The far-right political influencer James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, has reportedly assembled a group of election personnel and monitors in the US to secretly film voting and ballot counting procedures on election day.
According to documents given by a whistleblower to the New York Times, the people involved would use hidden cameras “to record and then publicise video to support their claims of fraud and irregularities” at polling locations.
By mid-October, nearly 70 individuals – some purporting to be election officials and volunteer poll watchers – had committed to the project, the documents show.
O’Keefe’s initiative is just one of many being planned across the country, often at the local level, to uncover supposed instances of election fraud at polling sites, spurred on by Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was somehow fraudulent.
Trump has already baselessly accused Pennsylvania election officials of “cheating”.
The documents were provided to the Times by Kayla Dones, a former staff member of O’Keefe Media Group, who recently resigned out of concerns that the project could land people in legal trouble.
O’Keefe, who resigned from Project Veritas in February 2023 after the group’s governing board found that he had “spent an excessive amount of donor funds on personal luxuries”, described the project as “fully legal”.
“Why on earth would I have arranged all this if I were secretly planning a criminal enterprise?” he wrote in a post on social media.
He promised to “publish an avalanche of these recordings in the coming days”.
O’Keefe and Project Veritas have earned notoriety for video stings, often involving hidden cameras, targeting progressive groups. They also helped spread debunked claims of voter fraud at a Pennsylvania post office during the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won.
In February the organisation admitted it had “no evidence” to support such claims.
Many states prohibit filming at election sites and have laws protecting voter privacy and barring election interference.
O’Keefe acknowledged that risk on social media last week, but said: “It is legal for me to publish what you send me so long as I ‘play no part’ in the recording.”
