Catherine Renee Engelbrecht [1] is the American co-founder of True the Vote and King Street Patriots, a nonprofit Tea Party organization which is active mostly in Texas. [2] She is also the co-founder of "The Freedom Hospital" with Gregg Phillips, [3] and the CFO of CoverMe Services Inc, one of his companies. The company was formerly known as AutoGov, Inc. [4] [5]
Engelbrecht has a bachelor's degree in marketing from the University of Houston. [6]
Engelbrecht was a small business owner and a parent–teacher association volunteer until Barack Obama won the 2008 United States presidential election. [7] In 2008, after volunteering at the election, Engelbrecht began sharing her opinions about the US voting system, catching the attention of the Tea Party movement. [7]
In 2009, Engelbrecht founded the King Street Patriots, naming the organization after the 1770 Boston Massacre. [2] Several members of the King Street Patriots, including Engelbrecht, its president, were dissatisfied with the voting process in Harris County, Texas, during the 2008 United States Presidential election, especially the shortage of poll workers, which they believed "invited fraud and other problems at the polls." Later in 2009, Engelbrecht co-founded True the Vote. [2]
Politico named Engelbrecht as "one of the 50 political figures to watch" in 2012. [7] In 2018, Phillips renamed AutoGov, Inc. to CoverMe Services Inc. with himself as CEO and Catherine Engelbrecht as CFO. [8] [4] [5] CoverMe claimed that “in the span of a five-minute interview, hospitals can provide patients with real-time eligibility and enrollment support, creating better outcomes for both the patient and provider.” [9] It made $1.7 million charging services to University of Mississippi Medical Center for work through 2023 [10]
On June 5, 2022, Gregg Phillips had announced on Truth Social that he had begun a nonprofit under the name "The Freedom Project" and began soliciting donations to raise $25 million dollars for a mobile hospital in Ukraine in response to the Russo-Ukrainian War. He claimed to have already raised half the amount needed due to an in-kind donation from manufacturer MED-1 Partners, but MED-1's CEO Tim Masud denied making a pledge or offer of any such donation. [3] Additionally, "The Freedom Hospital", of which Engelbrecht was co-founder, posted a video on its YouTube account with a caption saying that its team was reporting from Ukraine. [11] The Freedom Hospital had no role in producing the video, and Christopher Loverro, a Los Angeles-based actor and veteran, who made the video in front of a recently bombed Ukrainian preschool, said he never had any connection to The Freedom Hospital and had not given anyone permission to use his work. Loverro said he reported the video to YouTube and commented on the post, warning: "This is a scam. Do not donate to this organization." The hospitals in Ukraine never materialized, and Phillips abandoned the project earlier in April 2022, months before making the fundraising posts on TruthSocial, according to his attorney. [12] True the Vote was listed as the fiscal sponsor on the website, which has since been deleted. [3] [12] [13]
In October 2022, Engelbrecht, and True the Vote former board member Gregg Phillips, [14] were jailed for contempt of court after refusing to name the person who allegedly gave them information about election logistics software company Konnech. [15] Konnech was litigating for defamation [14] damages after being accused of rigging the 2020 United States presidential election. [15] Both were held in Joe Corley Detention Facility in Conroe, Texas. [14] In February 2024, True the Vote told a Georgia judge that it has no evidence to support its claims of illegal ballot stuffing in Atlanta during the 2020 general election and a runoff two months later. [16]
Engelbrecht is a mother of two children, [6] a Christian by affiliation, and was aged 52 in 2022. [7] She lives in Cat Springs, Texas. [6]
The 1960 United States presidential election was the 44th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. The Democratic ticket of Senator John F. Kennedy and his running mate, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, narrowly defeated the Republican ticket of incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon and his running mate, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. This was the first election in which 50 states participated, marking the first participation of Alaska and Hawaii, and the last in which the District of Columbia did not. This made it the only presidential election in which the threshold for victory was 269 electoral votes. It was also the first election in which an incumbent president—in this case, Dwight D. Eisenhower—was ineligible to run for a third term because of the term limits established by the 22nd Amendment.
Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud, or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of rival candidates, or both. It differs from but often goes hand-in-hand with voter suppression. What exactly constitutes electoral fraud varies from country to country, though the goal is often election subversion.
Voter suppression are tactics used to discourage or prevent specific groups of people from voting or registering to vote. It is distinguished from political campaigning in that campaigning attempts to change likely voting behavior by changing the opinions of potential voters through persuasion and organization, activating otherwise inactive voters, or registering new supporters. Voter suppression, instead, attempts to gain an advantage by reducing the turnout of certain voters. Suppression is an anti-democratic tactic associated with authoritarianism.
Lucian Lincoln Wood Jr. is an American former attorney who made claims about the existence of widespread election fraud during the 2020 US presidential election. He has faced legal sanctions for lawsuits made in furtherance of these claims in the state of Michigan. In July 2023, while facing investigation and possible disciplinary action by the State Bar of Georgia for violating the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct, Wood surrendered his law license and asked to retire rather than face disbarment.
Warren Kenneth Paxton Jr. is an American politician and lawyer who has served as the attorney general of Texas since 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served in the Texas Senate representing the eighth district and as a member of the Texas House of Representatives.
True the Vote (TTV) is a conservative vote-monitoring organization based in Houston, Texas, whose stated objective is stopping voter fraud. The organization supports voter ID laws and trains volunteers to be election monitors and to spot and bring attention to suspicious voter registrations that its volunteers believe delegitimize voter eligibility. The organization's founder is Catherine Engelbrecht.
Mark Randall Meadows is an American politician who served as the 29th White House chief of staff from 2020 to 2021 under the Trump administration. A member of the Republican Party, he also served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina's 11th congressional district from 2013 to 2020. During his legislative tenure, Meadows chaired the Freedom Caucus from 2017 to 2019. He was considered one of Donald Trump's closest allies in the House of Representatives before his appointment as chief of staff.
Voter ID laws in the United States are laws that require a person to provide some form of official identification before they are permitted to register to vote, receive a ballot for an election, or to actually vote in elections in the United States.
Voter suppression in the United States consists of various legal and illegal efforts to prevent eligible citizens from exercising their right to vote. Such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Voter suppression has historically been used for racial, economic, gender, age and disability discrimination. After the American Civil War, all African-American men were granted voting rights, but poll taxes or language tests were used to limit and suppress the ability to register or cast a ballot. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 improved voting access. Since the beginning of voter suppression efforts, proponents of these laws have cited concerns over electoral integrity as a justification for various restrictions and requirements, while opponents argue that these constitute bad faith given the lack of voter fraud evidence in the United States.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission is a bipartisan regulatory agency of the state of Wisconsin established to administer and enforce election laws in the state. The Wisconsin Elections Commission was established by a 2015 act of the Wisconsin Legislature which also established the Wisconsin Ethics Commission to administer campaign finance, ethics, and lobbying laws. The two commissions began operation on June 30, 2016, replacing the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB), which was abolished.
Briscoe Cain is an American attorney and Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives for District 128.
Gregg Allen Phillips is an American conspiracy theorist and the former head of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, Deputy Commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, and the author of a tweet cited by U.S. President Donald Trump that falsely alleges, without evidence, that between three and five million non-citizens voted in the 2016 elections. Phillips executive produced and appeared in Dinesh D’Souza's debunked political film 2000 Mules and pushed a conspiracy theory about election fraud. He was partnering on a project with a Texas-based, partisan-conservative organization named True the Vote which falsely alleges widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, even though "on the record there has been still no evidence or proof provided that there was any sort of fraud".
Ballot collecting, also known as "ballot harvesting" or "ballot chasing", is the gathering and submitting of completed absentee or mail-in voter ballots by third-party individuals, volunteers or workers, rather than submission by voters themselves directly to ballot collection sites. It occurs in some areas of the U.S. where voting by mail is common, but some other states have laws restricting it.
The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a nonprofit organization in the United States whose goal is to improve electoral integrity by helping states improve the accuracy of voter rolls, increase access to voter registration, reduce election costs, and increase efficiencies in elections. ERIC is operated and financed by state election agencies and chief election officials.
After the 2020 United States presidential election, the campaign for incumbent President Donald Trump and others filed 62 lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in 9 states and the District of Columbia.
After Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, Republican nominee and then-incumbent president Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented effort to overturn the election, with support from his campaign, proxies, political allies, and many of his supporters. These efforts culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack by Trump supporters in an attempted self-coup d'état. Trump and his allies used the "big lie" propaganda technique to promote claims that had been proven false and conspiracy theories asserting the election was stolen by means of rigged voting machines, electoral fraud and an international conspiracy. Trump pressed Department of Justice leaders to challenge the results and publicly state the election was corrupt. However, the attorney general, director of National Intelligence, and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – as well as some Trump campaign staff – dismissed these claims. State and federal judges, election officials, and state governors also determined the claims were baseless.
Following the 2020 United States presidential election and the unsuccessful attempts by Donald Trump and various other Republican officials to overturn it, Republican lawmakers initiated a sweeping effort to make voting laws more restrictive within several states across the country. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of October 4, 2021, more than 425 bills that would restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states—with 33 of these bills enacted across 19 states so far. The bills are largely centered around limiting mail-in voting, strengthening voter ID laws, shortening early voting, eliminating automatic and same-day voter registration, curbing the use of ballot drop boxes, and allowing for increased purging of voter rolls. Republicans in at least eight states have also introduced bills that would give lawmakers greater power over election administration after they were unsuccessful in their attempts to overturn election results in swing states won by Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The efforts garnered press attention and public outrage from Democrats, and by 2023 Republicans had adopted a more "under the radar" approach to achieve their goals.
Look Ahead America is a conservative political advocacy group and nonprofit formed by former Trump campaign staffer Matt Braynard in August 2017. The group's stated goals are to identify working-class and rural voters, to increase voter registration and mobilization, local community activism, and to advocate for increased transparency in the voting process such as forensic investigations of fraudulent vote claims and equipping poll watchers with cameras.
2000 Mules is a debunked 2022 American conspiracist political film which falsely claims paid "mules" illegally collected and deposited ballots into drop boxes in swing states during the 2020 presidential election. The film was written, directed, produced, and narrated by right-wing political commentator and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, who has a history of creating and spreading false conspiracy theories.
Republican Party's efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election involve a series of coordinated actions intended to influence election outcomes at both federal and state levels. These efforts, which were preceded by Republican efforts to restrict voting following the 2020 presidential election, are characterized by legislative, legal, and administrative strategies that seek to affect voter access, election oversight, and post-election certification processes. This initiative grew out of widespread claims within certain Republican Party circles about election integrity, many of which trace back to the 2020 United States presidential election and Trump's false claims of a stolen election, including the election denial movement in the United States, despite a lack of substantial evidence supporting these allegations.
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