Kelley said.

Patrick, with Democracy Fund, said that during the 20 years she’s worked on election integrity, including in states where ballots can be made public, she’s seen signed ballots, and ballots with the voter’s name listed as the preference for every office, and ballots with hand-written political manifestos. Such incidents, she said, happen “more often than you’d think.”

She also pointed out that in small precincts it can be easy to connect a particular ballot to a particular voter. She added that in places that do allow copies of ballots to be made public, some ballots are always redacted or held back, making it impossible to do the type of precise re-counting that groups such as Patriot Group say they want.

Even if the merits outweigh the concerns in allowing copies of most Orange County ballots to be released, state law would need to be changed in order for it to happen. That hurdle might prove convenient for a group that, lacking evidence of actual fraud, might want to simply raise doubt about elections security.

Peters insisted that access to local ballot copies would settle many questions his group has about recent county elections.

Political conundrum?

Ronald Palermo, a San Jose businessman who helped found Patriot Force, didn’t respond to a request to speak for this story. State records show Palermo and Roseville businessman Eric Hoffman launched Patriot Force in October 2021 as a mutual benefit corporation — a type of nonprofit that raises money for members, rather than the public, and which can claim tax exemption for itself but can’t offer tax deductibility for donors.

Peters said most group members connected via America First Audit, a channel on the Telegram app that says it aims to “unite and educate Patriots on forensic Audits in America and State Election Integrity.”

While that group is national, Peters said local members felt they could be more effective by breaking off on their own. So they connected with Patriot Force, where he said Palermo and Hoffman now serve as board members.

Peters declined to say how much money they’ve raised. But he insists Patriot Force is nonpartisan.

“We don’t want to support either political party,” he said. “We think they are both stealing elections.”

For the Republican party in Orange County, that accusation hints at a potential conundrum.

Any Republican leader who tries to counter the election fraud narrative by agreeing that elections are fair risks drawing the ire of a significant faction of their voting base, or even Trump himself. Yet failure to counter it poses a different risk — that a large segment of Republican voters simply will not participate in an election system they’ve been told not to trust.

Repeated debunking of such claims doesn’t seem to make much of a difference for election skeptics, Patrick noted. She suggests that people genuinely worried about election integrity get involved in the voting process, as volunteer poll workers or election observers. By doing that, she said, they can see all of the checks and balances, bipartisan cooperation and transparency that’s typically part of the vote counting process.

Patrick said she was part of several teams in Maricopa County, Arizona that hand counted ballots to check for accuracy. Just about every citizen on those teams came in ready to find “something amiss.” Hours later, she said they left impressed with the security and accuracy of the process.

In the meantime, she said, all we can do is continue to “lead with the truth.”