Donald Trump’s ground game in Arizona and Nevada may be undermined by canvassers working for America Pac using GPS spoofing to pretend they have knocked on doors when they haven’t, according to multiple people familiar with the practice and a leaked how-to-fake-location video.
The ramifications for Trump may be far reaching, given America Pac has taken on the bulk of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the battleground states, and the election increasingly appears set to be decided by turnout.
A bootleg how-to-spoof video, made by an America Pac canvasser in Nevada and obtained by the Guardian, shows the apparent ease with which locations can be changed to fake door knocks, calling into question how many Trump voters have actually been reached by the field operation.
The video, shared with a few hundred canvassers, walks through the setup: a user downloads a GPS-spoofing app to falsely place themself at the door of a Trump voter, fakes responses to the survey and takes steps to cover up the fraud by varying the survey responses to make it believable.
The scope of the GPS-spoofing practice is unclear because it is difficult to catch cheaters without cross-referencing data with another tracker. It is also not a problem limited to America Pac; GPS spoofing has been a problem for years and it has become increasingly resource-intensive to catch cheaters.
In response to the reporting, America Pac issued to a joint statement by its vendors Blitz, Patriot Grassroots, Echo Canyon and the Synapse Group.
“Every door that is marked leaves unique fingerprints, and the fingerprints of a door marked with a spoofing app leave these fingerprints in neon colors. We have tech-enabled auditing and fraud prevention tools to identify and dismiss the bad apples, the Pac doesn’t pay a dime, and the door gets knocked by the next canvasser,” it said.
Blitz – the vendor in Arizona and Nevada – has its canvassers clock in and clock out using the QuickBooks Workforce app, which continually tracks locations and has some geofence features, according to two people directly familiar with the situation.
But the geolocation data stored on the Workforce app can be manipulated by turning off location services – and one former Blitz auditor said they would typically only review the secondary location data if something first appeared amiss on the canvassing app Campaign Sidekick itself.
The video comes as America Pac has struggled to grapple with 24% of the door knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door knocks done in Nevada last week – by less sophisticated cheaters working for Blitz – being flagged internally as potentially faked or fraudulent, according to data obtained by the Guardian.
Faking surveys
In the how-to-spoof video, the canvasser opens up a door-knocking route for America Pac in Nevada – apparently for the benefit of his colleagues – and explains the method he uses to change his location so that it appears as though he is visiting every house he is supposed to.
The canvasser first pulls up the location changer app and zooms in so that the map there mirrors the map on the Campaign Sidekick app that shows the houses supposed to be knocked with orange dots.
He then memorizes the position of the target Trump voter’s house on the Campaign Sidekick app, navigates back to the location changer app, and taps the same house to spoof his location as supposedly being in the driveway.
“These houses down here look the same way on the app, so you know, you just move that shit over there – or you can type the address in but this is way faster – so I just change my location right there,” the canvasser explains.
The canvasser then explains how to falsify survey responses so that the activity does not appear suspicious and invite an internal audit of the doors that could result in firing or being referred by the canvassing company for prosecution.
“So here’s the part that matters: you click the house, you want to do ‘not home’ for about five houses so you click the ‘not home’ shit, ‘left literature’, boom, and then you want to put a survey in,” the canvasser says.
“So this is the survey. You click available for survey. This is what I do. I click ‘definitely yes’, ‘Donald Trump’, ‘early vote’, ‘no’, ‘end survey’. So it’s pretty much that simple. So then you keep bouncing between houses. And you don’t want to go too fast, you want to make it look realistic.”
It remains unclear how often Blitz’s auditors are reviewing the roughly 400-450 canvassers. If audits are done every few days – a person familiar with the matter said it was at least every five days – and canvassers are together frauding several hundred doors a day, that could quickly add up.
The problem of suspicious doors in the America Pac field operation underscores the risk of outsourcing a ground-game program, where paid canvassers are typically not as invested in their candidate’s victory compared with traditional volunteers or campaign staff.
Musk has so far donated $75m to America Pac in the three months of its existence. Roughly $30m has been spent on the ground-game operation to drive the Trump vote, with the rest put towards digital and mail advertising for the former president, as well as for down-ballot Republican candidates.
