Leaked chats link MAGA 'poll watcher' group to hardcore militias: report

Leaked online chats from a prominent pro-Trump group of "poll watchers" reveal close ties to an infamous armed militia movement, reported The Guardian on Monday.

"Chat records from a public-facing channel for the America First Polling Project (AFPP) were made available to reporters by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets)," the newspaper reported.

"The activist who leaked those materials to DDOSecrets provided the Guardian directly with an archive of the Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch (A22) chat channel."

These newly revealed conversations "offer a window into the way in which the rightwing information environment — and the unverified, distorted or false information it proffers — erode faith in elections, and encourage those who would violently disrupt them."

AFPP can clearly be seen working with members of the American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) militia in the chats. "Three Percenters" is a frequent term used by far-right militia figures, based on a long-debunked myth that only 3 percent of the colonial population took part in the American Revolutionary War — the implication being that an aggrieved minority ought to be capable of the violent overthrow of the government at its own will.

These chats, according to the report, reveal a "broad cooperative effort among a range of election denial groups, whose activities were fueled by disinformation from high-profile conservative activists." For instance, in the 2022 midterms, A22 activists were sharing information about drop box locations: “There are 13 drop box only locations in Maricopa county of which only 2 are 24 hour locations,” said one user.

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“We will need help with getting these watched. I have also been able to connect with cleanelectionsusa and am coordinating with those folks.”

Other chats show the group sharing disinformation about various elections being stolen, and posting violent threats in response. One user who went by the name of @Wilbo17AZ wrote, “If we don’t fight this with our every waking breath, we are done. Expect war.” They also promoted vaccine misinformation and panic about migrants.

Additionally, according to the report, tech billionaire Elon Musk, who runs the X social media platform, is a key source of disinformation for the network — for instance, when he promoted the viral hoax about Haitian migrants eating people's pets, it was boosted by the poll watcher groups.

All of this comes as the Republican National Committee has shifted much of its election resources away from traditional canvassing and outreach, which has largely been farmed out to Musk's own America PAC, and instead gearing up to recuit its own poll watchers and prepare litigation for any battleground state that goes against them.