Canvassers working for billionaire Elon Musk's pro-Donald Trump America PAC in the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada are "using GPS spoofing to pretend they have knocked on doors when they haven’t," The Guardian exclusively reported Tuesday.
Per the report, "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 Guardian's Hugo Lowell notes that "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."
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Lowell reports:
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.
The politics reporter also notes that 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.
The Guardian's full report is available at this link (subscription required).