Election deniers targeting 'disaffected patriots' in Virginia with ominous messaging

A group that has ties to election denialism is targeting right-leaning voters to encourage them to sign up for absentee ballots.

Look Ahead America, which claims to be a nonpartisan organization, says it has identified thousands of “disaffected patriots” and will encourage them to sign up to automatically receive absentee ballots, and the group will encourage them to return those through grassroots activism and ominous messaging, reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

“We will communicate with these voters through door knocking, direct mail, phone calls, digital ads, text messaging, robocalls, and by encouraging our national activist base of over 30,000 to send these voters personal postcards with personal messages encouraging them to vote,” said the group’s executive director Matt Braynard in a statement.

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“Everything that matters to them can be taken away if they do not vote: their parental rights, their right to self-defense, their right to attend church and go to work," Braynard added.

Look Ahead America has promoted nationwide vigils and rallies for jailed Jan. 6 rioters and maintains a job board to help participants find work, and this summer the organization offered a $1,000 "bounty" to the first rioter to upload video of them asking a federal candidate what they would do for those "political prisoners."

Braynard, who worked for Trump's first campaign in 2016, has issued a statement challenging the former president's federal indictment for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Look Ahead America is a client of LINK Public Affairs, whose founding partner Matt Moran is executive director of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s PAC, Spirit of Virginia, although that political action committee's chairman denied involvement in the voter outreach effort.

“Spirit of Virginia is not coordinating our absentee and early voting outreach with this group,” said Spirit of Virginia chairman Dave Rexrode.

However, Rexrode recently touted Spirit of Virginia, an effort launched by Youngkin and the state's Republican Party to drive up early and absentee voting.

“We can’t be upset if we’re sitting on the bench, not playing the game,” Rexrode said. “The Democrats are running up and down the court, making easy layups, because we don’t want to play by those rules and then we get mad when we’re down going into the final minute of the game.”