ProPublica

by Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois, and Molly Parker, Lee Enterprises Midwest

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Lee Enterprises, along with Capitol News Illinois. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Several employees at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center attempted to cover up a brutal assault on a patient, according to a new report by the watchdog office within the Illinois Department of Human Services.

The report by the IDHS Office of the Inspector General said that the “widespread attempted cover-up” around that incident pointed to a deeply entrenched “code of silence” among some workers.

The OIG report comes after a series of stories by Capitol News Illinois, Lee Enterprises Midwest and ProPublica revealing a culture of patient abuse and cover-ups at the state-run facility in rural southern Illinois that serves people with developmental disabilities, mental illnesses or a combination of disorders. The news organizations’ reports detailed the beating of Blaine Reichard in December 2014 and attempts by staff to conceal the abuse; the series also showed how workers accused of abuse allegations seldom face serious consequences for their actions.

The OIG report, which comes nearly eight years after the attack on Reichard, echoed many of the news organizations’ findings and called on IDHS to do more to protect patients’ safety. The news organizations had sought the report when it was finalized in September under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, but the request was denied until this month.

Among the most egregious violations, the OIG’s investigation found that mental health technician Mark Allen held Reichard in a chokehold and punched him repeatedly in the face after the two argued, leaving the patient with two black eyes, a busted lip and bruising to his face and upper body. The OIG additionally cited five mental health technicians for neglect after they witnessed the abuse but didn’t seek medical care for the patient or report the abuse to authorities, despite the fact that one of them later told authorities that it looked like Reichard had “gone three rounds with Mike Tyson.”

But the OIG investigation showed that the problem was not confined to a few bad actors. Among the challenges investigators faced when they were called to the scene: One of the mental health technicians initially lied to state police and said he’d been in the bathroom at the time of the abuse. A housekeeper told them she hadn’t seen any blood in Reichard’s room but later acknowledged that she had. A social worker who was romantically involved with Allen leaked information to him about the investigation. And a nurse and doctor gave misleading statements about the extent of Reichard’s injuries, the OIG report said.

That collusion led the inspector general to find Choate itself negligent. The facility, the OIG said, must be held responsible for “failing to prevent the establishment of a culture in which so many employees chose to protect their fellow employees instead of protecting an abused individual and apparently felt comfortable doing so.”

The OIG report concluded: “That so many employees participated in the cover-up of the abuse of [the patient] suggests that this type of conduct may be endemic at Choate.” Previous reporting by the news organizations revealed credible abuse allegations in which the state’s attorney declined to bring charges because he said that employees would not cooperate in determining what happened.

An excerpt from the “Recommendations” section of the Illinois Department of Human Services inspector general’s report calling for employees who impede investigations to be held responsible. (Source: OIG Report obtained by Capitol News Illinois)

The OIG report said that it is “crucial” that when staff lie or withhold information in an investigation, they “experience consequences for their actions” — and that one of the best ways to identify such conspiracies is by using video footage. The watchdog recommended the installation of interior security cameras at Choate in order to break the code of silence “from the onset.”

In the Reichard case, more than a year passed before anyone was arrested in connection with the beating. In 2016, Allen was charged with felony battery and intimidation, and three others — Curt Ellis, Eric Bittle and Justin Butler — were charged with felony obstruction of justice. All ultimately accepted plea deals for reduced charges: Allen was convicted of felony obstruction of justice for lying to the police, and the others were convicted of failing to report the abuse, a misdemeanor.

But no one was held criminally responsible for abusing Reichard and no one served prison time.

Reporting by the news organizations also showed that Allen continued to be paid for a full year after the attack, up until he was criminally charged. He has been suspended without pay since then and resigned in early October, a department spokesperson said.

But the other three had never missed a state paycheck until they were suspended pending termination last week in the wake of the OIG report finding them negligent. The state has paid them, collectively, in excess of $1 million since Reichard’s attack. Initially, they were assigned to duties away from patients, such as lawn care, cooking and laundry; later, they were sent home on administrative leave.

In addition to the OIG findings against those who faced criminal charges, the report cited two other employees for neglect — Christopher Lingle and John “Mike” Dickerson; the report concluded that both witnessed the abuse and didn’t intervene or report it. Lingle continued to work until earlier this year and is now suspended without pay pending termination. Dickerson worked at the facility until he retired in 2017. In his last three years on the job, he mowed the lawns at Choate.

In a statement, IDHS spokesperson Marisa Kollias said that all of the employees named in the report had either resigned or were suspended pending discharge following the conclusion of the OIG investigation in September. She previously said that IDHS could not take disciplinary action against the employees until the conclusion of OIG’s case. That investigation was held up for eight years awaiting the resolution of Allen’s court case, which concluded last December.

Allen could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for the union who represents the other employees named in the case did not respond to an email seeking information about their employment status. When reporters reached out to them for an earlier article about the incident, Butler, Bittle, Ellis and Dickerson did not respond to requests to comment. Lingle, who was not named in the prior story, did not respond to a message sent via Facebook this week.

Kollias also said that in the eight years since the case began, “additional safeguards have been put in place to protect residents, patients and staff from harm.” Those changes include bringing in Equip for Equality, a legal advocacy organization, to monitor conditions inside the unit, setting up training on the reporting of abuse and neglect, beefing up the security and professional staff at Choate and installing security cameras — something the OIG has called for more than 20 times over the past five years. (This week, the IDHS spokesperson said the department has 39 cameras and plans to begin installing them this month.)

Despite OIG’s call for more serious consequences for employees who impede abuse investigations, the report stopped short of issuing more serious findings against the mental health technicians that would have prohibited those staffers from seeking employment in a different health care setting such as a hospital, nursing home or veterans home.

State law requires that the OIG report the names of any employees it cites for abuse or “egregious neglect” to the Illinois Department of Public Health’s Health Care Worker Registry. Under that law, Allen will be reported to the registry but the others will not.

Stacey Aschemann, a vice president with Equip for Equality, said the fact that these workers are not prohibited from future employment with vulnerable populations is “very troubling.” Peter Neumer, IDHS’ inspector general, said it is his office’s general policy not to comment on specific details of its investigations or its decision-making process.

Aschemann, an attorney, said it is evident from the report that the OIG felt constrained by the current regulatory language. The report stated that the behavior of the workers who witnessed the abuse was “profoundly troubling” but did not fit the legal definition of “egregious” because Allen, not the other technicians, was directly responsible for the injuries, and because the other technicians’ failure to report the abuse did not result in the patient’s death or a serious deterioration in his physical condition.

Though he declined to comment directly on the case, Neumer signaled that legislative action may be needed. “OIG,” he said, “is prepared to collaborate on and advocate for policy changes to further deter employees from engaging in ‘code of silence’-type behavior.”

Aschemann was more direct, saying that Illinois lawmakers should address shortcomings in the laws governing conduct standards for direct-care workers.

”It is clear that laws need to be updated to both impose harsher penalties for this misconduct and to ensure that employees who turn a blind eye to the well-being of the people they are paid to help are reported to the Illinois Health Care Worker Registry as ineligible to work in health care settings,” she said.

by Peter Elkind

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The health complaints started rolling in within weeks of the activation of a new cellphone tower in August 2020 in Pittsfield, an old factory town in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. Seventeen residents reported headaches, dizziness, insomnia or confusion. A few children had to sleep with “vomit buckets” by their beds.

Like many people, Bobbie Orsi had never paid close attention to questions about the health effects of cellphone technology. She mostly viewed it as an issue that had long ago been put to rest. But after becoming the chair of Pittsfield’s Board of Health as the complaints emerged, Orsi, a 66-year-old registered nurse who had spent much of her career in public health, decided to educate herself. She combed through a stack of research studies. She watched webinars. She grilled a dozen scientists and doctors.

Over several months, Orsi went from curious, to concerned, to convinced, first, that radio-frequency emissions from Verizon’s 115-foot 4G tower were to blame for the problems in Pittsfield, and second, that growing evidence of harm from cellphones — everything from effects on fertility and fetal development to associations with cancer — has been downplayed in the United States.

Orsi and the Pittsfield board decided to try to do something about Verizon’s tower. They quickly discovered that they would get no help from federal regulators. The Federal Communications Commission, which has responsibility for protecting Americans from potential radiation hazards generated by wireless transmitters and cellphones, has repeatedly sided with the telecom industry in denying the possibility of virtually any human harm.

Worse, from Orsi’s perspective, federal law and FCC rules are so aligned with the industry that state and local governments are barred from taking action to block cell towers to protect the health of their citizens, even as companies are explicitly empowered to sue any government that tries to take such an action. It turned out that Verizon, in such matters, has more legal rights than the people of Pittsfield.

Still, the lawyers for Orsi and her colleagues thought they saw a long-shot legal opening: They would argue that the FCC’s exclusive oversight role applied only to approving cell tower sites, not to health problems triggered after one was built and its transmitters switched on. In April 2022, the Pittsfield Health Board issued an emergency cease-and-desist order directing Verizon to shut down the tower as a “public nuisance” and “cause of sickness” that “renders dwellings unfit for human habitation.” (Several families had abandoned their homes.) The order was the first of its kind in the country. It was, Orsi said, “a gutsy move — maybe naively gutsy.”

The Board of Health in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, tried to fight Verizon over a 4G tower. (Patrick Dodson for ProPublica)

Almost as quickly as the battle began, it ended. On May 10, Verizon sued the city in federal court. The company contended that the Pittsfield residents’ medical complaints were bogus. And, in any case, Verizon argued, the cease-and-desist order was barred because federal law gave the FCC the sole power to regulate wireless-radiation risks. Fearing a hopeless and costly David-and-Goliath battle, Pittsfield’s City Council refused to fund the fight. A month later, the Board of Health withdrew its cease-and-desist order.

But it was a signal of a growing fear — other cities have fought cell sites only to be forced to back down — and evidence of a striking shoulder-to-shoulder partnership between a federal agency and the industry it is supposed to regulate. The build-out of a new generation of wireless networks, known as 5G, is amping up the stakes of this conflict for localities across America. It will require an estimated 800,000 new base stations, including both towers and densely spaced “small cell” transmitters mounted on rooftops and street poles. That means nearly tripling the current number of transmitters, and many of them will be placed close to houses and apartments.

The FCC has held firm to its position that there’s no reason for concern. In a statement for this article, a spokesperson said the agency “takes safety issues very seriously” but declined to make officials available for on-the-record interviews.

The FCC is an improbable organization to serve the role of protecting humans. It specializes in technical issues that make the communications system function, not in health and safety. “At the FCC, they feel like this is really not their problem,” said Edwin Mantiply, who dealt with cellphone-radiation issues before retiring from the agency four years ago. “It’s not their job to do this kind of thing. They might have a token biologist or two, but that’s not their job.” The result, Mantiply said, was that in situations where the science isn’t black and white — and it isn’t when it comes to cellphones — the agency tended to listen to the telecom industry, which vehemently insists that cellphones are safe. “They don’t really want to deal with uncertainty,” Mantiply said of the FCC.

In the view of Mantiply and a rising number of scientists, there’s more than enough evidence about cellphone risks to be concerned — and some of the strongest evidence comes from the federal government itself. In 2018, a massive, nearly-two-decade study by the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, found “clear evidence” that cellphone radiation caused cancer in lab animals. “We’re really in the middle of a paradigm shift,” said Linda Birnbaum, who was director of the NTP until 2019. It’s no longer right to assume cellphones are safe, she said. “Protective policy is needed today. We really don’t need more science to know that we should be reducing exposures.”

The FCC rejected the need for any such action when it reviewed its standards on cellphone radiation in 2019. The agency decided it would continue to rely on exposure limits it established in 1996, when Motorola’s StarTAC flip phone was considered cutting edge.

The Motorola StarTAC flip phone was considered cutting edge in 1996 when the Federal Communications Commission established exposure limits for cellphones. The agency has not updated those limits since. (SSPL/Getty Images)

The way the FCC went about reexamining its standards so dismayed a federal appeals court that, in 2021, it excoriated the agency for what it called a “cursory analysis.” The court accused it of “brushing off” evidence of potential harm and failing to explain its reasoning. The agency’s “silence,” the court said, left unclear whether the government even “considered any of the evidence in the record.” The appeals court ordered the agency to revisit the adequacy of its safeguards.

All this has left Orsi frustrated. Petite and intense, she has been through these sorts of fights before. Years ago, with the eventual support of the Environmental Protection Agency, she helped push General Electric to clean up the toxic chemicals it had dumped in Pittsfield.

Now she feels powerless. “The Board of Health has a mandate to protect the citizens of Pittsfield,” she said. “But the bottom line is the FCC has made it impossible for us to do anything. If a company can come in and do something to make people sick, and the Board of Health has no authority to act, that’s ludicrous.”

Bobbie Orsi, the chair of Pittsfield’s Board of Health, combed through research studies and grilled scientists to educate herself on the risks of cellphone technology. (Patrick Dodson for ProPublica)

To see how completely the U.S. telecom industry has prevailed in the rhetorical war over cellphone safety so far, consider this example. In February 2019, near the end of a hearing largely devoted to extolling the wonders of 5G technology, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., asked representatives of two wireless industry trade groups what sort of research the industry was funding on the biological effects of 5G, which remains largely untested. “There are no industry-backed studies, to my knowledge, right now,” replied Brad Gillen of the CTIA (originally called the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association). “I’m not aware of any,” replied Steve Berry of the Competitive Carriers Association.

Wireless companies maintain that cellphones and base stations operating within the FCC’s exposure limits pose no proven risk. A CTIA spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The consensus of the international scientific community is that radiofrequency energy from wireless devices and networks, including 5G, has not been shown to cause health problems.” Included in that list was the National Cancer Institute. The spokesperson also said the industry is in favor of additional science. (Verizon itself declined to comment on the record for this article.)

In a September 2021 meeting with Pittsfield’s Board of Health, for example, Verizon’s chief expert was a University of Pittsburgh theoretical physics professor named Eric Swanson. He testified that wireless radiation is far too weak to cause cancer or any of the problems the Pittsfield residents were reporting. He suggested they have psychological problems.

Fears of radio-frequency radiation, Swanson declared in the videotaped meeting, are based entirely on “fringe opinion,” backed only by cherry-picked evidence. Swanson said he’d spotted one such study on “an Alex Jones website” and voiced exasperation: “This is the kind of stuff I have to deal with.” Concerns about wireless radiation, he said, are at odds with the overwhelming scientific consensus. “All international bodies,” he said, “declare cellphones to be safe.”

The FCC has been similarly scornful. In a June 2020 Washington Post op-ed, Thomas Johnson, general counsel for the agency during the administration of President Donald Trump, wrote: “Conjectures about 5G’s effect on human health are long on panic and short on science.” Johnson has since decamped to a law firm that represents telecom companies. (Johnson declined requests for comment.)

Signs in Pittsfield denounce the Verizon cell tower. (Patrick Dodson for ProPublica)

“It’s a slog at the moment to convince people this isn’t just crazy stuff,” said Louis Slesin, an MIT-trained environmental policy Ph.D. and the editor of Microwave News, an industry newsletter that has chronicled the wireless-radiation debate for four decades. “This is part of the organized campaign to devalue the science, with the government as a co-conspirator. The other really important factor is nobody wants to hear this because everybody loves the technology. If you shut down people’s phones, the country would come to a stop.”

But a growing body of international research asserts that there is reason to worry about harms — many of them unrelated to cancer — from wireless radiation. Henry Lai, an emeritus professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, has compiled a database of 1,123 peer-reviewed studies published since 1990 investigating biological effects from wireless-radiation exposure. Some 77% have found “significant” effects, according to Lai. By contrast, an earlier review by Lai found that 72% of industry-sponsored studies reported no biological effects.

One branch of research has studied radiation impacts on test animals, mostly rats and mice, but also guinea pigs, rabbits and cows. Another has examined epidemiological patterns, looking for health effects on human groups, such as heavy long-term cellphone users or people living near cellphone towers. Studies have found impacts on fertility, fetal development, DNA, memory function and the nervous system, as well as an association with an array of cancers. Several investigations reported a significantly increased risk of brain tumors, called gliomas, among the heaviest cellphone users. And the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, in 2011 classified wireless radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”

Individual studies underline the value of simple precautions, which include using a headset or speaker and keeping the phone away from direct contact with your body. In 2009, Ashok Agarwal, director of research at the Cleveland Clinic’s American Center for Reproductive Medicine, found that exposing human semen to cellphone radiation for an hour caused a “significant decrease” in sperm motility and viability, impairing male fertility. He advises patients to avoid carrying phones in their pants pockets.

Epidemiological studies show a rise in behavioral disorders among children whose mothers were heavy cellphone users while pregnant, while lab research found hyperactivity and reduced memory in mice exposed in the womb to cellphone radiation. “The evidence is really, really strong now that there is a causal relationship between cellphone radiation exposure and behavior issues in children,” said Dr. Hugh Taylor, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine and past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The period of fetal brain development is a “very vulnerable time,” he said.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has written that the FCC’s safeguards “do not account for the unique vulnerability and use patterns specific to pregnant women and children.” It urged the agency to adopt measures “protective of children,” warning that their thinner skulls leave them “disproportionately impacted” by cellphone radiation, and called for better consumer disclosure about exposure risks.

Both the FCC and Food and Drug Administration websites dismiss the existence of any special health risk to children. And the agencies don’t counsel people to limit their exposure. Instead they list safety steps, while insisting they’re really not necessary. The FCC’s “Wireless Devices and Health Concerns” page, for example, notes that “some parties” recommend safety measures, “even though no scientific evidence currently establishes a definitive link between wireless device use and cancer or other illnesses.” It then states, in bold: “The FCC does not endorse the need for these practices.” Only then does it list “some simple steps that you can take to reduce your exposure” to radio-frequency energy from cellphones.

Efforts in the U.S. to promote awareness of wireless-radiation risks have sparked fierce industry resistance. In 2014, the CDC added this modest language to its website: “Along with many organizations worldwide, we recommend caution in cellphone use.” An influential industry consultant emailed the CDC within days, as a public-records request later revealed, complaining that “changes are truly needed” in the CDC’s language. The agency quickly softened its warning, which now says: “Some organizations recommend caution in cellphone use.”

The industry’s main trade group, CTIA, has beaten back local consumer-disclosure measures. For example, in 2015, CTIA sued Berkeley, California, after its City Council passed an ordinance requiring retailers to post a safety notice warning customers that carrying a cellphone tucked in a pocket or bra might expose them to excessive radiation. (This was based on FCC guidelines, typically buried in small-print information included with new phones, that phones shouldn’t be kept in direct contact with the head or body.) A five-year legal battle, including a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, ensued. It ended after the FCC weighed in, saying the ordinance interfered with its exclusive authority by “over-warning” consumers and frightening them “into believing that RF emissions from FCC-certified cellphones are unsafe.” With that, the judge ruled against the city.

“The industry doesn’t want you to pay any attention to that stuff because that just creates anxiety among users,” said Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California-Berkeley, who advised the city in its fight. “They want you to think these devices are perfectly safe.”

By contrast, more than 20 foreign governments have adopted protective measures or recommended precautions. France requires new phones to be sold with headsets and written guidance on limiting radiation exposures; it also bans phones marketed to small children and ads aimed at anyone younger than 14. Greece and Switzerland routinely monitor radio-frequency radiation levels throughout the country. Britain, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, India and South Korea urge citizens to limit both their own exposure and cellphone use by children. The European Environment Agency does too, noting: “There is sufficient evidence of risk to advise people, especially children, not to place the handset against their heads.”

When the FCC’s rules on radio-frequency emissions from phones and transmitters were adopted 26 years ago, just 1 in 6 Americans owned cellphones, which they typically used for short periods. Today, 97% of adults own a cellphone, and they use the device for an average of five hours a day. More than half of children under 12 own a smartphone.

Then and now, the FCC’s rules targeted just one health hazard: the possibility that wireless radiation can cause immediate “thermal” damage, by overheating skin the way a microwave oven heats food. Most experts agree that risk is nonexistent under any but the most unusual circumstances.

Meanwhile, the FCC doesn’t even consider “biological” impacts: the possibility that wireless exposure, even at levels well below the FCC limits, can cause an array of human health problems, as well as harm to animals and the environment. The FCC’s approach matches the industry’s long-standing position: that wireless radiation is simply too weak to cause any nonheating damage.

Of course, the wireless industry has every incentive to take this position. Going back to the 1990s, the industry has recognized the financial peril posed by health concerns over radiation, and it has pressed the public and government to reject them altogether.

In 1994, for example, Motorola swung into action when it learned of troubling research by Lai and a University of Washington colleague, Narendra Singh, who found that two hours of exposure to modest levels of wireless radiation damaged DNA in the brains of lab rats. Such changes can lead to cancerous tumors.

Motorola’s then-PR chief described a strategy to discredit the findings in a pair of memos that were later leaked to Microwave News. Motorola’s approach would serve as a template for the industry’s response to troublesome research over the three decades that followed. The researchers’ methodology would be challenged for raising “too many uncertainties” to justify any conclusions. The scientists’ credibility would be questioned and their findings dismissed as irrelevant. Finally, friendly academics, “willing and able to reassure the public on these matters,” would be recruited to rebut the findings. (At the time, Motorola defended its conduct as the “essence of sound science and corporate responsibility” and affirmed that there was “a sound scientific basis for public confidence in the safety of cellular telephones.”)

Doubters in the government would be neutralized too. As the FCC moved toward adopting wireless-radiation limits in 1996, EPA officials, whose experts had conducted the most extensive government research on wireless-radiation risk, affirmed their concern about possible biological harm in a presentation to the FCC. They urged the FCC to follow a two-stage strategy: to meet a looming congressional deadline by first setting interim limits covering known thermal effects; then to commission a group of experts to study biological risks and develop permanent exposure guidelines.

But the FCC never pursued “Phase 2.” Instead, just months later, Congress completed a multiyear defunding of the EPA’s wireless-radiation group, sidelining the agency from researching the issue. This left most independent study of the issue to scientists in other countries. At the EPA, a lone radio-frequency radiation expert named Norbert Hankin remained, periodically rankling the wireless industry by publicly rebutting “the generalization by many that the [FCC] guidelines protect human beings from harm by any or all mechanisms.”

Going forward, the FCC, which has no in-house health or medical expertise of its own, would increasingly rely on the FDA and industry-influenced technical organizations. (The FDA itself has collaborated with the CTIA, the wireless industry trade group, to study cellphone safety. That research found “no association” between exposure to “cell phones and adverse health effects.”)

Still, there was enough concern among government scientists from multiple agencies that, in 1999, the FDA asked the NTP to “assess the risk to human health.” The NTP conducts detailed lab studies, typically on rodents, to evaluate environmental hazards. Its findings, widely regarded as the gold standard for toxicology work, routinely prompt federal public-health actions.

The FDA requested that the NTP conduct its own animal experiments, which were “crucial” to assess cancer risk because of the long delay between human exposure to a carcinogen and a tumor diagnosis. As an FDA memo put it, “There is currently insufficient scientific basis for concluding either that wireless communication technologies are safe or that they pose a risk to millions of users.”

The NTP study was the biggest the agency had ever conducted and lasted over a decade. It used an unusually large number of rats and mice — some 3,000 — and involved both setting up a lab in Chicago and designing and constructing special radiation-exposure chambers for the rodents in Switzerland. The final report was released in November 2018.

The results were dramatic. The study found “clear evidence” of rare cancerous heart tumors, called schwannomas, in male rats; “some evidence” of tumors in their brains and adrenal glands; and signs of DNA damage. The percentage that developed tumors was small, but, as the study’s authors noted earlier, “Given the extremely large number of people who use wireless communication devices, even a very small increase in the incidence of disease resulting from exposure” could have “broad implications for public health.”

The federal government’s scientists had spoken. But the parts of the government charged with following the science and protecting people responded (in the case of the FCC) by publicly ignoring the results or (in the case of the FDA) pooh-poohing them. The study changed nothing, said Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, and the chief official advising the FCC on wireless issues, in a statement at the time of the study’s release. Shuren disputed several key findings and asserted that the study “was not designed to test the safety of cellphone use in humans,” even though his own agency had commissioned it specifically for that reason. He added: “We believe the existing safety limits for cellphones remain acceptable for protecting the public health.” (An FDA spokesperson said Shuren declined to comment.)

The NTP findings, combined with similar results that year from the Ramazzini research institute in Italy and other studies, demanded a strong response, according to three long-time former government experts who spoke to ProPublica. “It should have been the game-changer,” added Moskowitz, the Berkeley public-health researcher.

The former government officials believe the NTP findings should have led to a detailed statistical risk assessment by federal health agencies, spelling out the possible incidence of cancer in the general population; development of stricter FCC limits to address biological risks; prominent user warnings detailing simple steps people should take to minimize their exposure; and dramatically increased research funding.

None of that happened. “Their conclusion was, ‘Oh, there was nothing going on,’” said Birnbaum, the NTP’s then-director and a toxicologist. “Many of us found that very hard to believe.”

Today Birnbaum, who retired in 2019 after 40 years with government health agencies, is tempered in her assessment of the evidence. “Do I see a smoking gun? Not per se. But do I see smoke? Absolutely. There’s enough data now to say that things can happen.” Birnbaum said the NTP results should have triggered a consumer advisory akin to “the black-box warning on a drug, to say this has been associated to possibly cause cancer.”

Even as the NTP study was happening, the FCC in 2013 had been prodded by a Government Accountability Office report to review its radio-frequency exposure limit, unchanged since 1996. “We recognize that a great deal of scientific research has been completed in recent years and new research is currently underway, warranting a comprehensive examination,” the FCC wrote, in opening its inquiry.

Over the six years that followed, 1,200 comments poured into the FCC’s docket, including scores of studies (and a briefing on the NTP findings); appeals for stronger protections signed by hundreds of international scientists; and 170 personal accounts of “electro-sensitivity” radiation sickness, similar to the complaints in Pittsfield, resulting from neighborhood cell towers. An Interior Department letter voiced concern about the impact of radiation from towers on migrating birds, noting that the FCC’s limits “continue to be based on thermal heating, a criterion now nearly 30 years out of date and inapplicable today.”

The FCC was overwhelmed by the flood of comments, according to Mantiply, the agency official most involved in radio-frequency issues during this period. “We didn’t have the resources to even read all the comments,” he told ProPublica.

Edwin Mantiply, a former FCC official, thought the agency was ignoring the issue of cellphone risk. (Greg Kahn, special to ProPublica)

Mantiply thought higher-ups were ignoring the issue. “There was really nothing being done on it,” he said. “The inquiry was just on a back burner, and the back burner was turned off.” So Mantiply, a soft-spoken physical scientist, decided to take action. In 2017, as the FCC’s review of its wireless standards entered its fourth year, he said, he and three colleagues proposed hiring an outside consulting firm to conduct an environmental assessment, a detailed formal examination, of the submissions on the radiation safety limits. But their boss, Julius Knapp, the head of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology, summarily rejected the proposal, according to Mantiply. “He said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.’ He let us know in no uncertain terms. He just rejected it in a single meeting.”

(Knapp, who is now retired, declined to comment on the record. FCC officials, through a spokesperson, declined requests to discuss the matter. Former FCC engineer Walter Johnston, one of the colleagues Mantiply identified as backing his proposal, said he didn’t remember it ever being presented as a “formal recommendation.”)

Mantiply’s proposal came at a time when the Trump White House and FCC commissioners were aggressively promoting 5G. FCC leadership was “not really thrilled with us pushing these inquiries,” Mantiply said. “They just felt like it’d get a lot of attention, that it would be in The Washington Post.”

On his final day at the FCC in August 2018, as he was retiring after 42 years in government, Mantiply raised the issue with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel during a brief courtesy visit. “Don’t dismiss all this stuff because you’re hearing from industry, and they’re dismissing it,” Mantiply told her. “There’s uncertainty, and we don’t know what’s going on. It’s a very, very difficult problem.” Rosenworcel, he said, listened politely.

Fifteen months later, the FCC voted unanimously to shut down its review after six years. There was no need to change anything, the commissioners concluded. After examining the record, the FCC declared in a written order, it had seen no evidence that the science underlying its standards was “outdated or insufficient to protect human safety.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., disagreed. Responding to a pair of lawsuits filed by the Environmental Health Trust and other activist groups, the court ruled in August 2021 that the FCC had failed to meet “even the low threshold of reasoned analysis” in finding that its limits “adequately protect against the harmful effects of exposure to radiofrequency radiation unrelated to cancer.” (The FCC had responded sufficiently to fears that wireless radiation causes cancer, the judges wrote.)

It was a striking rebuke, given the judiciary’s practice of offering agency decisions a high degree of deference, especially on technical matters. The court wrote that it was taking “no position in the scientific debate” on wireless radiation’s effects, but it was scornful of the FCC’s heavy reliance on three “conclusory” statements from the FDA about safety. In oral argument, one judge also challenged the FCC’s claim that an interagency working group was closely monitoring concerns about wireless exposure on the FCC’s behalf; in fact, the group hadn’t met since 2018.

The FCC’s actions, the court wrote, waved off any concern about protections for children and ignored “substantive evidence of potential environmental harms.” And the FCC had said nothing about the potential impacts of the many technological changes, including 5G, that had taken place since 1996. “Ultimately,” the court wrote, “the Commission’s order remains bereft of any explanation as to why, in light of the studies in the record, its guidelines remain adequate.”

With that, the court sent the issue back to the FCC, for either a fresh review of its 26-year-old standard or better explanations to justify it. In the 15 months since, the FCC, now led by Rosenworcel, who was elevated by President Joe Biden, has taken no formal action.

In its statement to ProPublica, the FCC said it is exploring “next steps” with its “federal partners.” However, the FDA, the FCC’s chief partner on health concerns, said in its own statement that it is not currently working with the FCC on any response to the court ruling. There’s been no visible sign of any preliminary FCC steps, according to four lawyers and representatives of the environmental groups that brought the court challenge.

In the past few years, with the appearance of more neighborhood cell towers and transmitters, pressure has begun to rise on this issue beyond environmental groups, longtime activists and officials in liberal jurisdictions. In November 2020, a bipartisan state commission in New Hampshire charged with investigating 5G issued a detailed report concluding that wireless radiation “poses a significant threat to human health and the environment.” Among its recommendations: that all new cell towers be at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) from any residence, school or business. And in April, Mark Gordon, the Republican governor of Wyoming, wrote to Rosenworcel, urging the agency to reexamine its radiation limits based on “current scientific research” to make sure “the health and safety of our citizens is prioritized.”

In Pittsfield, Orsi and her colleagues on the board have grown resigned to their inability to take action against Verizon. Reactions have varied around town. One group of affected neighbors is waging its own separate long-shot legal battle with the company. Others are coping with dark humor. Before Halloween, the local daily suggested dressing up as a cellphone tower to “strike fear in the heart of your neighbors.” Nobody in Pittsfield is holding out hope that the federal government will intervene.

“It’s very natural for the FCC to listen to the industry,” said Mantiply, the former agency staffer. “That’s their audience and who they deal with most of the time.” But, he added, “They’re answering to industry more than anything.”

Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Laurence Du Sault, Open Vallejo

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Open Vallejo. Sign up for ProPublica’s Dispatches and the Vallejo Free Press to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

For more than a decade, the families of those killed by police in Vallejo, California, have pleaded for oversight of their city’s exceptionally lethal police force.

When a series of fatal shootings attracted national attention and the scrutiny of state officials in 2020, Vallejo’s leaders pledged to implement 45 reforms recommended by a private consulting group and overseen by the California Department of Justice. But officials have blown past deadlines and failed to follow through on nearly all of the promised reforms. Reporting by Open Vallejo and ProPublica has found that the city has fully implemented just two.

“We are continuously working on new and revised policies related to the remainder” of the recommendations, a city spokesperson said last week in a joint statement with the police department. “The City and the department have steadily increased the resources devoted to the task, most recently forming a dedicated task force comprised of four full-time dedicated officers.”

Later the same week, Vallejo police Chief Shawny Williams, considered a reformer by many, announced his resignation. The newsrooms reported in July how Vallejo police consistently failed to properly investigate killings by officers.

Days after being presented with our findings for that story, the department put out a proposal to begin addressing one of the key recommendations from the state DOJ: to modify how the department investigates fatal shootings and other critical incidents.

But for all its pledges, the city has little to show — and some of the efforts are being impeded by union and city officials.

“All we want is police reform,” Melissa Nold, the local civil rights attorney for two families whose loved ones were killed by Vallejo police, said in an interview. “We thought they would do the right thing, but here we are.”

“Lack of Concrete Follow-Through”

Things looked like they might begin to change three years ago, after a group of Vallejo officers fired 55 rounds at 20-year-old musician and producer Willie McCoy, who had fallen asleep behind the wheel of his Mercedes, a gun allegedly in his lap.

Willie McCoy (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

McCoy’s death, in February 2019, garnered national media attention and sent residents to the streets in protest. That summer, amid the public outcry, the department hired a private consulting firm called OIR Group to conduct a “constructive analysis” of its practices.

Roughly a year later the city released the results of the consultants’ work: They identified “timing concerns” — specifically long delays in investigations of police killings — as well as a “lack of concrete follow-through” on the issues identified by those reviews, and an “apparent reticence when it came to finding fault.” They strongly advised the department to revise its system for investigating fatal shootings to ensure comprehensive reviews in “time-appropriate phases.” All in all, the outside firm made 45 recommendations, which also included strengthening reviews of the use of force by officers and creating an independent police oversight body.

Weeks later, in a highly unusual move, the chief fired officer Ryan McMahon for endangering a colleague when he shot at McCoy, records released by the city show. At the time of McCoy’s death, McMahon was already under investigation for killing an African American man. McMahon was the first Vallejo officer to be fired for conduct during a fatal shooting in at least 10 years. (McMahon was not criminally charged in either shooting; he did not respond to requests for comment.)

The OIR Group’s recommendations, however, were nonbinding, and the department did not immediately release plans for implementing them.

Then, less than a month after the reforms were proposed, Vallejo police Detective Jarrett Tonn fired five rounds from a rifle at 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa from the backseat of an unmarked police truck, public records show. The young Latino man was killed by a single bullet to the back of the head. It was one week after the murder of George Floyd. Tonn, a SWAT officer who participated in three nonfatal shootings since joining the department in 2014, said he mistook a hammer, later recovered in Monterrosa’s sweatshirt pocket, for a firearm. (Tonn was not charged in any of these shootings; the criminal investigation into the Monterrosa shooting is still open.)

Sean Monterrosa (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

Three days later, on June 5, concerned by the “number and nature” of police shootings in Vallejo, the California DOJ announced that it would conduct a three-year review of the department’s policies and practices — a relatively rare occurrence in California that can open the door to further scrutiny and potential civil or criminal sanctions.

The state DOJ embraced the 45 recommendations that the OIR Group had put forth and set out to evaluate Vallejo’s progress in implementing them. To do that, the DOJ hired Jensen Hughes, a global risk management firm, and defined steps for each reform that Vallejo police had to fulfill before they would deem the department compliant. Williams called the process a “massive review” and agreed to collaborate.

In less than two weeks, the Vallejo Police Department produced a draft implementation plan estimating that the steps for most reforms, including changes to the post-shooting review process, would be completed around February of 2021. But the plan itself noted that the target timelines it was setting did not take into account review by stakeholders like the union. In the end, the department missed more than a dozen deadlines, subsequent reports show.

In March 2021 the department set new goals to complete most recommendations within one year. By May of this year, however, it released a progress report revealing that the police department had achieved DOJ compliance with only one reform: a stricter requirement that officers activate their body cameras and mandated audits of some of the footage. The policy change, instituted by Williams, had been entrenched before the state DOJ’s review even began. (Despite the new policy, none of the officers present during the Monterrosa killing — which took place after this requirement was added — activated their body cameras prior to the shooting; three of the officers involved incorrectly claimed they were not required to turn them on because they were detectives rather than patrol officers.)

Since then, Vallejo has “completed and implemented” just one additional reform: an accountability program to ensure that the body camera policy would be enforced, according to the city’s statement to the news organizations.

“Implementation of new policies is a multi-step process,” the city wrote. The statement also said officials were “optimistic” that with the new task force dedicated to the reforms, moving “to full completion status will occur more rapidly.”

The California DOJ declined to answer specific questions about Vallejo’s compliance with the reform standards. “No public updates to share on our end at this point in time,” the DOJ press office wrote in response to requests for comment. “Our office remains committed to executing the terms of the agreement.”

The Vallejo Police Department also claimed in the May progress report that it had reached the implementation phase for 11 other recommendations. The report underscored changes to the hiring process to prioritize diversity and an increase in civilian staffing to support police services (for example, dispatchers or workers in the department lobby). In his statement to the news organizations the same month, Williams also noted several reform “highlights,” including changes to the department’s de-escalation policy, but did not talk specifically about compliance with the state DOJ’s measures.

As of May, the remaining 32 reforms remained untouched or in draft form, including key changes to how the department reviews fatal incidents and the implementation of an independent police oversight agency. The city did not provide updated information about its progress on the uncompleted recommendations.

“Resounding” Resistance

The issue of independent oversight, which was recommended by the OIR Group and endorsed by the California DOJ, has become a key point of contention among officials.

City officials, and in one case the police union, have resisted establishing an independent agency with the power to hold the department accountable, sources with knowledge of the matter told the news organizations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss processes relating to the California DOJ’s intervention in Vallejo.

In the fall of 2020, after the McCoy and Monterossa killings, the city asked a coalition of local nonprofits called Common Ground to help research permanent oversight models for Vallejo, an effort soon joined by Mike Nisperos, a retired attorney who is a member of the Vallejo Chief’s Community Advisory Board and a founding member of Oakland’s Police Commission. The city estimated that finding a model would take about six months and planned for a temporary solution in the meantime.

“Independent oversight cannot wait,” Vallejo’s then-city manager wrote in a City Council report advocating for an “interim auditor” to oversee the department. On Feb. 23, 2021, the city unanimously voted to hire OIR Group to review citizen complaints, conduct independent investigations and produce public reports while Common Ground and Nisperos researched a permanent model.

“We can’t have police police themselves,” Ashley Monterrosa, the sister of Sean Monterrosa, said at a City Council meeting where she, her sister Michelle Monterrosa and others advocated for strong police oversight.

But even the temporary oversight was never put in place. In July 2021, the Vallejo Police Officers’ Association sent Williams a cease-and-desist letter, obtained by the news organizations, demanding that the city refrain from hiring the independent auditor. The union alleged that the city violated California law by failing to consult with union officials, and it threatened to file a complaint with the state. Nisperos said he believed the pressure by the union may have caused the interim oversight proposal to falter.

The union, Williams, the city and city attorney, and the OIR Group did not comment on what happened with the interim proposal.

As the interim solution stalled, Nisperos and Common Ground continued to advocate for permanent oversight and produced a 40-page draft ordinance that would have created three branches of oversight, including a community review agency with the power to investigate fatal shootings and other incidents. Nisperos and Common Ground gathered feedback on the draft from all seven members of the Vallejo City Council, Williams, police oversight experts, residents impacted by police violence and the state DOJ.

Despite repeated requests, however, Vallejo City Attorney Veronica Nebb did not provide feedback on the draft for more than a year, Nisperos said, adding that he considers Nebb a “deliberate impediment” to reform.

The city disputed this assessment. “The City Attorney, in conjunction with the City Manager, have worked to build consensus with the community through numerous community meetings as well as meetings with Police Department leadership, the unions, and sworn and civilian staff,” the city wrote in a statement to Open Vallejo and ProPublica. The statement also said that between them, the city attorney and city manager had met with Common Ground three times since 2020, that they had reviewed the draft and that they would meet with the group again once the new ordinance was produced, this or next month. “Consensus-building efforts have always been in place and will continue.”

In August, Nebb — who plays a major role in handling the oversight reform — announced during a council meeting that the city could soon “begin to look at drafting” oversight legislation. Her 55-minute presentation did not address the draft ordinance that had been circulating among city officials for nearly 18 months.

“You have people who dedicated two years to put in research, to putting a model together for you,” Michelle Monterrosa said about the Common Ground ordinance at the meeting. “Let’s stop wasting time.”

Several elected officials at the meeting agreed. “I’m just ready to go on this, I’m ready to have something put in place,” Councilmember Mina Loera-Diaz said.

“The resistance from the city attorney’s office was resounding,” Councilmember Tina Arriola said in a September interview. “There’s just no budging.”

In presenting the city’s plan to draft its own ordinance, Nebb had raised concerns that an oversight body with the power to implement discipline or overrule the chief’s decisions could scare off potential police recruits. Advocates are concerned that she will water down the powers of the oversight agency. Nebb did not respond to specific questions about these efforts.

But barriers did not only originate from the union or city attorney’s office.

The union itself suggested in a May statement to Open Vallejo and ProPublica that the now-former police chief too has been an obstacle to change, and it claimed it had tried to set up meetings to discuss a handful of reforms but had gotten close to “zero response from the city.”

Williams, who has repeatedly expressed support for the reforms, did not respond to questions about the union’s claim.

In September, a representative for Jensen Hughes, the firm hired by the state DOJ, told Williams that it had developed “defined concerns” that a lack of involvement of top leadership was affecting the reform efforts, according to an email disclosed in response to a public records request. The email outlined several matters requiring “leadership” that instead were being left to lieutenants. A spokesperson for Jensen Hughes declined to comment for this story, and Williams did not comment on the firm’s findings.

A few weeks later, Williams unexpectedly took three weeks off and subsequently announced his resignation.

With a council election this week and less than eight months left until the end of its three-year agreement with the California DOJ, Vallejo could exit state supervision with no independent oversight, unless the state decides to extend — or escalate — its intervention in Vallejo.

“They want to continue doing what they’ve been doing for 20 years,” said Willie McCoy’s brother, Kori McCoy, about Vallejo’s handling of the reforms. McCoy’s family, who supports the Common Ground proposal, is demanding that the city implement the oversight ordinance as part of their civil rights lawsuit against the city; their attorney, Melissa Nold, said they will not accept any settlement money unless officials agree to impose outside oversight on the police.

“I don’t see how you’re going to fix the problems with the same people,” McCoy said. “​​​​Police run that city, and people are afraid.”

Help Us Investigate the Vallejo Police Department

Reporting for this project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

by Bianca Fortis

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Leola Scott recently decided to become a more active citizen. The 55-year-old resident of Dyersburg, Tennessee, was driven to action after her son was stabbed to death and nobody was charged.

In August, Scott tried to register to vote. That’s when she learned she’s not allowed to cast a ballot because she was convicted of nonviolent felonies nearly 20 years ago.

One in five Black Tennesseans are like Scott: barred from voting because of a prior felony conviction. Indeed, Tennessee appears to disenfranchise a far higher proportion of its Black residents — 21% — than any other state.

The figure comes from a new analysis by the nonprofit advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which found that Mississippi ranks a distant second, just under 16% of its Black voting-eligible population. Tennessee also has the highest rate of disenfranchisement among its Latino community — just over 8%.

While states around the country have moved toward giving people convicted of felonies a chance to vote again, Tennessee has gone in the other direction. Over the past two decades, the state has made it more difficult for residents to get their right to vote back. In particular, lawmakers have added requirements that residents first pay any court costs and restitution and that they be current on child support.

Tennessee is now the only state in the country that requires those convicted of felonies be up to date on child support payments before they can vote again.

The state makes little data available about who has lost the right to vote and why. Residents who may qualify to vote again first have to navigate a confusing, opaque bureaucracy.

Scott says she paid off her court costs years ago. But when she brought a voting rights restoration form to the county clerk to affirm that she had paid, the clerk told her she still had an outstanding balance of $2,390.

“It was like the air was knocked out of me,” she said. “I did everything that I was supposed to do. When I got in trouble, I owned it. I paid my debt to society. I took pride in paying off all that.”

Scott does not have receipts to verify her payments because she made them so long ago, she said. And there is no pathway for her to fight what she believes is a clerical error.

She is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Tennessee NAACP challenging the state’s voting rights restoration process. In court documents, the state denied allegations that the restoration process is inaccessible.

Overall, according to The Sentencing Project, about 470,000 residents of Tennessee are barred from voting. Roughly 80% have already completed their sentence but are disenfranchised because they have a permanently disqualifying conviction — such as murder or rape — or because they owe court costs or child support or have gotten lost in the system trying to get their vote back.

Over the past two years, about 2,000 Tennesseans have successfully appealed to have their voting rights restored.

Those convicted after 1981 must get a Certification of Restoration of Voting Rights form signed by a probation or parole officer or another incarcerating authority for each conviction. The form then goes to a court clerk, who certifies that the person owes no court costs. Then it is returned to the local election commission, which then sends it to the State Election Commission for final approval. (Rules on voting restoration were revised multiple times, so older convictions are subject to different rules.)

Republican Cameron Sexton, speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, said people convicted of felonies should have to pay court costs and child support before voting.

“If someone’s not paying or behind on their child support payment, that’s an issue,” he told ProPublica. “That’s an issue for that child, that’s an issue for that family, not having the things that they agreed to in court to help them for that child.”

When asked about Tennessee being the only state to require that child support payments be up to date before voting rights can be restored, Sexton said, “Maybe Tennessee is doing it correctly and the others are not.”

A 2019 report from the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that the requirements for repayment have been especially burdensome to women, the poor and communities of color. The report also noted that Tennessee has increasingly levied court charges “as a means for funding the State’s courts and criminal justice system.”

Georgia previously required payment of restitution and fines in order to restore voting rights. But in 2020, the office of Georgia’s secretary of state clarified that anyone who has completed their sentence may vote, even if they owe court costs or other debts that were not incurred as part of their sentence.

Disenfranchisement does not solely impact the lives of individual voters — it can have consequences for elections, too. This is particularly true for multiracial communities in Tennessee, according to Sekou Franklin, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He pointed to county-level races that have been decided by a few dozen votes.

“There are real votes that are lost that can shape elections,” Franklin said.

Black Tennesseans, even those who were not enslaved, have been disenfranchised for centuries. In 1835, the new state constitution took away the right to vote from free Black men, who had been able to vote under the previous constitution. It also stipulated that anyone convicted of an “infamous” crime — a list that included robbery, bigamy and horse stealing — would lose their voting rights, often permanently.

The civil rights laws of the 1960s opened up voting again for Tennesseans. But soon lawmakers began adding back in provisions that disenfranchised people convicted of felonies. Legislators updated the statute every few years, adding to the list of crimes that permanently disqualify someone from voting. The result is a convoluted list of eligibility criteria for voting rights restoration that depend on what a person was convicted of and when the conviction took place.

The reality of disenfranchisement in Tennessee received some national attention recently around the case of a Memphis woman, Pamela Moses. Three years ago, she got her probation officer’s signoff to vote again. The next day, the Tennessee Department of Correction asserted the officer had made an error. Prosecutors then charged Moses with lying on an election document. She was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, but a judge later threw out the conviction.

Tennessee lawmakers from both parties have tried, unsuccessfully, to make it easier for residents to get their vote back.

In 2019, two Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill that would have automatically restored voting rights to people upon completion of their sentence. It was supported by a bipartisan coalition of civil rights advocates, including the libertarian group Americans for Prosperity and the Tennessee American Civil Liberties Union. But it never gained traction among legislators.

In 2021, two Democrats sponsored another bill that would have granted automatic vote restoration, but that bill also died. The sponsors said that the Republican supermajority in Tennessee’s legislature simply doesn’t have an appetite to take it on.

“We said we wanted to do criminal justice reform, but all we’ve done is really nibbled around the edges,” state Sen. Brenda Gilmore told ProPublica, referring to a bill she co-sponsored with a fellow Democrat.

Dawn Harrington, the founder of Free Hearts, an organization that supports formerly incarcerated women, also advocated for the 2021 bill.

On a trip to New York City in 2008, Harrington carried a gun that was licensed in Tennessee. Because New York does not recognize permits from other states, she was convicted of a gun possession charge.

After serving a yearlong sentence on Rikers Island, she returned to Tennessee and set out to have her rights restored. Tennessee requires the incarcerating agency to sign the rights restoration form, but Harrington struggled to find someone in New York willing to sign it. After nine years, her rights were finally restored in 2020.

“I don’t know if you know the show ‘The Wiz,’ but I literally eased on down the road,” Harrington said about having her voting rights restored. “I danced. I was so happy I cried. I was feeling all the emotions. You never know how much something means to you until it’s taken away.”

Do you have information about people with felony convictions who are not allowed to vote? Contact Bianca Fortis at bianca.fortis@propublica.org.

by Jessica Priest and Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Chris Morran, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

The endorsement of political candidates by religious leaders from the pulpit has grown increasingly brazen, aggressive and sophisticated in recent years.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have found 20 apparent violations in the past two years of the Johnson Amendment, a law that prohibits church leaders from intervening in political campaigns. Two occurred in the last two weeks as candidates crisscross Texas vying for votes. The number of potential violations found by the news outlets is greater than the total number of churches the IRS has investigated for intervening in political campaigns in the past decade, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Under the law, pastors can endorse candidates in their personal capacities outside of church and weigh in on political issues from the pulpit as long as they don’t veer into support or condemnation of a particular candidate. But the law prohibits pastors from endorsing candidates during official church functions such as sermons.

Violations can lead to the revocation of a church’s tax-exempt status.

Descriptions of the 20 videos we identified are below. ProPublica and the Tribune had three experts review each of them. They agreed that the cases below violate the law. The experts were Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a tax and election law expert at the University of Notre Dame; Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school; and Sam Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago.

We’re Not Endorsing a Candidate, but…

In these cases, pastors said they were not endorsing candidates, but their actions equated to an endorsement, according to the experts. Some acknowledged that the law did not allow them to endorse before making their statements.

Mercy Culture

Location: Fort Worth, Texas

Pastors: Landon Schott, Heather Schott and Steve Penate

Context: Pastors at Mercy Culture expressed support for political candidates in at least three sermons this year. All three instances violated the Johnson Amendment, according to the experts. During one such instance on Feb. 6, the Schotts and Penate spoke in favor of Nate Schatzline, who is running for a seat in the state House. “Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” Landon Schott said. Schatzline’s appearance ended with Schott stating: “We declare Mercy Culture Church is behind you. We declare Mercy Culture Church is praying for you. We declare Mercy Culture Church is supporting you.” Early voting for the March 1 primary began eight days after the church service. Schatzline qualified for a runoff, which he won on May 24. He will face Democratic nominee KC Chowdhury, a Democrat, in Tuesday’s general election.

Expert assessment:

Brunson: “If it’s part of the religious services, his disclaimer doesn’t work and it’s a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment (albeit an almost clever, and definitely self-aware, attempt to avoid that). Penate saying ‘do something with us’ is absolutely an endorsement. If they’re doing it in their capacity as pastors, this violates the Johnson Amendment.”

Church and candidate response: Mercy Culture, Landon Schott and Heather Schott did not respond to questions or requests for comment. Both Penate, a church elder who said he was not speaking on behalf of the church, and Schatzline stated in separate interviews that they did not believe any laws were broken. “Mercy Culture has never endorsed anyone,” Penate said. “Mercy Culture has never told anyone to vote a certain way. Never.”

Unite Church

Location: Anchorage, Alaska

Pastor: Josh Tanner

Context: On Jan. 16, Tanner introduced his congregation to Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, and let her speak about how she expressed her faith during her career in government. “OK, so I want you to know that we’re not just gonna be doing an endorsement for Kelly today, even though I am endorsing Kelly for U.S. Senate. And you can vote for whoever you want. I’m just letting you know who I’m voting for. It’s gonna be her.”

Tshibaka was among the top candidates to advance to the November general election. She will face incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Patricia Chesbro on Tuesday.

(Unite Church)

We’re not just gonna be doing an endorsement for Kelly today, even though I am endorsing Kelly for U.S. Senate. And you can vote for whoever you want. I’m just letting you know who I’m voting for. It’s gonna be her.

—Josh Tanner, pastor of Unite Church in Anchorage, Alaska

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “That the pastor says he personally endorses the candidate at an official function of the church makes the statement campaign intervention.”

Church and candidate response: Unite Church, Tanner and Tshibaka did not respond to requests for comment.

“Uncle Bill”: A New “Family”-Based Strategy

Some churches coordinated with one another to provide their congregations with a list that singled out specific candidates and omitted others.

Gateway Church

Location: Southlake, Texas, northwest of Dallas

Pastor: Robert Morris

Context: Morris is among a group of Dallas-area pastors who have coordinated to highlight certain candidates running for public office. Since 2021, Morris has shown his congregation the names of specific candidates for office at least three times. In each of those cases, Morris violated the Johnson Amendment, according to experts. (Morris also showed the names during an Oct. 23 service.) During an April 18, 2021, sermon, a day before the start of early voting, Morris displayed the names of nine candidates running in nonpartisan races for school board and City Council on a screen. “And so we’re not endorsing a candidate,” Morris said. “We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running.” All but one of the candidates whose names were shown either won their race or qualified for a runoff.

(Gateway Church)

We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running.

—Robert Morris, pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas

Expert assessment:

Mayer: “This is a new (at least to me) technique, to join a group of like-minded churches and then identify to the congregation anyone who is a member of any of those churches who is a candidate for elected public office, as opposed to just identifying members of your congregation who are candidates. But this technique, even with the disclaimers made by the pastor here, is still a violation of the Johnson Amendment. While the pastor tries to avoid the violation by making various disclaimers and saying he is just giving the congregation the names and they can do what they want when they vote, those are not sufficient to cure the violation. But they do provide an argument that there is not a violation and so muddies the waters a bit, even though I believe that argument ultimately fails legally.”

Church response: Lawrence Swicegood, Gateway Media executive director, said in an emailed statement:

“At Gateway Church:

We DON’T:

• Support any specific political party

• Endorse political candidates

We DO:

• INFORM our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.

• ENCOURAGE our church family to vote as God leads them.

• PRAY for our elected officials regardless of their political party, or affiliation.”

First Baptist Grapevine

Location: Grapevine, Texas, northwest of Dallas

Pastor: Doug Page

Context: On April 18, 2021, Page showed his congregation the same list of candidates as Morris. “This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you,” Page said.

Expert assessment:

Mayer: “This is a violation of the Johnson Amendment for the same reasons as the Gateway Church violations.”

Church response: “As is clearly stated in the sermon clip you provided, these candidates were named for information only, not for endorsement. First Baptist Grapevine does not and will not endorse candidates for public office. Our primary focus is the gospel of Jesus Christ and seeking to follow His will for our lives,” Page said in an emailed statement.

Dueling Endorsements

For these nonpartisan races in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, pastors from different churches endorsed opposing candidates.

Koinonia Christian Church

Location: Arlington, Texas

Pastor: Ronnie W. Goines

Context: The first race involved candidates for the Mansfield school board. In a May 1 sermon, Goines implored his congregation to vote for Benita Reed in a local nonpartisan race on May 7. He said that Reed was the most qualified candidate in the race because she has worked in education for almost 30 years, but that scare tactics were being used against her. He then showed a mailer targeting Reed that read, “MISD put ‘woke’ politics over the safety of our children.” Then, Goines said, “All we got to do, people, is let’s go make a long line outside the polls and get this woman elected.” He later said: “Koinonia, we need, Dr. Reed needs a thousand votes. She needs a thousand votes. We got right at 10,000 members.”

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “This is a direct campaign intervention. He says, ‘She needs a thousand votes.’”

Church and candidate response: Reached by phone, Goines directed the news organizations to the church’s spokesperson, who did not respond. Reed did not respond to emailed questions.

More Church

Location: Mansfield, Texas, southwest of Dallas

Pastor: Truston Baba

Context: None of the candidates received more than 50% of the vote during the May 7 election, leading to a runoff between Reed and Craig Tipping. During a June 12 sermon, Baba encouraged his congregation to vote in the runoff election. He then praised Tipping. “And so, Craig, thank you for running. Thank you for being obedient to do what God’s called you to do. And I’m gonna support you. And I hope that people from More Church will not just complain but will actually get out and vote. You know, we go to the booth, and we go to get these little stickers. ‘I voted.’ Y’all know you get the ‘I voted’ sticker? Come on. There’s a big one. Get out. Get the sticker. Let’s vote and help make a difference locally. Come on. Give a hand for my friend Craig today.” Tipping, a physical therapist, won on June 18.

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Having only one candidate appear is partisan. This pastor states at an official event that he supports the candidate. As noted earlier, that violates the prohibition. Moreover, the pastor’s comments are an endorsement of the candidate generally.”

Church and candidate response: Neither More Church nor Baba responded to requests for an interview or emailed questions. Tipping did not respond to emails requesting comment.

Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship

Location: Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Dono Pelham

Context: The second set of dueling sermons involved two candidates in a nonpartisan race for Frisco City Council. On May 2, 2021, Pelham told his congregation that his wife, Angelia Pelham, had qualified for the runoff. He encouraged them to vote in the June 5, 2021, election in which Pelham faced Jennifer White, a veterinarian who described herself as the only conservative in the race. “I’m not about to endorse, but you’ll get the message,” Pelham said.

(Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship)

I’m not about to endorse, but you’ll get the message.

—Dono Pelham, pastor of Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in Frisco, Texas

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “He’s basically endorsing his wife, and I think it would be hard to argue anything different.”

Church and candidate response: Dono Pelham said in an emailed statement that he did not endorse his wife in the runoff. Angelia Pelham said she and her husband were “very clear and very intentional” about not violating the Johnson Amendment.

KingdomLife Church

Location: Frisco, Texas

Pastor: Brandon Burden

Context: Six days before that runoff election for the Frisco City Council, Burden supported White from the pulpit. Burden told churchgoers that God was working through the congregation to take the country, and particularly North Texas, back to its Christian roots. He framed the race between White and Pelham as one against Frisco Mayor Jeff Cheney. Cheney had urged residents to put party politics aside and vote for Pelham because of her experience working for corporations such as PepsiCo Inc., The Walt Disney Co. and Cinemark. “I got a candidate that God wants to win,” Burden said. “I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.” Pelham defeated White in the election.

(KingdomLife Church)

I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city.

—Brandon Burden, pastor of KingdomLife Church in Frisco, Texas

Expert assessment:

Brunson: “It’s pretty obvious, from the context and other things that he has said, that it is clear who he is saying God wants to win.”

Church and candidate response: Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions. White said she wasn’t in attendance during the sermon. She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active. “I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won’t take a political stance,” White said. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”

“Vote Her Behind Right Out of Office”: Criticizing the Incumbent, Praising the Challenger

Pulpit criticism of sitting officeholders is permitted, except during campaigns when officeholders are running as candidates. In the cases below, pastors criticized the incumbents while praising their challengers during election season.

Legacy Church

Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Pastor: Steve Smothermon

Context: During a July 10 sermon, Smothermon attacked New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, and praised Republican Mark Ronchetti for seeking to end abortion in New Mexico. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti,” Smotherman said. Later in the sermon, Smotherman said, “You better get registered to vote, and we better vote her behind right out of office.” Grisham and Ronchetti will face each other in Tuesday’s gubernatorial election.

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “This is a campaign intervention. The pastor is endorsing Ronchetti and opposing Ronchetti’s opponent.”

Church and candidate response: Legacy Church, Smothermon and Ronchetti did not respond to requests for comment.

Friendship-West Baptist Church

Location: Dallas

Pastor: Frederick Douglass Haynes III

Context: At the end of the church service on May 8, Haynes criticized state leaders’ response to the deadly February 2021 winter storm and praised Beto O’Rourke for donating $25,000 to the church during that time. Haynes then invited O’Rourke to speak with his congregation. “I just want to say, because I think we need to know this in a very public way, that when there was a crisis February last year and the ineptitude of our state leadership, and then you had (Ted) Cruz going to Cancun. Lord Jesus, so Cruz went to Cancun and then (Greg) Abbott’s friends got paid. And while that was going on, Beto O’Rourke was using resources from his foundation. He was on the ground, serving people, blessing people and just, just, just doing what God wants us to do.” O’Rourke, who announced in November 2021 that he would challenge Greg Abbott in the race for governor, then gave a 10-minute speech about how the faith community played a pivotal role in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. O’Rourke was identified as a gubernatorial candidate in a caption on the church’s livestream. He ended his May speech by expressing hope that people of color who were targeted by the restrictive voting laws passed by Republicans last year would provide the margin of victory on Nov. 8.

(Friendship-West Baptist Church)

So Cruz went to Cancun and then Abbott’s friends got paid. And while that was going on, Beto O’Rourke was using resources from his foundation. He was on the ground, serving people, blessing people and just, just, just doing what God wants us to do.

—Frederick Douglass Haynes III, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “Assuming the church is responsible for the caption (that ran under O’Rourke on the church’s livestream), this is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because the church explicitly identifies Beto O’Rourke as a candidate and the pastor expresses support for him.”

Church and candidate response: Haynes did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment. Chris Evans, communication director for O’Rourke’s campaign, said in an emailed statement: “Beto has enjoyed worshiping alongside the congregation at Friendship-West Baptist Church for years and is proud to call Pastor Haynes his friend. Pastor Haynes has long led the on-the-ground work of bringing people together to deliver for his community that Greg Abbott has absolutely failed and to fight for equality, justice, and opportunity across Texas.”

“My Dear Friend”: Hosting a Candidate

Some pastors introduced candidates during their sermons and allowed them to speak, while others interviewed them during church functions. The Johnson Amendment allows candidates to visit churches and speak to parishioners before elections, but it requires that churches maintain a “nonpartisan atmosphere” and give all candidates the same opportunity to visit.

St. Luke "Community" United Methodist Church

Location: Dallas

Pastor: Richie Butler

Context: On Oct. 23, a day before early voting began, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke visited the church. Butler introduced him as “the next governor of Texas.” He told parishioners: “We want to encourage him as he continues to run the race that is before him, and he needs us to get him across the finish line.” O’Rourke urged parishioners to vote and then gave a brief speech calling for fixing the state’s electric grid and expressing alarm over the high rate of school shootings and gun violence.

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This situation is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment. Beto O’Rourke is introduced as the ‘next governor of Texas,’ which highlights both that he is a candidate and one whom the church supports. And O’Rourke’s comments are a sales pitch for his candidacy. There is no indication that any opposing candidate has been given a similar opportunity and, even if he had been, the favorable introduction of O’Rourke would still be across the line.”

Church and candidate response: In a statement, Butler said: “Black churches have been important hubs for civic engagement and organization in the fight for social justice since Reconstruction. The mixing of faith-based congregations and electoral engagement is not a new concept.” O’Rourke did not respond to a request for comment or emailed questions.

Grace Woodlands

Location: The Woodlands, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Steve Riggle

Context: Also on Oct. 23, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican running for reelection, visited Grace Woodlands. During the sermon, Riggle said that Texas needs leaders like Patrick who “will stand for values that are critical to the future of this nation.” Riggle praised Patrick as a “strong person” of faith whom “God has given us at the very top.” Patrick then spoke to the congregation and cast the election in stark terms. “This is not a race between Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “This is a race about darkness and light. This is a race about powers and principalities. And the devil is at full work in this country.”

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “This is a clear endorsement of Patrick by the pastor of a church acting in his capacity as pastor in the course of ordinary church meetings. This violates the Johnson Amendment.”

Church and candidate response: Riggle said that his church did not endorse any candidate and said his introduction was focused on biblical values, not politics. He added that he believes the Johnson Amendment should be overturned.

“The government has no right at any time to, in any way, tell the church who it can have or who it cannot have to speak,” he said. “It can’t tell the church what it can preach on or not preach on. This is America, and we believe in a free church, not one controlled by the government.”

Patrick did not respond to requests for comment or emailed questions.

Sojourn Church

Location: Carrollton, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Chris McRae

Context: During a May 1 sermon, McRae told parishioners that they were being lied to by an “invisible enemy” about issues of race, gender and abortion. He said they needed to “wake up” and confront the lies. McRae then invited Kevin Falconer, the mayor of Carrollton and a Republican candidate for Denton County Commissioner, to the pulpit to speak. “I can’t, as my friends will say, I can’t endorse him. But I do know that God loves Falcons,” McRae said. He also told his congregation he thought Steve Babick would win the upcoming nonpartisan mayoral election to fill the vacancy left by Falconer. Both Falconer and Babick won their elections.

(Sojourn Church)

I can’t, as my friends will say, I can’t endorse him. But I do know that God loves Falcons.

—Chris McRae, pastor of Sojourn Church in Carrollton, Texas

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “That is campaign intervention to me, even though the pastor states that he is asking Kevin to speak about communion. Context makes it an indirect campaign intervention.”

Church and candidate response: Sojourn Church, McRae and Falconer did not respond to requests for comment. Babick said he was unaware of any statements McRae made about him or his candidacy. “I’m not necessarily in favor or against it,” Babick said of the Johnson Amendment.

Woodlands Church

Location: The Woodlands, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Kerry Shook

Context: On Jan. 16, Shook introduced Christian Collins to his congregation. Collins was campaigning for the Republican nomination for Texas’ 8th Congressional District, which includes parts of Houston and several surrounding cities. “And so, the primaries are coming up in March, and I just wanted y’all to get to know Christian, my dear friend, and his love for Jesus Christ and pray for all of those Christ followers who are doing something that I would never do,” Shook said. The sermon occurred two and a half months before the Republican primary election. Collins lost the race.

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Specifically naming the primary and the candidate and saying we need Christ followers makes it campaign intervention to me.”

Church and candidate response: Woodlands Church, Kerry Shook Ministries and Kerry Shook did not respond to requests for comment. Through a spokesperson, Collins declined to comment.

Abundant Life Church

Location: Willis, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Dave Stovall

Context: At the end of his sermon on Dec. 5, 2021, Stovall introduced Collins as a candidate for the 8th Congressional District. He praised Collins for founding the Texas Youth Summit, a two-day conference that promotes conservative political activism among students. “Would you stand in honor of Christian Collins and the leader, servant-leader that he is and what he has done for this community?” Stovall asked. Collins had pledged to join the congressional Freedom Caucus, a voting bloc made up of some of the most conservative members of Congress, in contrast to his chief opponent, former Navy SEAL Morgan Luttrell, who won the Republican primary.

(Abundant Life Church)

Would you stand in honor of Christian Collins and the leader, servant-leader that he is and what he has done for this community?

—Dave Stovall, pastor of Abundant Life Church in Willis, Texas

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment for the same reasons as the previous passage from Woodlands Church. (The similarity of this passage and the one from Woodlands Church makes me wonder if the pastors had been given suggested scripts from the same source.)”

Church and candidate response: Abundant Life Church and Stovall did not respond to requests for comment, including the news organizations’ question about whether it had invited Luttrell or any other candidate to speak at the church. Through a spokesperson, Collins declined to comment.

Destiny Christian Church

Location: Rocklin, California, northwest of Sacramento

Pastor: Greg Fairrington

Context: In a conversation with California gubernatorial candidate Anthony Trimino, a Republican, during a May 15 church service, Fairrington told his congregation that the state needs a leader with a “vibrant faith in Jesus Christ.” He praised Trimino for his effort to unseat Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and prayed for the Republican candidate. “Lord God, that you would inspire voters here in the state of California to cast their vote for the sanctity of life. Lord God, that they would get behind a conservative Christian candidate,” Fairrington said. Trimino came in sixth in an open party primary election on June 7. He did not advance to the November general election.

(Destiny Christian Church)

Lord God, that you would inspire voters here in the state of California to cast their vote for the sanctity of life. Lord God, that they would get behind a conservative Christian candidate.

—Greg Fairrington, pastor of Destiny Christian Church in Rocklin, California

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This passage is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it implicitly identifies Anthony as a candidate, specifically mentions voting and calls on the audience to get behind a conservative, pro-life Christian candidate (implicitly, such as Anthony).”

Church and Candidate Response: Destiny Christian Church, Fairrington and Trimino did not respond to requests for comment.

Carver Park Baptist Church

Location: Waco, Texas

Pastor: Gaylon P. Foreman

Context: On April 7, Foreman livestreamed a Q&A at the church with Marlon Jones, a candidate for the Waco Independent School District school board. “Again, I endorse him fully and completely, and I wish that you would prayerfully consider helping support this mighty man of God, so he can help make kingdom impact on the Waco ISD,” Foreman said. Experts said Johnson Amendment violations can occur at any church function, not just during sermons. Jones lost the May 7 election.

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “This pastor doesn’t even pretend not to be endorsing the candidate, which is the honest approach. He’s clearly endorsing.”

(Carver Park Baptist Church)

I endorse him fully and completely, and I wish that you would prayerfully consider helping support this mighty man of God.

—Gaylon P. Foreman, pastor of Carver Park Baptist Church in Waco, Texas

Church and candidate response: Foreman defended his discussion with Jones. “I told him about the show and he agreed to appear. I didn’t hear from or have any other contact with any other candidates or I would have gladly allowed them to appear as well,” Foreman said. “On the show, I did acknowledge that I personally supported him and that I felt that he was the best candidate. I also asked about how our community could help him. For as long as I’ve been serving as pastor, I’ve always made it clear that I never tell others who to vote for but do encourage everyone to vote.”

Jones said in an interview with the news organizations that he thought Foreman provided information and did not violate the Johnson Amendment. “I think during the broadcast Pastor Foreman was very intentional about encouraging people to vote but not necessarily saying this is who we should vote for.” Jones, who is also a pastor, added: “Saying ‘this is something I am doing’ does not necessarily mean your congregation will do that.”

Praising Trump Before the 2020 Election

In the days leading up to the 2020 election, some pastors extolled the ways in which former President Donald Trump had delivered for Christians.

Cowboy Church of Corsicana

Location: Corsicana, Texas, southeast of Dallas

Pastor: Derek Rogers

Context: On Oct. 14, 2020, Rogers told his congregation that even though pastors aren’t supposed to talk about politics, parishioners needed to support Trump’s reelection bid. “I do not understand how anybody that calls himself a Christian could vote for the agenda and the platform of Joe Biden,” he said. “President Trump, he ain’t the greatest dude in the whole world, but he’s the closest thing that we got to what we need.”

(Cowboy Church of Corsicana)

President Trump, he ain’t the greatest dude in the whole world, but he’s the closest thing that we got to what we need.

—Derek Rogers, pastor of Cowboy Church of Corsicana in Corsicana, Texas

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it identifies two candidates by name and explicitly tells the congregation for which of them they should vote.”

Church response: Rogers did not respond to requests for comment.

Beth Sar Shalom

Location: Carrollton, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Steven Ger

Context: Ger explained to congregants why they should support Trump over Biden for president two days before the election. “I like what our president has done. He made his promises. And he kept his promises.” He later called Trump the “most pro-life president ever” and said, “Vice President Biden would be the most pro-abortion president ever.”

(Beth Sar Shalom)

I like what our president has done. He made his promises. And he kept his promises. He moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He made peace between Israel and three Arab nations. ‘Can’t be done.’ He did it.

—Steven Ger, Beth Sar Shalom in Carrollton, Texas

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “The passage is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it identifies two candidates, describes their positions and then says which position (and therefore candidate) should be voted for.”

Church response: Executive Pastor Don Jones initially said he was willing to be interviewed, but neither he nor Ger responded to follow-up calls and emailed questions.

Trinity Family Church

Location: Forney, Texas, east of Dallas

Pastor: Marty Reid

Context: In a sermon two days before the Nov. 3, 2020, election, Reid told his congregation that even though Trump “doesn’t know much” about Christianity, “I believe God has raised up President Trump for such a time as this".

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Clearly an endorsement of Trump and campaign intervention.”

Church response: Trinity Family Church and Reid did not respond to requests for comment.

by Jeremy Schwartz, Jessica Priest and Perla Trevizo

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is seeking reelection, have been crisscrossing the state in the lead-up to Tuesday’s election, visiting megachurches and smaller houses of worship packed tight with parishioners.

The stops are part of a longstanding tradition for political candidates that often accelerates as Election Day nears.

Two Sundays ago, O’Rourke, a Democrat, and Patrick, a Republican, visited different churches where pastors praised them and allowed them to give speeches about the upcoming election. This was in violation of federal law, according to tax law experts. Known as the Johnson Amendment, the law bars tax-exempt organizations from intervening in political campaigns.

At St. Luke “Community” United Methodist Church in Dallas on the morning of Oct. 23, pastor Richie Butler introduced O’Rourke to his congregation as “the next governor of Texas.”

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke visits St. Luke “Community” Methodist Church on Oct. 23, one day before early voting began. (ProPublica/Texas Tribune screenshot from a St. Luke “Community” United Methodist Church video.)

“He needs us to get him across the finish line,” Butler told parishioners.

O’Rourke then walked to the stage, where he gave a speech that would be familiar to those who have seen him on the campaign trail. He called for fixing the state’s electric grid and expressed alarm over the high rate of school shootings and gun violence.

“If our votes were not important, they would not be trying so hard to keep us from voting in this election, and our vote is how we overcome,” O’Rourke told the crowd.

The same morning, hundreds of miles away, pastor Steve Riggle introduced Patrick to his congregation at Grace Woodlands church north of Houston by saying the lieutenant governor is someone that “God has given us at the very top.”

“If the nation is to be saved, it’s going to take some leaders who, beyond their concern about being reelected, will stand for values that are critical to the future of this nation,” Riggle said. “Dan Patrick is one of those.”

Patrick then took the stage and cast the election in stark terms. “This is not a race between Republicans and Democrats,” he told the congregation. “This is a race about darkness and light. This is a race about power and principalities. And the devil is at full work in this country.”

He later added: ”I don’t even recognize the other party. It’s been taken over by communists and socialists.”

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick speaks to congregants at Grace Woodlands church on Oct. 23. (ProPublica/Texas Tribune screenshot from a Grace Woodlands church video)

Tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that the pastors’ support of the candidates in their sermons violated the Johnson Amendment. The experts also raised concerns about what appeared to be the churches’ failure to give equal time to their opponents. O’Rourke is facing Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the general election, and Patrick is being challenged by Democrat Mike Collier.

“Beto O’Rourke is introduced as the ‘next Governor of Texas,’ which highlights both that he is a candidate and one whom the church supports,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a tax and election law expert at the University of Notre Dame. “And O’Rourke’s comments are a sales pitch for his candidacy. There is no indication that any opposing candidate has been given a similar opportunity, and, even if he had been, the favorable introduction of O’Rourke would still be across the line.”

St. Luke pastor Butler did not answer questions about Mayer’s assessment or whether the church had also invited Abbott to speak.

“Black churches have been important hubs for civic engagement and organization in the fight for social justice since Reconstruction,” Butler said in a statement. “The mixing of faith-based congregations and electoral engagement is not a new concept.”

O’Rourke did not respond to questions about the visit.

Sam Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, said the language Riggle used while introducing the lieutenant governor was an “endorsement of Patrick by the pastor of a church acting in his capacity as pastor in the course of ordinary church meetings.”

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Riggle said in an interview that his church did not endorse any candidate and that his introduction was focused on biblical values, not politics. He added that he believes the Johnson Amendment should be overturned.

“The government has no right, at any time, to, in any way, tell the church who it can have or who it cannot have to speak,” he said. “It can’t tell the church what it can preach on or not preach on. This is America, and we believe in a free church. Not one controlled by the government.”

Patrick did not respond to requests for comment or to emailed questions.

Last week, ProPublica and the Tribune reported about numerous apparent violations by church pastors who supported political candidates from the pulpit. A candidate endorsement is a “clear violation” under IRS rules. But the law itself is complex and can be vague, leaving gray areas that make identifying other violations more difficult. Below are answers about what it does and doesn’t do.

What is the Johnson Amendment?

In 1954, then-U.S. Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that prohibited nonprofits, including religious institutions, from involvement in political campaigns.

The amendment was uncontroversial at the time. It passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.

Though Johnson did not single out churches, religious organizations are subject to the law because they are nonprofit organizations. Violations can result in revocation of their tax-exempt status.

What does the Johnson Amendment prohibit?

Nonprofit organizations are barred from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, “any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”

Contributions to political campaigns made on behalf of the tax-exempt organizations supporting or opposing a candidate also “clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity,” according to the IRS.

The IRS periodically produces lengthy guides that spell out the “facts and circumstances” the agency considers when determining whether political activity is allowable.

In some cases, such as pulpit endorsements, violations can be clearly identified. But violations can be harder to distinguish in other cases.

O’Rourke made another stop on Oct. 23 at The Chosen Vessel Cathedral in Fort Worth, where pastor Marvin L. Sapp introduced him to the crowd. “If y’all notice, nobody else came,” Sapp said. “But we recognize people that come to see about us.”

He then said O’Rourke would be in the lobby after the service to “meet and greet.”

“This situation is a close call,” Mayer said. He said the visit could be a violation because Sapp gave candidates a chance to meet with congregants on church property after the service.

Brunson said that if O’Rourke solicited votes or funds in the lobby it would likely be a violation.

In a statement, Sapp said he did not believe the visit was barred by the Johnson Amendment and pointed out that O’Rourke did not address parishioners during the service.

“I have been a pastor for 19 years and have never endorsed a candidate,” Sapp said. “I understand the parameters of the Johnson Amendment and do not violate them. While I believe in the inherent separation of church and state, I also believe in empowering marginalized communities, the African American community in particular, to participate in the democratic process.”

What does the Johnson Amendment allow?

Religious institutions are allowed to invite candidates to speak to their congregations.

But if one person is invited in their capacity as a candidate, everyone in the race must be given equal opportunity to address parishioners, according to IRS rules. Fundraising is also not allowed during the appearance and the church must maintain a “nonpartisan atmosphere,” the rules state.

“As long as all candidates are invited and there’s no endorsement, candidates can appear at a church and can even explain why the congregation should vote for them,” Brunson said.

While only inviting one candidate violates the law, enforcement is difficult.

“All sorts of houses of worship do this,” Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school, said. “Think about the enormous amount of resources it would take for the IRS to enforce the ban and to do so in a way that avoids accusations of political favoritism.”

In some cases, a single politician can be invited to speak as long as they are not identified as a candidate.

On the evening of Oct. 23, Patrick attended a “Night to Honor Israel” event at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio.

Pastor John Hagee introduced Patrick. He avoided violating the prohibition on supporting a political candidate because he praised the lieutenant governor in his capacity as a current public official and did not mention his candidacy, Mayer said. The tax law expert added that Patrick also did not mention the upcoming election, voting or his candidacy.

Churches also can provide voter guides and have voter registration drives as long as they avoid showing preference for specific candidates. They can also weigh in on such issues and policies as abortion if they steer clear of targeting individual candidates. The Congressional Research Service acknowledged in 2013 that “the line between issue advocacy and campaign activity can be difficult to discern.”

Religious institutions have more flexibility in supporting or opposing ballot measures like bonds and referendums that don’t involve specific candidates.

In Michigan, Catholic churches have put up signs against a ballot measure that would enshrine the right to abortion access in the state constitution. They’ve also spoken out against the measure during sermons and sent campaign letters to parishioners urging them to oppose it.

The Detroit archdiocese told The Detroit News last month that IRS rules allow the church to participate in political activity related to the ballot proposal and that it would continue to follow the law “while remaining firm” in its advocacy efforts. Critics have accused the church of violating IRS rules.

Churches can be involved in noncandidate elections as long as such lobbying work is not “substantial,” which the tax code does not explicitly define, Mayer said.

Outside of official church functions or publications, pastors and other church leaders can endorse candidates and engage in political activity in their private capacity. A religious leader’s church affiliation can be identified in such an endorsement, as long as it’s clear that the church leader is not speaking on behalf of the institution.

How likely is the IRS to crack down on Johnson Amendment violators?

Not very.

In the 68 years since the Johnson Amendment became law, the IRS has only publicly acknowledged revoking the tax-exempt status of one church. (The Congressional Research Service said a second church lost its status, but its identity is unknown.)

In 1992, just four days before the presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York paid for ads in USA Today and the Washington Times attacking then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who was challenging Republican President George H.W. Bush.

The ads started with the headline: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They claimed Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads stated, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”

The revocation of the church’s tax-exempt status spurred a yearslong legal battle. In 2000, a U.S. appeals court ruled in favor of the IRS.

During a four-year period that started in 2004, the IRS sent dozens of churches warning letters about political activity and initiated some audits. The result of the audits is unclear.

Then, in 2013, a scandal related to nonprofits that were not churches helped further dampen the agency’s enthusiasm for politically sensitive investigations, said Philip Hackney, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and former IRS official.

Congressional Republicans accused the agency of bias against conservative groups after the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that the agency had given extra scrutiny to Tea Party nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status. Two high-ranking IRS officials stepped down.

“They got burned badly as a result of being in that space,” Hackney said, adding that the incident led IRS leaders to be particularly “careful about how they tread in those waters.”

The IRS has not released data on enforcement of church political activity over the last decade and does not publicly confirm individual investigations.

But in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the agency produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.

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by Mick Dumke

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For months, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has pushed a plan to turn valuable public housing land over to a soccer team owned by a billionaire. But as the deal awaits approval from the federal government, Lightfoot and the Chicago Housing Authority have kept key details hidden from the public and even other government officials.

The CHA has told city aldermen that the Chicago Fire soccer team will likely pay up to $40 million to lease the 23-acre site for 40 or more years, with the proceeds used to benefit low-income families. But CHA officials have been secretive about specifics of the deal, including how they arrived at that price for prime land in a gentrifying neighborhood.

The CHA already received City Council approval for a zoning change needed for the deal, and it has formally asked the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to back the plan as well. But agency officials have not shared a lease agreement with the council or HUD.

And they’ve been evasive about whether they have an agreement in writing at all. When ProPublica asked for a copy of the lease, the CHA’s freedom of information officer said the agency didn’t have one. “There is no responsive record, in draft form or otherwise,” he wrote in an email.

The CHA also refused to disclose records showing the appraisal and analysis used to determine the value of the land it plans to lease. The agency cited an exemption in the Illinois Freedom of Information Act that allows it to keep documents secret if they are considered “preliminary” or “draft” proposals. A CHA spokesperson said the agency will release the appraisal once the deal is finalized.

But by that point the public won’t be able to do anything about it.

“It really raises a fundamental question about whether they’re proceeding in this way to avoid anyone knowing [the details] until it’s been done,” said Joe Ferguson, the city’s former inspector general. Ferguson recently launched Re-Imagine Chicago, a nonprofit aimed at addressing flaws in the city’s governing structure.

By keeping information secret until the deal is complete, Ferguson said, the CHA is at odds with a key tenet of good government: transparency. “This is the Chicago way in its most dark form,” he said.

In response to questions, a CHA spokesperson wrote in a statement that the agreement with the Fire has not been finalized, but that the general terms of the “partnership” have the support of resident leaders.

“CHA has been negotiating with the Fire to get the best possible deal for the agency and our residents and at this point we have agreed with them on the broad terms,” the statement said. “Publicly releasing appraisal documents or the terms under discussion during the negotiations would place CHA at a competitive disadvantage.”

The CHA has not sought any other bids or alternate deals for the land. It did not respond to a question from ProPublica asking why.

And while elected resident leaders have backed the Fire proposal, other residents are opposed, including a group that has been meeting regularly near the site.

The CHA land, just west of downtown, was once part of the ABLA Homes development. But most of the buildings at ABLA were leveled after the CHA launched its citywide Plan for Transformation two decades ago. Despite plans for replacement housing on the 23-acre site, it remained vacant as the agency struggled to fulfill its commitments. The CHA has finished less than a third of the new homes it promised at ABLA.

Land in the Near West Side neighborhood has grown valuable. In 2017, a one-acre parcel two blocks away from the site designated for the Fire was appraised at $2.7 million, though the CHA ended up leasing that to a nonprofit organization for just $1 a year for 99 years.

As in that case, the CHA didn’t undertake a competitive bidding process to determine the best use or price of the land offered to the Fire, which are owned by billionaire business leader Joe Mansueto, an ally of Lightfoot’s.

Instead, team officials sent word to the city that they were looking for land to build a new practice facility. Mayoral aides worked with them for months on a plan to take over a Northwest Side park tucked between three public schools, and school officials even drafted a lease agreement, which they later released to ProPublica.

But when those talks stalled, Lightfoot aides offered the CHA land to the Fire. The team has previously said that when the city offered the site, the Fire saw it as an “opportunity” to invest in the Near West Side and its residents while building a “world-class performance center.” (Originally their plan called for using nearly 26 acres of CHA property, though they subsequently altered it to fit on 23 acres.)

In December, weeks before Lightfoot said anything publicly about the Fire deal, CHA officials launched an environmental review of the property, one of the first steps it has to take before disposing of the land. By spring, the CHA had commissioned an appraisal of the land’s value that cost the agency a little more than $35,000, records show.

On May 2, officials from the CHA and the Fire held a meeting with public housing residents. They promised that as part of the agreement, the Fire would pay money that the CHA could use to renovate sections of the ABLA development that were not dismantled in the Plan for Transformation. The officials also said the Fire would provide job opportunities and fund other neighborhood investments, including new parking and recreational space.

ABLA’s elected leaders and some other residents welcomed the deal with the Fire, according to the CHA’s records of the meeting. But others noted that they had heard promises from the CHA before. They pointed out that the CHA had failed to deliver hundreds of units of replacement housing at ABLA.

“CHA needs to build the property back that they tore down,” Mary Rush, one of the skeptical residents, said at the meeting.

More than five months later, Rush told ProPublica that she still hadn’t learned any specifics about the terms of the Fire deal and still objects to it. “That soccer field is not going to do anything for us,” she said, “and we’re going to look over there and wonder what happened to the housing.”

Later in May, the CHA board voted unanimously to seek HUD’s approval for the deal without any public discussion of lease specifics. When a board member asked how many appraisals the CHA would use to determine the deal terms, Ann McKenzie, the CHA’s director of development, said, “We are considering two and maybe a third will be necessary.”

The board’s resolution then granted agency CEO Tracey Scott the authority to “negotiate and enter into a long-term lease with the Chicago Fire Football Club” and to “perform such actions as may be necessary or appropriate” to carry out the deal once HUD signs off.

It was June before any details of the CHA’s deal with the Fire were released to the public, and even then they weren’t easy to find: They were summarized in just a few lines of a 461-page environmental report posted deep within the city’s website. The report stated that the Fire would lease the property for at least 40 years, paying an $8 million “lump sum” plus “approximately” $1 million a year in rent, adding up to $48 million total.

Over the next few months, behind closed doors, the terms apparently shifted so that the CHA would get less money.

In September, a number of aldermen had questions when a City Council committee considered a zoning change needed for the proposed soccer facility. The aldermen had not received any information about the terms of the lease, according to several who attended.

McKenzie told them that the agency had commissioned an appraisal and analysis to determine the value of the lease. None of the aldermen asked to see it, and McKenzie didn’t offer to share it.

She told aldermen the lease would be for 40 or more years and the Fire would pay $8 million upfront — just as the environmental report had stated. But McKenzie said the team’s annual payments would be as much as $800,000 a year — compared with the $1 million a year outlined before. That adds up to at least $8 million less over 40 years.

McKenzie indicated that the “reduction” was due to the costs of environmental cleanup, which were estimated to be $4 million.

A number of aldermen weren’t convinced that the deal was good for the CHA or its residents. The committee voted 7-5 against the zoning change for the facility. The next morning, though, Lightfoot’s allies called for another vote and were able to advance the measure.

When the full council took it up a few hours later, two aldermen moved to delay the vote at least a month so they could have more time to review the deal. Lightfoot, wielding the gavel, declared them out of order. The zoning change was approved.

That afternoon, the CHA submitted an application asking for HUD’s formal approval of the Fire deal. The materials included illustrations of the Fire’s proposed facility, records of meetings with residents and a copy of a letter of support from Lightfoot. It did not include details about the proposed lease agreement.

The application to HUD did include a copy of the appraisal the CHA said it is using to determine the lease terms. But in the records provided to ProPublica, the pages with the financial analysis are missing because the CHA considers the information “preliminary.” The public will be able to see the full appraisal, the agency said, but only after the Fire deal is finalized.

It was the only appraisal the CHA commissioned for the property. The CHA says the Fire also conducted an appraisal, which produced results similar to the agency’s own.

Alderman Byron Sigcho Lopez, who represents part of ABLA, said it’s outrageous that the CHA hasn’t disclosed the details of the deal with residents or elected officials.

“Imagine such a big deal, such a big agreement like this, and they don’t have all the documents available,” he said. “There has to be a cost-benefit analysis. Is this in the best interest of the ABLA residents? Is this in the best interest of the city of Chicago? How can you answer that when you don’t even know what the agreement is?”

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Joshua Kaplan

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Republican officials around the country have been giving increasing attention and resources to investigating election crimes. Most have focused on the alleged wrongdoing of voters.

But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also working a different angle: His office has been criminally investigating the people who help run elections.

Over the past two years, Paxton’s office opened at least 10 investigations into alleged crimes by election workers, a more extensive effort than previously known, according to records obtained by ProPublica. One of his probes was spurred by a complaint from a county GOP chair, who lost her reelection bid in a landslide. She then refused to certify the results, citing “an active investigation” by the attorney general.

In at least two of the cases, Paxton’s office unsuccessfully tried to indict election workers, attempts that were first reported by the Austin American-Statesman. In the remaining eight investigations identified by ProPublica, it is unclear just how far the probes went. As of mid-October, none of the cases resulted in criminal charges.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Most of Paxton’s investigations of election workers center on allegations of obstructing a poll watcher, which is banned by a controversial and recently expanded law that experts fear could open the door for turmoil in the election process. Texas is one of the few states where blocking the view or limiting the movements of poll watchers — partisan volunteers who monitor election sites — can bring criminal penalties. Obstruction is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

Experts worry such investigations could exact a stiff price, chilling participation in the process, slowing down elections and fostering misinformation and distrust in the vote. These probes may be a harbinger of potential chaos in the midterms.

“To have law enforcement policing around and creating the perception that these elections are not secure is doing enormous damage to democracy,” said Lorraine Minnite, a political scientist at Rutgers University, Camden who has studied voter fraud allegations.

Paxton, who has been under a securities fraud indictment for seven years, has touted his eagerness to pursue election-related crimes. He created a unit dedicated to doing so five years ago, long before so-called election integrity units became a trend in Republican-controlled states. (He’s denied wrongdoing in the ongoing securities fraud case.)

Between January 2020 and September 2022, records show, the office opened at least 390 cases looking into potential election crimes. That includes criminal investigations of both voters and election workers. It’s not clear how many cases Paxton’s office attempted to prosecute. But the records show that, like other prosecutors’ efforts around the country, Paxton often comes up empty. His office secured five election-related convictions during that period.

A skeptic of the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election, Paxton has been soliciting tips from the public about the upcoming midterms, during which he will be operating with broad new powers. Last year, the Texas Legislature dramatically expanded the state’s ability to pursue criminal sanctions against election officials. This year’s midterms will be the first general election where law enforcement could use the new criminal statutes to prosecute.

Paxton will also be sending a “task force” to Harris County, which contains Houston, a Democratic stronghold, to respond to “legal issues” with the election, according to a letter from the Texas secretary of state. Paxton is up for reelection in the midterms, in a race that polls indicate could be close.

America’s voting system depends on the thousands of public employees and volunteers, often retirees, who do the tedious job of managing elections. Officials have long reported challenges in recruiting enough poll workers to run elections efficiently. Now, prospective poll workers may find themselves wrestling with the possibility of facing criminal charges.

This growing scrutiny and animosity have taken a toll. Officials have resigned en masse, as conspiracy theories and physical threats have increasingly become a part of the job. Over the last two years, roughly a third of Texas’ election administrators have left their posts, according to the Texas secretary of state.

Paxton’s election worker investigations span large, heavily Democratic cities and deep-red rural counties alike. Some officials learned they were under scrutiny when they were contacted by sergeants in Paxton’s office. Others told ProPublica they were unaware an investigation had occurred. At least five suspects were in their 60s or 70s. Several cases were prompted by a referral from the Texas secretary of state. Others stemmed from complaints made by small-town sheriffs or voters.

Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, said the office is required to refer complaints to the attorney general if there is reasonable cause to believe a crime occurred.

Dana DeBeauvoir said she has already seen the impact of Paxton’s efforts on the ground — and in her own life. She told ProPublica that in her 36 years as the top election official in Travis County, where Austin is located, nothing compared to the disruption she saw in the 2020 election.

When an unmasked poll watcher named Jennifer Fleck began photographing the counting of ballots, which was against the rules, a volunteer asked her to leave. Fleck refused, then began screaming and banging on the window of the room where votes were being counted, DeBeauvoir said. Ultimately, the police arrived, arrested Fleck and charged her with criminal trespass.

Officers allegedly found that Fleck had a “button camera on her shirt” connected to a “recording device that had been secreted in Fleck’s pants,” according to police records. Fleck also faces a perjury charge because she swore in an affidavit that she would not use recording devices. The case is pending.

Weeks later, DeBeauvoir said, the county attorney informed her that Paxton’s office had a different view of the incident: DeBeauvoir herself was now the subject of a criminal investigation. Attorneys advised her to not speak about the case.

“I never felt more alone,” DeBeauvoir said. “Everything that was being said was completely untrue. And I could not defend myself.”

The next year, Paxton attempted to prosecute DeBeauvoir for obstructing a poll watcher, court records show. In an unusual move, when his office brought her case before a grand jury, prosecutors didn’t do it in Travis County — where DeBeauvoir lives and the incident took place — but in a suburban county that is more conservative.

Yet, in a rarity for the criminal justice system, the grand jury in April 2021 declined to indict her.

“I was completely terrified” by the investigation, DeBeauvoir said.

Fleck did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Among the new powers Paxton will now be able to wield: The Legislature made it a felony for an election official to send a mail-in voting application to a person who didn’t request one. It gave new authority to poll watchers, allowing them “free movement” around voting facilities. And it broadened the obstruction statute Paxton had used to try to prosecute officials like DeBeauvoir.

“We’ve seen this kind of onslaught of laws that are essentially treating voting booths like crime scenes,” said Liz Avore, senior policy adviser at Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit that analyzes election legislation. She said Texas’ new poll-watching provisions could hamstring election officials who witness partisan volunteers harassing voters and make it hard to keep polling places “a safe place for voters to cast their ballots.”

Even when investigations don’t result in criminal charges, they can be used as a pretext to disrupt the election process.

In 2020, Cynthia Brehm was running for reelection as chair of the Bexar County Republican Party. She secured more votes than any other candidate in the March primary, but it was a close race and she’d have to go through a runoff to retain her seat. In June, Brehm made a Facebook post suggesting George Floyd’s death was staged. Sen. Ted Cruz and other top Texas Republicans called for her to resign. Her chances were starting to look bleak.

Then Brehm made a move that would have surprising consequences. She filed a complaint with Paxton’s office about the election, records show, prompting the attorney general to open a criminal investigation into the county elections administrator.

A police report details what the official stood accused of. First, that the primary results were incorrect. Second, that there were “several other” allegations “that include obstructing poll watchers.”

In July, Brehm lost in the runoff by 32 points. But as party chair, she held the authority to certify the results. She refused to do so — pointing to the fruits of her complaint.

“The Texas Attorney General has an active investigation ongoing into the results of the Primary Election,” Brehm wrote in a press release justifying her decision. “I Cynthia Brehm, have determined that every aspect of this election has been severely compromised.”

In response to a public records request, Paxton’s office said the investigation into the elections administrator, Jacquelyn Callanen, is now closed. Brehm and Callanen did not respond to requests for comment. The winning candidate ultimately took over Brehm’s post.

At least three suspects in Paxton’s investigations were the top election officials in their counties, but his probes have also ensnared volunteers. In 2020, Robert Icsezen, a Houston-based attorney and self-described “election nerd,” volunteered to serve on his county’s signature verification committee, which is responsible for checking the signatures on mail-in ballots. On Oct. 14, a poll watcher asked Icsezen to let her into the area where ballots were being processed, he said. He thought that wasn’t permitted and turned her away. Later that morning, he received a call from a local official, who told him the secretary of state’s office said he needed to let the poll watcher in. The woman never returned, Icsezen said.

Shortly thereafter, an officer in Paxton’s election police unit contacted Icsezen. Assuming it was all a misunderstanding, Icsezen agreed to speak with him, he said.

Eight months later, Paxton’s office brought the case before a grand jury and unsuccessfully tried to indict Icsezen for obstructing a poll watcher, records show.

“I have four kids,” Icsezen told ProPublica. “There could have been cops coming to my door to cuff me and take me away.”

He will not volunteer to help in another election, he said.

Do you have information about “election integrity” units that we should know? Reporters Cassandra Jaramillo and Josh Kaplan can be reached via email at cassandra.jaramillo@propublica.org or joshua.kaplan@propublica.org, or via Signal at 469-606-9665 or 734-834-9383.

Lynn Dombek contributed research.

by Jeremy Kohler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Ohio lawmakers this fall will consider adding consumer protections to “clean energy” lending programs, responding to concerns they can burden vulnerable homeowners.

In testimony during state House committee hearings this year, some proponents of the bill pointed to reporting by ProPublica as evidence that Ohio should closely regulate the lending. That reporting showed that Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE, loans often left low-income borrowers in Missouri at risk of losing their homes.

Two Republican state House members from eastern Ohio are pursuing rules for PACE, though such a lending program has only been offered through a pilot program in Toledo. But lawmakers Bill Roemer, from Richfield, and Al Cutrona, from Canfield, said they want to make sure that, if companies try to bring a statewide program to Ohio, they comply with stricter rules.

PACE offers financing for energy-saving home improvements that borrowers pay back in their property taxes. Unlike with some other types of financing, defaulting on a PACE loan can result in a home being sold in a tax sale.

Missouri, California and Florida are the only states with active statewide residential PACE programs. Ohio last year came close to becoming the fourth, after California-based Ygrene Energy Fund announced it would offer loans to homeowners in partnership with the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority.

But the program never got started. Ygrene has since suspended all lending nationwide and last week agreed to settle a complaint by the federal government and the state of California that the company had harmed consumers through deceptive practices.

Roemer said in an interview that he co-sponsored the measure after talking to a coalition that included mortgage lenders, real estate agents and advocates for affordable housing and the homeless.

“You never really see all those people come together on a bill,” he said. “I did my research, and I said, ‘This is really a bad program that takes advantage of the most vulnerable people.’”

The legislative session ends on Dec. 31, leaving little time to pass the bill.

“It’s going to be a lot of work,” Roemer said, “but I think it’s very important that we do it.”

Ben Holbrook, an aide to Cutrona, said that after Ygrene’s withdrawal, the bill is “less of a reactive piece of legislation and more proactive.”

ProPublica found that state and local officials in Missouri exercised little oversight over the two entities that have run the clean-energy loan programs in that state. Ygrene and the Missouri Clean Energy District charged high interest rates and fees over terms as long as 20 years, collecting loan payments through tax bills and enforcing debts by placing liens on property — all of which left some borrowers vulnerable to losing their homes if they defaulted.

Reporters analyzed about 2,700 loans recorded in the five counties with Missouri’s most active PACE programs. They found that borrowers, particularly in predominantly Black neighborhoods, sometimes were paying more in interest and fees than their homes were worth.

PACE lenders said that their programs provided much-needed financing for home upgrades, particularly in predominantly Black neighborhoods where traditional lenders typically don’t do much business. They said their interest rates were lower than payday lenders and some credit cards.

Weeks after ProPublica’s investigation, the Missouri legislature passed and Gov. Mike Parson signed a law mandating more consumer protections and oversight of PACE. In Ohio, following our reporting, leaders in the state’s two most populous cities, Columbus and Cleveland, said they would not participate in any residential PACE plan.

Ohio’s bill would cap the annual interest rate on PACE loans at 8% and prohibit lenders from charging interest on fees. Lenders must verify that a borrower can repay a loan by confirming that the borrowers’ monthly debt does not exceed 43% of their monthly income and that they have sufficient income to meet basic living expenses.

The measure would also change how PACE lenders secure their loans. In states where PACE has thrived in residential markets, PACE liens are paid first if a home goes into foreclosure. And a homeowner can borrow without the consent of the bank holding the mortgage. Ohio’s bill would pay off PACE liens after the mortgage and any other liens on the property. In addition, the mortgage lender would have to agree to adding a PACE loan.

Ygrene officials did not respond to requests for comment. But a company official told the legislative committee that the bill would “unequivocally kill residential PACE.” Crystal Crawford, then a Ygrene vice president, told the committee in May that the bill was “not a consumer protection bill — it is a bank protection bill.”

Ohio’s limited experience with PACE illustrated how the program, with sufficient oversight, could be a low-cost option for borrowers. The Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority operated a pilot program allowing residents to borrow money for energy-saving projects without paying high interest or fees. A local nonprofit, the Lucas County Land Bank, made sure borrowers had the means to repay the loans, matched homeowners with contractors and made sure home improvements were completed correctly before releasing the loans.

Ygrene announced in August it had suspended making residential PACE loans in Missouri and California but was continuing to make residential PACE loans in Florida and commercial PACE loans in more than two dozen states. Commercial loans have not attracted as much attention from regulators because they tend to involve borrowers with more experience and access to capital who aren’t as likely as residential borrowers to default.

More recently, Ygrene’s website suggests that instead of making loans directly, Ygrene now operates as an online lending marketplace where consumers seeking personal loans for home improvements can enter personal information and receive offers from third-party lenders.

The complaint by the Federal Trade Commission and the California Department of Justice alleges the company deceived consumers about the potential financial impact of its financing and recorded liens on borrowers’ homes without their consent. To resolve the case, Ygrene agreed to provide monetary relief to some borrowers, end allegedly deceptive practices and meaningfully oversee the contractors who act as its sales force. The settlement must be approved by a judge.

Ygrene said in an email that the complaints date back to the “earliest days” of the company’s marketing of PACE loans in 2015 and that it had since taken “considerable action” to safeguard consumers.

“We deeply regret any negative consequences any customer may have experienced, as even one unhappy customer is too much,” the company said.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Zach Despart, Alejandro Serrano and Roxanna Asgarian, The Texas Tribune

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

This story contains audio of people calling 911 during a mass shooting incident.

The first two 911 calls came in at 11:29 a.m.

A man had crashed his truck into a ditch by Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and he was rushing toward the school with a gun.

“​​He’s inside the school shooting at the kids!” a third caller yelled at 11:33 a.m.

The gunman fired more than 100 rounds by the time police dispatchers received another call two minutes later. An adult voice could be heard making “shh” sounds for nearly 44 seconds before the phone abruptly cut out.

Monica Martinez, a STEM teacher who was hiding in a closet at the school, was among several callers from inside the school who followed.

“There’s somebody banging at my school,” Martinez said, her voice muffled as she continued speaking. “I’m so scared,” she said at 11:36 a.m.

What happened on May 24 in Uvalde is well documented. Hundreds of law enforcement officers from nearly two dozen local, state and federal agencies rushed to the scene. It took more than an hour before they entered the rooms where the gunman was located. They treated the crisis as one of a barricaded suspect who was no longer an active threat. Ultimately, 19 children and two teachers were killed in the worst school shooting in Texas history.

In the ensuing five months, the delayed law enforcement response has spurred state and federal investigations. The school district’s police chief was fired. He has publicly contested his termination, saying he was unfairly blamed. The acting Uvalde police chief has also been suspended and a state trooper fired. The chief of the Texas Rangers, the Department of Public Safety unit that is leading the state investigation, retired abruptly in September, as did his deputy in August. Several state police troopers remain under investigation. Officers facing punishment either could not immediately be reached for comment or declined to respond.

The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have for the first time obtained recordings of more than 20 emergency calls and dozens of hours of conversations between police and dispatchers that lay bare the increasing sense of urgency and desperation conveyed by children and teachers. In chilling, muffled 911 calls, they begged for help from inside the school.

Although the existence of some 911 calls and body camera footage has been reported publicly, the totality of the recordings show the pervasiveness of the miscommunication that unfolded that day.

During some calls, dispatchers and officers warned that class was supposed to be in session in rooms where the gunman had been shooting. On others, law enforcement officers said they were unaware that anyone aside from the gunman was in the classrooms, even as dispatchers received calls from children seeking help.

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Ten-year-old Khloie Torres was one of those children. While state officials previously released a transcript with excerpts from one of Khloie’s phone calls, the news organizations obtained additional recordings of her pleading for help that had not been made public. Khloie survived that day.

In an interview, her father, Ruben Torres Jr., said he is “disgusted” that police did not quickly intervene. The fact that his daughter had to wait so long to get help is “mind-boggling,” Torres said.

“There was no control. That dude had control the entire 77 minutes,” said Torres, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran. “They didn’t have him barricaded. He had the police barricaded outside. It’s plain and simple. The police didn’t go in. That’s your job: to go in.”

DPS officials did not respond to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune about the recordings. A spokesperson for the city of Uvalde, the police chief, the Uvalde mayor and the county’s chief executive declined to comment.

Communication was a key failure throughout the response. Many officers assumed the school police chief, Pete Arredondo, was in command. He did not have his radios with him, issued few orders and later said he never viewed himself as the officer in charge. County officials said emergency communications were overwhelmed in the rural community, which typically has only two dispatchers answering 911 calls and juggling the transmission of key information to emergency responders.

The emergency radio system has two 911 lines and three emergency channels. Its frequency is designed for the vast, 15,000-square-mile stretch of scrubby desert terrain, rather than for high-density urban areas where equipment must work inside buildings, said Forrest Anderson, the county’s emergency management coordinator who oversaw the radio system’s implementation two decades ago. A legislative committee that later examined the response noted that city police radios worked only intermittently inside the school.

Radio traffic and footage obtained by the news organizations show that some police knew about the 911 calls, but just how many officers remains unclear.

High-stakes emergency responses always have some communications gaps, but skilled incident commanders should be prepared to overcome such challenges, said Bob Harrison, a former California police chief and homeland security researcher at the Rand Corp., a national think tank.

Harrison noted that many of the radios used by Border Patrol agents also did not work during the Uvalde shooting response, but the agency’s SWAT team, which does not typically lead the response in school shootings because it is a federal agency focused on immigration and national security, mobilized to breach the classroom once it arrived and determined no one was in control.

“If a strong unifying command scene was set up quickly, these discrepancies wouldn’t have been necessarily relevant, and there would have been one voice and one command,” Harrison said of the problems with 911 and radio communication.

The state legislative committee reached a similar conclusion in its July investigative report, which stated that a capable incident commander would have realized that the radios were “mostly ineffective” and that responders needed other means of communication to transmit key details such as calls from victims inside the classrooms. The report highlighted that law enforcement is trained to be “prepared to respond effectively without reliable radio communications” and could employ a series of strategies including using “runners” to deliver messages in person.

But that day, children and teachers, including Martinez, waited to be rescued.

In the dark closet of room 116, Martinez stayed on the phone with a dispatcher and tried to practice a key tenet of the school’s active-shooter protocol: Be quiet.

Class Should Be in Session

When a new round of gunshots rang out from behind the closed door of the two adjoining classrooms, Uvalde police Sgt. Daniel Coronado sprinted outside, panting heavily as he relayed an urgent message on his radio to city police dispatchers.

“He’s inside the building,” Coronado said of the shooter at 11:38 a.m. “We have him contained.”

He asked for ballistic shields and requested that someone call DPS.

Then he repeated: “He’s contained. We’ve got multiple officers inside the building at this time. We believe he’s barricaded in one of the offices. Male subject is still shooting.”

Four minutes later, an unidentified male official asked that someone check the classroom of fourth-grade teacher Eva Mireles, a 44-year-old educator and the wife of Ruben Ruiz, a Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police officer. Mireles was assigned to room 112, one of two adjoining rooms where the shots were coming from.

“See if the class is in there right now or if they’re somewhere else,” the official said.

Then a Uvalde school district police officer came on the radio with a critical announcement: “The classroom should be in session right now. The class should be in session, Ms. Mireles.”

Another officer gasped.

“That’s going to be Ruben’s girl,” he said, referring to Mireles.

“Oh no, oh no,” Coronado muttered under his breath.

The exchange demonstrates some officers knew early on that the gunman was not barricaded alone in the classroom. More indicators, and clear confirmations, would come soon after — yet for much of the response, they would not be heard.

At 11:48 a.m., Ruiz, who was standing in the hallway outside of the classroom, told officers that his wife had been shot. Ruiz said his wife had called him and said she was “dying.” Mireles later died in an ambulance.

Officers escorted Ruiz outside, taking away his weapon for his safety, according to interviews officers at the scene later gave to the Texas Rangers. But they did not attempt to enter the classroom. One of the police lieutenants who heard Ruiz’s announcement told investigators that they were waiting for DPS and Border Patrol to arrive “with better equipment like rifle-rated shields.”

By that time, Martinez, the teacher, had been on the phone with 911 for more than 10 minutes. She had told the dispatcher that she could hear people in the hallway. The dispatcher urged her to stay quiet and remain barricaded in the closet.

“You still there with me?” the dispatcher asked at about 11:47 a.m.

“I’m still here,” Martinez whispered.

Misinformation spread as Martinez and other 911 callers waited to be rescued. At 11:50 a.m., a Uvalde police dispatcher wrongly reported that the school chief was “in the room with the shooter,” referring to Arredondo by his call sign.

Seven minutes later, an officer asked if any children were inside with the gunman.

“No, we don’t know anything about that,” another officer replied on the radio.

“Everything is closed, like the kids are not in there,” a third responded.

About a minute later, an officer asked for the shooter’s location.

“The school chief of police is in there with him,” another officer replied.

As the back-and-forth continued, law enforcement officers rescued people from other classrooms. At 11:58 a.m., Martinez told the dispatcher that she again heard someone knocking. She said the person had identified themselves as a police officer.

“Open the door,” the dispatcher said, confirming that the person on the other side was law enforcement. “Stay on the line with me until you make contact with him.”

“I’m coming,” the teacher whispered.

Her sobs carried through the phone.

The teacher did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

Confusion Marks Response

Some children in classrooms 111 and 112 with the gunman kept calling 911, seeking help even when they suspected it was not safe to speak. One of the first calls from a trapped student, at 12:03 p.m., was barely audible.

“There’s a school …” a muffled child’s voice reported, breaking up in the recording, “at Robb Elementary.”

The call lasted a minute and 24 seconds. The child was silent as the dispatcher asked their name and what room they were in.

“Hello, ma’am? Can you hear me?” the dispatcher asked.

Then at 12:10 p.m., Khloie called.

“There is a lot of bodies,” The New York Times previously reported that she told a dispatcher, adding that her teacher had been shot but was still alive.

Khloie stayed on the phone for more than 17 minutes. While she spoke, another city police dispatcher answered a call from DPS and erroneously reported that the school police chief was inside the classroom with the gunman.

“I have the school chief of the PD in room 111 or 112 with the active shooter, and they’re still standing by,” she said when the DPS dispatcher asked for an update. “We have multiple agencies on scene. I don’t know if you have anybody else to send out to help out?”

“We’re sending everybody that we can, um, heading out there, but do you have any injuries, fatals, anything?” the DPS dispatcher responded.

Only one female was shot, and perhaps an officer was injured, the Uvalde dispatcher replied.

A dispatcher’s voice crackled through the Uvalde police and Border Patrol radio traffic, notifying that she had a child on the line.

“The child is advising he is in the room full of victims, full of victims at this moment,” the dispatcher said.

Hallway surveillance video from inside the school at the time shows at least four law enforcement officials, one with a shield, kneeling outside the classroom door with their guns drawn.

It is not clear if the officers heard that message.

At 12:14 p.m., a state trooper’s body camera captured someone saying, “There’s victims in there, dude.” The trooper was standing outside a door to the school, with at least eight officers from different agencies visible from that camera angle.

“We need to get in there,” one responded.

No one did.

Five minutes later, another girl in room 111 called 911. The recording of the call, which lasted a minute and 17 seconds, is mostly inaudible.

In the hallway, Uvalde County Constable Emmanuel Zamora wrongly suggested that the gunman may have already shot himself.

“One shot at the end was self-inflicted, maybe,” Zamora said in the recording, referring to an earlier burst of gunfire.

Zamora did not respond to texts and emails about his comments, which had not been previously reported.

Arredondo, the school chief, can be heard on a state trooper’s body camera at 12:20 p.m. telling another officer: “We have victims in there. I don’t want to have any more. You know what I’m saying?”

It was the first time he acknowledged to other responders that anyone was wounded inside the two classrooms, according to new footage obtained by the news organizations. The legislative report noted only that he acknowledged “some casualties” 14 minutes later. Arredondo did not return a message seeking comment shared with him by his former attorney.

A minute later, the gunman fired again.

Officers in the hallway flinched, formed a line and started walking down the hall, then suddenly stopped, a state trooper’s body camera footage reveals.

Just after the shots were fired at 12:21 p.m., the school chief began trying to talk to the shooter for the first time, according to communications and records.

“If you can hear me, sir, please put your firearm down, sir,” Arredondo said. “We don’t want anyone else hurt.”

Just after 12:30 p.m., three troopers again advanced toward the classrooms before an unidentified person said “no, no, no,” according to body camera footage.

Once again, they stopped.

A DPS trooper who made his way into the hallway around that time asked another officer if there were children in the classroom. The response was, “We don’t know.”

By then, more than 20 minutes had lapsed since Khloie first begged a dispatcher for help. She ended the initial call when she feared the gunman, who she felt taunted the children, was getting close, her father later recalled.

She called 911 again at 12:36 p.m.

“There’s a school shooting,” Khloie said. “Yes, I’m aware,” the dispatcher responded. “I was talking to you earlier. You’re still there in your room? You’re still in room 112?” “Yeah,” Khloie replied. “OK. You stay on the line with me. Do not disconnect,” the dispatcher said.

“Can you tell the police to come to my room?” Khloie whispered. The dispatcher said: “I’ve already told them to go to the room. We’re trying to get someone to you.”

About two minutes later, Khloie once more asked for police.

Yet again, a dispatcher tried to reassure her.

“I have someone that is trying to get to you, OK,” she said.

Khloie whispered that she thought she heard the police next door.

“If you hear anyone come in, but they’re not supposed to be there, and they don’t say that they’re police, y’all pretend that you are asleep, OK?” the dispatcher replied.

“That Was You?”

As the Border Patrol strike team was almost ready to breach, DPS Capt. Joel Betancourt went on the radio and ordered the agents to wait.

“The team that’s gonna breach needs to stand by,” Betancourt said at 12:50 p.m.

The captain did not respond to requests for comment left for him through DPS.

The team ignored the order and entered the classroom, quickly killing the shooter. The previously silent hallway filled with officers waiting to act.

Someone yelled, “Make a hole!” as police carried out wounded children. Law enforcement officers motioned for those who were not as severely injured to walk out on their own.

“Oh man, I guess there was more kids in that room,” a DPS special agent said, according to his body camera footage. “Yeah, he must have had some hostages,” another law enforcement officer replied.

As the onsite paramedics focused on the most critically injured, officers began taking other hurt children to the hospital. Khloie was among them.

“I was on the phone with a police officer,” she told the trooper examining her as the screams of other wounded children reverberated in the background.

The officer, whose body camera had earlier picked up a dispatcher describing that call, seemed surprised.

“Oh, that was you?” the trooper asked.

Uriel J. Garcia of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.

Correction

Nov. 3, 2022: A previous version of this story included incorrect details of a request to check the classroom of teacher Eva Mireles early in the police response. The request was to check Mireles' room, 112, not the adjoining 111. It was made by an unidentified male official, not a dispatcher. And class was reported to be in session by a school district police officer, not a Uvalde officer. That same officer, not a dispatcher, also wrongly reported over the radio at 11:50 a.m. that the school chief was "in the room with the shooter."

by Heather Vogell

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The chair of a U.S. Senate committee asked the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to review whether a Texas-based property tech company’s rent-setting software violates antitrust laws.

The move comes after ProPublica published an investigation Oct. 15 into RealPage’s pricing software, which suggests new rents daily to landlords for all available units in a building. Critics say the software may be helping big landlords operate as a cartel to push rents above competitive levels in some markets.

“Alarmingly, recent reporting by ProPublica highlighted that RealPage’s algorithm-based price optimization software, YieldStar, is being used by a growing number of property managers and landlords, potentially impacting pricing and the supply of homes in the rental market,” said the letter signed by U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who chairs the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. “Renters should have the power to negotiate fairly priced housing, free from illicit collusion and deceptive pricing techniques.”

RealPage’s software applies a complex set of mathematical rules to a vast trove of data collected by the company from landlords who are its clients. That data includes the otherwise private data of nearby competitors.

“Troublingly, ProPublica reported that a former RealPage executive stated that the data could give insight into how competitors within a half-mile or mile radius are pricing their units,” said the letter, which was addressed to FTC chair Lina Khan.

RealPage has said the data fed into its pricing tool is anonymized and aggregated. It said the company “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

In a statement Tuesday, the company said it had not seen the letter, “but we are always willing to engage with policy stakeholders to ensure they have the facts about the competitive dynamics of the housing market and the value and benefits that RealPage creates for renters and housing providers.”

Critics say the use of private data is one of the reasons the software invites scrutiny from antitrust enforcers such as the FTC. RealPage also claims its analytics “balance supply and demand to maximize revenue growth.” And the company organizes forums for competitors to meet and discuss aspects of its software, including its pricing algorithms. One legal expert told ProPublica that such collaborations “could raise an antitrust red flag.”

In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, all of which used pricing software sold by RealPage in at least some of their buildings.

The Senate letter said the recent reporting on RealPage “raises serious concerns about collusion in the rental market.” It said “the FTC should review whether rent setting algorithms that analyze rent prices through the use of competitors’ private data, such as YieldStar, violate antitrust laws.”

RealPage said previously that its revenue management software prioritizes a property’s own internal supply and demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents. The software helps eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing, which often relies on phone surveys of competitor prices, the company said.

An FTC spokesperson said the agency does not comment on letters or requests from Congress.

The letter also raised concerns that the pricing software is potentially restricting the supply of apartments. It said that the national rental vacancy rate was just 5.6% at the end of 2021, the lowest since 1984. Even in the tight market, however, it said, there are reports that RealPage’s algorithm sometimes encourages property owners to keep units vacant or push tenants out to increase profits.

The letter cited ProPublica’s story, which quoted from a 2017 earnings call with RealPage’s then-CEO, Steve Winn. He explained how one large property company found it could increase profits by raising rents and leaving more apartments vacant.

Winn has not responded to requests for comment.

“Intentionally holding units vacant, when there are so few homes available, decreases a consumer’s negotiating power and exacerbates the housing shortage,” the letter said.

RealPage’s influence over apartment pricing has grown substantially in recent years, following its 2017 acquisition of its biggest pricing competitor, software called Lease RentOptions, or LRO, from The Rainmaker Group. RealPage was pricing 1.5 million units at the time, and the purchase allowed it to double that number. The Department of Justice’s antitrust division took a close look at the merger, but allowed it to proceed.

By 2020, RealPage had expanded its number of clients to 31,700 across all its products, which also include accounting, lease management and other software. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought RealPage last year for $10.2 billion. It now calls its pricing software AI Revenue Management.

After ProPublica published its investigation, a group of tenants filed a lawsuit against RealPage and nine of the country’s biggest landlords, alleging they were colluding to artificially inflate rents.

A RealPage spokesperson has denied the allegations and said the company “will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” She declined to comment further, saying the company does not comment on pending litigation.

by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

There’s a phrase that pops up a lot when investigative journalists talk about politics: Follow the money.

For journalists, that often means looking at how political campaigns are funded and who’s paying for lobbyists. Today we’re going to talk about some of the methods we use to dig into those subjects.

This advice may not lead to you uncovering large-scale corruption — let us know if you do, though — but we hope to better acquaint you with which industries are donating to races you care about, how your candidates spend the money they raise and the oversized influence the ultrawealthy can have.

Campaign Finance Laws Are Meant to Increase Transparency

After the Watergate scandal (which, in addition to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, involved campaign funds used toward the scheme), Congress strengthened laws requiring federal campaigns to report their political contributions and spending to the Federal Election Commission. This was designed as a check against corruption, but also as a way to keep voters reasonably informed about money in politics.

So, let’s take a look at what money does in a campaign. Seeing where a candidate’s money comes from, as well as which groups are spending on behalf of (or against) their campaign, helps you understand their beliefs, the advice they’re getting and the kinds of policies they’re likely to support.

What a Donation Gets Candidates:

Money can help someone win an election, though it’s not the only factor. By and large, donations get spent on the day-to-day expenses of running a campaign. You can use FEC data to research how candidates are spending their funds this election.

It’s probably garden-variety stuff: lunch, plane tickets, campaign ads, fundraising software, venue rentals for campaign events. In some cases, you might even see donations to the campaigns of other candidates they support. The choices candidates make tell you something about their priorities: where they’re spending their time, which voters they’re trying hardest to win over (older voters with TV ads or younger folks online) and how much they pay their staff.

Of course, sometimes candidates try to hide the true purpose of their campaign expenses. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California was sentenced to 11 months in prison in 2020 for spending 2018 campaign donations on family trips to Hawaii and Italy and private school for his children.

What a Donation Gets Campaign Donors:

Individuals are allowed to contribute up to $2,900 per election to each candidate’s campaign. (A primary and a general election count as separate elections; so do runoffs.)

Campaign donations are not supposed to be transactional — that’s considered bribery, and it’s a crime. But they are a way of establishing a relationship and opening the door to conversations between the donor and the government. One example of this: In January 2021, The Intercept obtained a recording of a Zoom call Sen. Joe Manchin had with billionaire donors that shed light on the kind of access major funders get.

Most of the time these donors don’t see a direct “return” on their investment. If you donate to a candidate, chances are you’re getting one of two things:

1. The satisfaction of backing a potential winner who shares your values or goals.
2. Access. Academic research has shown that elected officials are more responsive to requests for meetings that come from donors to their campaigns. When you give money, the recipients know it, and while they may not agree with all your positions, they’re more likely to hear you out.

I know: It’s murky.

But, thanks to regulations in the ‘70s, we can at least see what’s behind the curtain. If you give $200 or more to a candidate, the campaign is required to report your name, address and employer or occupation to the FEC. Based on these FEC filings, along with similar disclosures from political action committees, the Center for Responsive Politics (through its site OpenSecrets.org) determines which industries are funding the candidates in your race, and you can look it up.

Take a close look at the types of sectors and interest groups donating to your candidates. These can signal who has their ear.

What a Donation Gets Super PAC Donors:

Some of the biggest players in the campaign landscape are super PACs. These are political action committees that don’t give directly to a candidate but spend independently in support of (or in opposition to) them. This outside spending is completely uncapped, freeing super PACs to raise any amount of money to influence any given race — and typically what super PACs spend money on are negative campaign ads. (You may balk at this, but, even if people claim to hate them, attack ads work.)

Think about the negative ads you’ve seen lately. Chances are they were funded by a super PAC that believe certain voters can be activated based on its message. Knowing who these groups are can help you better understand their motives and better assess whether you buy what they’re selling. You can browse our FEC Itemizer database to learn more about outside spending in specific races.

Super PACs tend to represent three main categories:

• Single-issue groups: Think advocacy groups that focus on abortion, the environment or taxes.

• Partisan groups: These are super PACs linked to key House and Senate leaders, like the Congressional Leadership Fund (affiliated with House Republican leaders) and the Senate Majority PAC (connected with Senate Democratic leadership). While lawmakers themselves are restricted from soliciting unlimited donations to the super PACs they’re tied to, the people running these groups can do so on their behalf.

• Family interests: Basically, this is when a wealthy family member donates money to a campaign or supportive PAC. For example, New Jersey congressional candidate Bob Healey’s campaign is supported by a Super PAC mostly funded by a $2 million donation from his mother.

Outside spending from super PACs can have a big impact on an election. For example, the Saving Arizona PAC, which is connected to tech mogul Peter Thiel, is pouring millions into ads supporting Republican Blake Masters, who is running to unseat Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona. This comes after the Washington Post reported that Mitch McConnell asked Thiel to intervene in the race after he funded the Masters in the primary.

How Companies and Industries Grapple with Politicized Donations

A total of 147 members of Congress voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election win. Pro-Trump Republicans had planned the vote for weeks, riding baseless claims of election fraud that had already been debunked in lawsuits, recounts and more. Until that moment, the certification vote had been symbolic. There was no procedural or democratic reason to vote against certifying election results, which were real, or state electors, who had already been sent by the states. A violent mob broke into and ransacked the U.S. Capitol, calling for Mike Pence’s hanging and other blood. In the aftermath, dozens of companies released statements that they’d no longer be donating to candidates who voted against certifying the election.

ProPublica focuses on accountability, so, naturally, we wanted to know whether they’d stuck to their word.

Sergio Hernandez, a news apps developer here, looked into it. Using publicly available campaign finance information, he found that Fortune 500 companies have given millions of dollars to election deniers who voted against certifying the 2020 election. You can look up each company’s top beneficiaries, individual contributions and whether they kept their promises.

What About Dark Money?

Transparency laws as they are written only bring us so much information. Since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, dark money (money spent by political nonprofits or super PACs, which are not legally obligated to disclose donors) has been flowing fast. That’s one reason ProPublica is busy. Sometimes it takes intrepid journalists who investigate as their full-time jobs to unearth just some of the ways the ultrawealthy influence how the government operates.

In August, ProPublica and its partner The Lever exposed how an elderly, ultrasecretive business owner named Barre Seid gave the largest known political donation, worth $1.6 billion, to an advocacy organization run by Leonard Leo, one of the prime architects of the conservative effort to reshape the Supreme Court.

Seid, a later investigation found, has been quietly funding right-wing causes using a strategy he called “attack philanthropy.” Seid did much of his political funding while trying to remain below radar. That’s one reason you may have never heard of him. But the donors who help shape this country deserve as much scrutiny and publicity as the politicians they support. After all, this country belongs to all of us.

by Alec MacGillis and Sergio Hernandez

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Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the reliably provocative Georgia Republican, declared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” that if her party wins back a House majority next week, as is quite likely, it will seek revenge on the corporations that curtailed contributions to the 147 congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. “That’s not going to be forgotten by a whole bunch of my Republican colleagues,” she said.

It is not clear exactly what form such punishment would take. But there’s another complicating factor in this revenge scenario: Many of the corporations that announced with great fanfare their cutoff in contributions after the certification vote and storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have since resumed giving to some of those 147 Republicans. In other words, if Greene leads a quest for revenge on those companies, she’ll be taking aim at the very corporations that have funded many of her allies.

For some of the companies, the resumption of giving to the 147 Republicans (139 in the House, eight in the Senate) started only a few months after they vowed to stop. But ProPublica has now created a tool to track and assess this remarkable shift: an app that has collected all of the campaign contributions that Fortune 500 corporations made to the 147 over the past two years. All told, at least 228 of the Fortune 500 — representing more than two-thirds of the 300-odd companies that have political action committees — have given to the 147, for a total of more than $13 million. (This does not include millions in contributions made to Republican campaign committees for the House and Senate, much of which is making its way to those who voted against certifying the election results.)

That $13 million sum is a stark testament to business as usual in Washington. These members — more than half of the Republicans in Congress — decided to side with the baseless claim to victory by then-President Donald Trump, thereby exacerbating an unprecedented transition-of-power crisis that threatened to upend the political order. And yet those members have managed to resume receiving substantial contributions from the companies that depend on the stability of that political order, including companies that garnered public relations points after the Jan. 6 riots by saying they were cutting the 147 off.

Take, for instance, General Electric, which issued a particularly strong clarion call in announcing a new post-Jan. 6 policy for its GE Employee Political Action Committee. “The GEPAC board has voted to suspend donations to those who voted to oppose the Electoral College results,” said Meghan Thurlow, GE’s global director of public affairs. “This is not a decision we made lightly, but is one we believe is important to ensure that our future contributions continue to reflect our company’s values and commitment to democracy.”

Less than two years later, GE has made contributions to 11 of the Republicans who voted against certifying the results. The company’s explanation of the shift? “The GEPAC board’s broad suspension of donations to those who voted to oppose the Electoral College results remains in place,” said a company spokesperson. “However, like many other PACs, it will consider individual exceptions on a case-by-case basis.”

Among the lucky beneficiaries of those exceptions: Rep. Ken Calvert of California, who said after the 2020 election that Trump “has the right to ensure vote counts are complete, accurate and legal”; Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, who tweeted, “I stand with President Trump. Every legal vote must be counted in complete transparency”; and Rep. Ron Estes of Kansas, who decried the FBI search for classified records in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home as an outrage that “undermines the credibility of the FBI.” All voted against certifying the election. All are also on committees of importance to GE: Calvert is on the appropriations subcommittees for defense and energy spending, Graves is the top Republican on the committee overseeing transportation and infrastructure, and Estes is on the ways and means subcommittee overseeing taxation.

Also among the companies jumping on the bandwagon was Home Depot. “We are pausing to take time to carefully review and reevaluate each of the members who voted to object to the election results before considering further contributions to them,” said Sara Gorman, the company’s senior director of corporate communications, on Jan. 27, 2021.

That pause, it turned out, lasted only a year, less than many home appliance warranties. Home Depot has given a total of $475,000 to 65 of the 147, making it the top donor to 2020 election deniers. Asked about this, Gorman said, “Our associate-funded PAC is bipartisan. It supports candidates and organizations on both sides of the aisle who champion pro-business, pro-retail positions that create jobs and economic growth.” No more mention of the 2020 election or the denial of such.

Standing in contrast are big companies that have not given to any of the 147 through their corporate PACs during this election cycle, which include tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft and Wall Street powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock.

But then there is Boeing, which in the idealistic days of early 2021 announced, through then-spokesperson Bradley Akubuiro, “Boeing strongly condemns the violence, lawlessness and destruction that took place in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Given the current environment, we are not making political contributions at this time. We will continue to carefully evaluate future contributions to ensure that we support those who not only support our company, but also uphold our country’s most fundamental principles.”

Among those now apparently upholding the country’s most fundamental principles, in Boeing’s estimations, are 74 of the Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, who have received more than $390,000. Asked about the contributions, company spokesperson Connor Greenwood said, “We do not have anything to add to the story.”

Joining Boeing in announcing a hiatus in political giving in early 2021 were its competitors in the defense contracting realm: Northrop Grumman, which was “evaluating the way forward”; Lockheed Martin, which was updating its strategy to “reflect our core values”; and Raytheon, which needed to “reflect on the current environment.” All that evaluating and reflecting seems to have gotten old fast: Northrop has given $175,000 to 26 of the 147; Lockheed donated more than $366,000 to 90 of them; and Raytheon has given $309,000 to 66. None of the three companies responded to questions.

One other defense contractor did respond: General Dynamics, which has given more than $324,000 to 67 of the 147 Republicans. In response to questions about the contributions, spokesperson Jeff Davis noted that the company’s recent investor report stated: “Our employee PAC will not support members of Congress who provoke or incite violence or similar unlawful conduct.”

Asked to elaborate on how the company determined whether a member had provoked or incited violence, Davis said, “Sorry, I’m not able to help beyond what is already written there.”

American Airlines, meanwhile, had put an explicit three-month duration on its own pause in political giving after Jan. 6, but had said that when it resumed making contributions, it would make sure to focus its support on lawmakers who “support U.S. aviation, airline workers and our values, including bringing people together.” Those whom it deems to have “brought people together” now include 42 of the 147 Republicans, for a total of more than $128,000. The company had no comment.

Regions Financial, the bank holding company, also had strong feelings about national togetherness as it announced a halt to political giving in January 2021. “This is a time for us, as a nation, to come together and identify a united path forward,” said media and public relations manager Jeremy King in that halcyon moment.

That united path forward led Regions to give to 74 of the 147 Republicans, for a total of more than $258,000. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

ProPublica also reached out to more than a half dozen other companies that were either among the top 15 donors overall to the 147 or among the top 10 donors on the list of companies that had announced a halt to contributions after Jan. 6: AT&T, Comcast, Honeywell, L3Harris, Marathon Petroleum, Williams and UPS.

None responded to requests for comment, with the exception of L3Harris, where spokesperson Paul Swiergosz wrote back, “We will politely decline comment regarding this story.”

Politeness is certainly appreciated in this uncivil age. So are “commitment to democracy,” “a united path forward,” and concern for “our country’s fundamental principles,” especially if they endure for more than a news cycle or two.

by Sergio Hernandez, with additional reporting by Nat Lash

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, more than 100 major companies pledged to suspend political giving to the members of Congress who voted to invalidate Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Since then, many have resumed funding this group of lawmakers, often with little to no explanation.

ProPublica wanted to gauge corporate America’s continued support for these officials by tallying donations from a recognizable group: companies in the Fortune 500, whose political arms have sent these lawmakers nearly $13.2 million during the 2021-2022 election cycle.

Drill down to see each company’s top beneficiaries and individual contributions and how long companies kept their promises.

by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz

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On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed his national security team to make a plan to confront domestic terrorism. In their ensuing report, Biden’s advisers homed in on “a crisis of disinformation and misinformation.” The new administration, they pledged, would work to “counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.”

But the reality of the administration’s efforts has been less robust than its rhetoric. Instead, a ProPublica review found, the Biden administration has backed away from a comprehensive effort to address disinformation after accusations from Republicans and right-wing influencers that the administration was trying to stifle dissent.

In May, one Department of Homeland Security office instructed staffers that work on “sensitive” topics including disinformation should be put on “immediate hold,” according to material reviewed by ProPublica. In the months that followed, DHS canceled a series of planned contracts that would have tracked and studied the proliferation of disinformation and its connection with violent attacks. And after issuing six nationwide warnings about domestic terrorism fueled by disinformation in the first 13 months of the Biden administration, DHS has only issued one in the eight months since.

The government’s retreat comes ahead of midterms in which election officials throughout the country are being inundated with false rumors about their work. After talks on a project to help election officials monitor and respond to threats stalled, election officials from Colorado and Florida wrote a private letter in August to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pleading for help.

“Threats and harassment of election officials has become an extremely serious concern and terribly frequent experience for election workers,” they warned, adding, “We are ourselves a crucial part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, in need of and deserving of protection.”

“Time is of the essence,” the officials wrote.

Weeks later, DHS scrapped the project.

DHS’ change of course began after a storm erupted in May in reaction to the administration’s creation of a Disinformation Governance Board. Congressional Republicans called it a “Ministry of Truth.” The board was terminated just months later.

Aspects of the administration’s retreat on disinformation have been reported, including a CNN story about the DHS’ rejection of a project to protect election workers from harassment. But the extent of the turnabout has not been fully examined.

“They paused all the work on disinformation, not just the board,” Nina Jankowicz, the former executive director of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, told ProPublica. “The administration kowtowed to the disinformation rather than fighting it.”

It is not clear whether DHS’ initiatives would have made a significant difference in combating the tsunami of false rumors. But the current and former employees are frustrated that the agency’s efforts have been hobbled in response to political pressure.

DHS maintains it has not retreated on its disinformation efforts. “We have worked for over a decade to address disinformation that poses a threat to that security. This critical work continues today across several DHS components, consistent with the law and in a manner that is transparent and upholds the privacy, civil rights and civil liberties of the American people,” a DHS spokesperson said.

The agency has stepped up some activity in recent weeks, increasing alerts and training for election workers. On Friday, DHS, along with the FBI, the Capitol Police and the National Counterterrorism Center, issued a bulletin warning that “election-related perceptions of fraud” will “likely” drive some extremists to attempt acts of violence.

But, despite the initiatives, election administrators remain deeply concerned.

“States need more support. It is clear that threats to election officials and workers are not dissipating and may only escalate around the 2022 and 2024 elections,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said in an email to ProPublica. “Election offices need immediate meaningful support from federal partners.”

The new administration moved quickly after Biden’s inauguration. Experts welcomed the increased pace of domestic terrorism warnings and their focus on false rumors that could be weaponized for violent ends. In September 2021, Mayorkas’ top aides suggested creating the disinformation board after identifying the problem as a “serious homeland security risk.”

In early 2022, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is part of DHS, was in talks to deploy a federally funded nonprofit to protect election workers from harassment and violence.

The effort would have allowed elections officials to sign up for a service to protect them from having their identities and personal information exposed on the internet, known as doxxing. It also would have created a system to track and alert elections officials who were subject to serious threats on social media, including from foreign actors.

Around the same time, as lies about elections were becoming a central plank of GOP candidates, Republicans also began to attack the administration’s efforts. Some free-speech advocates also expressed concerns about government overreach.

An early Republican critic was Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. DHS had sent out an alert about “false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud.” Blackburn objected in a February letter to Mayorkas, writing, “The Department comes dangerously close to suggesting that publicly disagreeing with the current administration is akin to domestic terrorism.” Blackburn did not respond to a request for comment.

At that time, DHS was establishing the Disinformation Governance Board. It hired Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation, as its executive director. The board was tasked with coordinating all the efforts to confront the problem across the sprawling agency. The board’s charter was careful to note that the government needed to respect privacy and free speech.

Nevertheless, just hours after word leaked of its formation, right-wing media influencer Jack Posobiec issued a series of tweets slamming the board. Soon, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., were calling the board a “Ministry of Truth,” an apparent reference to a fictional government body that feeds people lies in George Orwell’s “1984.” Clyde did not respond to a request for comment. About 70% of Fox News’ one-hour segments over the next week contained a reference to the board, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonprofit media research group. The New York Post ran a cover with an image of Jankowicz and the headline: “Big Sister Is Watching You.” Jankowicz was subject to an outpouring of degrading comments and death threats.

A senior DHS official who spoke for the administration said to ProPublica that the board had become “a distraction that was making it harder for us to do the work we thought was essential.” In May, DHS “paused” the board and Jankowicz resigned, just 10 weeks after she had begun work.

That’s when the word went out to DHS staffers that work on “sensitive” topics like disinformation should be put on hold. DHS had been negotiating with a security firm called Moonshot, which specializes in monitoring online threats for governments and social media platforms. After the criticism of the board, discussions were halted and the contract was not signed. Eventually, DHS also froze millions of dollars for disinformation research contracts with two universities and the Rand Corporation, according to three people familiar with the matter. And a CISA “Rumor Control” webpage for election workers issued no updates from May to October.

DHS’ rollback in an election year alarmed former senior officials in homeland security. One of them, Bob Kolasky, a former top CISA official under Trump and Biden, warned in an opinion piece in a professional journal, “Many of our foreign allies, notably the Swedes and the French, have been much more aggressive in organizing to deal with the disinformation risk.” Without the board, “the country remains at risk.”

The pausing of the board and Jankowicz’s exit did not placate critics on the right. On the House floor, Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., accused the Biden administration of trying “to target and silence citizens who disagree with government actions.” Biggs did not respond to a request for comment.

In August, with the disinformation board still leaderless and frozen, Mayorkas killed it for good. The agency also canceled the CISA project with the nonprofit that would have tracked online death threats to election workers and offered them enhanced protection of their personal information.

The DHS is not the only federal agency confronting the problem. The FBI, which is under the Department of Justice, also monitors such threats, but it is focused on gathering evidence of crimes. In 2021, the DOJ formed a task force to investigate threats to election workers, inviting them to submit tips to the FBI. So far, more than 1,000 have come in, and the DOJ has filed eight cases against people who allegedly threatened workers with violence.

But experts say prosecutors and the FBI alone cannot effectively deal with the problem. DHS’ mission — to gather and share information with partners in government and law enforcement before crimes occur — is critical to prevention.

Today inside the department “scrutiny is over the top on anything to do with terrorism, extremism, violence prevention — especially domestic terrorism,” a current DHS official said.

“The answer is not how do we do it better; in the face of criticism, it’s to shut it all down,” one former high-level DHS official told ProPublica. The officials were granted anonymity so that they didn’t suffer reprisals.

The bitter irony is not lost on experts in the field, who say that the attacks can have a chilling effect on outside researchers, too.

“The very thing we are studying is being used against us because the tactics work,” said University of Washington’s Kate Starbird, who advises DHS on disinformation and who herself has recently been subject to harassment based on rumors. “They undermine trust in institutions and in government and tie our hands when we try to protect ourselves.”

With DHS stymied, election officials report it’s up to them to keep abreast of the false information and respond. Julie Slomski, clerk of Erie County, Pennsylvania, said she now spends about half of her workday explaining how elections work to angry or suspicious constituents. She gives out her cellphone number and tells people to call or text with questions. “Here in Erie County, we’re an open book,” she said. But she’s taking precautions. Slomski now wears a bulletproof backpack her sister bought her.

In lieu of a robust official government effort, the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which had once hoped for government resources and sponsorship, is briefing election workers on how to keep track of false information and respond effectively.

“I was surprised at the number of people who came up to me afterwards saying, no one had told us about any of this,” said John Cohen, a former top DHS official in the Biden administration and currently in leadership at the Center for Internet Security.

Some elections officials, however, question whether the federal government should be involved in this effort at all. Michael Adams, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, said the election denialism he encounters is so disconnected from facts that “sometimes I’m at a loss to even know how to reason with these people.” Adams has called out election conspiracies, but he believes his constituents are more likely to accept information about elections as trustworthy if it comes from local officials.

“I don’t think that the federal government, the so-called deep state, putting out information and saying ‘trust us’ is an effective strategy for persuasion,” he said.

But others say the federal government is doing too little, too late.

“We’re getting help, but much more is needed in certain areas,” Wesley Wilcox, supervisor of elections in Marion County, Florida, and one of the authors of the August letter to DHS pleading for help, said in a recent email to ProPublica. “I am NOT a proponent of a massive Federal Government intrusion. But, there are some very specialized areas that are a ‘best fit’ for the Federal Government.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Update, Nov. 1, 2022: This story was updated to include a reference to a CNN story about the DHS’ rejection of a project to protect election workers from harassment.

by Hannah Dreyfus

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The Colorado courts have suspended a well-known custody evaluator and launched a review of the entire state-approved roster, following a ProPublica investigation that found some evaluators had continued to work after being disciplined by state regulators and accused of domestic violence.

Jaime Watman, of the State Court Administrator’s Office, confirmed the audit of all custody evaluators and said that Mark Kilmer, who has served for decades as an evaluator in Colorado family courts, has been suspended while his “continued suitability” is reviewed. Kilmer was arrested and charged with assault in 2006 after his then-wife said he pushed her to the bathroom floor, according to police reports.

Kilmer pleaded guilty to harassment in 2007; the charge was dismissed by the court after Kilmer successfully completed domestic violence counseling and 24 months of probation.

In an interview with ProPublica, Kilmer denied the allegations and said his guilty plea was a result of poor legal representation.

Watman noted that because judges appoint evaluators to the cases they preside over, her office “has no authority to terminate an appointment” that is currently underway. Any action on “current appointments,” she said, will be determined by “the judicial officer presiding over the case.”

Kilmer, who was suspended last week, did not respond to a request for comment on the suspension.

In an interview with ProPublica, Kilmer said he does not believe 90% of the abuse allegations he hears during the course of his work.

ProPublica found that Kilmer is one of four parental responsibility evaluators, or PREs, on the state roster who have been charged with harassment or domestic violence. In one case, the charges were dismissed. In the two others, it is unclear how the charges were resolved.

ProPublica also found that 1 in 5 PREs, including Kilmer, has been publicly sanctioned by the Colorado State Board of Psychologist Examiners, six times the rate of discipline for all psychologists with active licenses in the state. Evaluators were sanctioned for misrepresenting their credentials, failing to keep client’s information confidential and, in one case detailed by the Gazette, of Colorado Springs, failing to disclose a conflict of interest that is alleged to have contributed to the death of a 10-year-old, according to a complaint filed by the child’s mother with the state board. (In his response to the complaint, the PRE said he never perceived threats to the child’s safety.)

None of the sanctioned or arrested PREs lost their licenses or had them suspended.

ProPublica spoke to 45 Colorado parents who were involved in custody disputes with allegations of child and domestic abuse. In cases evaluated by a PRE with a criminal or disciplinary record, the parents said they only learned about their evaluator’s background after the court had appointed them.

Multiple parents who alleged they had experienced abuse in their relationships said evaluators downplayed or omitted the abuse from their reports to the court.

Judges are not obligated to follow evaluators’ recommendations, but PREs acknowledge their opinions are very influential. “At this point in my career, sometimes the judge just cuts and pastes all my recommendations and puts it into the court order,” Kilmer told ProPublica.

The State Court Administrator’s Office, which is responsible for vetting PREs and other court-appointed custody evaluators, said a criminal misdemeanor conviction older than 15 years does not disqualify a custody evaluator from family court appointments. The office also said that discipline by the State Board of Psychologist Examiners does not disqualify an evaluator unless it currently affects their license.

A Colorado law that took effect in January placed court evaluators under the supervision of the State Court Administrator’s Office. Before then, evaluators were not formally vetted by the court and operated with little to no supervision. Watman said the court does not have authority “to consider complaints arising in cases filed prior to” Jan. 1.

The new law also requires court evaluators to receive additional training on how to identify domestic violence and child abuse and on how abuse should be weighed in custody recommendations.

Rep. Meg Froelich, the bill’s sponsor, told ProPublica she will push for additional family court reforms in the next legislative session, including requiring additional education for family court judges.

Froelich said she will model legislation after a Pennsylvania measure, known as Kayden’s Law, that mandates judges and court personnel receive training about child abuse and domestic violence and adds to the evidence judges must consider in custody decisions.

In March, President Joe Biden signed a law that adds language from Kayden’s Law to the reauthorized federal Violence Against Women Act, allocating additional federal funds to states that update their child custody laws to better protect at-risk children.

by Doug Bock Clark

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

On a Saturday in late March, the woman who runs elections in the rural hills of Surry County, North Carolina, was pulling another weekend shift preparing for the upcoming primary, when she began to hear on the other side of her wall the thunder of impassioned speeches. She was dismayed that the voices were questioning the election she’d overseen in 2020 and implying that corrupted voting machines had helped steal it. She also believed it was no coincidence that the Surry County GOP convention — the highlight of which was a lecture from a nationally prominent proponent of the stolen-election myth — was taking place in a public meeting room right next to her office.

The elections director, 47-year-old Michella Huff, who’d lived in the county since high school and knew many voters by name, considered it ludicrous that anyone could think the election had been rigged in Surry County. Donald Trump had received upward of 70% of the roughly 36,000 votes cast. Huff, a registered Republican for most of her adult life, had personally certified the vote.

Yet people had begun approaching Huff in church recently, saying things like, “I know you didn’t do anything, but that election was stolen.” In February, a longtime acquaintance of Huff’s cornered her in a bluegrass music store and berated her with complaints rooted in conspiracy theories. Huff started limiting her trips to town, even doing her grocery order online. “I didn’t want to have to deal with that,” she said of the election backlash. But it was hard to live in partial hiding. “I’m not that kind of person. I’m a people person.”

Unbeknownst to Huff, a national network of election deniers had been making inroads in Surry County, on the fringe of Appalachia. In early 2022, several members of the Surry County GOP had attended a training, put on by North Carolina Audit Force, which describes itself as a group that forms grassroots coalitions to “reveal election irregularities.” There, they were taught to “canvass” for election fraud by door-knocking to check for inaccuracies in public records, such as if a different person lived at an address than was listed on voter rolls. Discrepancies, canvassers claim, can indicate fraud — though experts say that canvassers often misinterpret normal imperfections in difficult-to-maintain voter lists, such as someone failing to update their address when moving. By early March, canvassers were crisscrossing Surry County, following “walk books” put together by data analysts associated with North Carolina Audit Force, who mapped routes for efficiency.

The featured lecturer at the Surry County GOP convention, Douglas Frank, is the face of the nationwide canvassing movement and claims to have established campaigns with the help of “supermoms” in at least 40 states. Frank and other speakers spent hours at the convention blaming corrupted voting machines and collusion among Democrats, Big Tech and nefarious forces for stealing the election. The assembly ultimately passed resolutions to create an election integrity task force and push for an audit, tactics espoused by Trump supporters.

The following Monday morning, Frank showed up at the service window of Huff’s office with William Keith Senter, the new chair of the Surry County GOP, and a woman who signed the guestbook as “NC Audit Force.” Huff believed that the group wanted to get inside her office — where voting equipment was kept — so she stepped into the cramped lobby with them, letting the door to her office automatically lock behind her.

The bowtie-wearing Frank began complaining to Huff about “phantom voters” discovered through canvassing and declaring that if he could just take an electromagnetic field meter tool to her DS200 ballot tabulators, he could reveal a minuscule modem that had helped switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. It wasn’t the first time that Frank had encouraged an election official to let outsiders access election equipment. About 11 months before, he’d offered to help bring in a “team” to “audit” machines for Colorado officials, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant of an official charged in the incident and to Frank himself. In September, Frank posted on Telegram that his phone had been seized by FBI agents investigating the incident, according to The Washington Post. Frank has not been charged.

“My objective is to help the clerk understand how they’re being hacked and what they need to do to fix it,” Frank said when asked about Colorado, using another term for election officials. In reference to Huff, he said: “I was there trying to offer a service to the clerk. I always assume clerks want to have clean elections, which is why I offered to help her find out if her machines were online or not.” Frank claimed to have convinced “dozens” of other election and county-level officials of the need to probe voting machines, “and that’s why counties all across the country are taking the machines out of the election process.”

It was not Frank who most concerned Huff, however, but Senter — a high school auto shop teacher and cattle farmer with a mechanic’s callused hands and baseball hat declaring “Pray for America” atop his silvering hair. The new GOP chair — who, according to three members of the Surry County GOP, replaced a predecessor who hadn’t sufficiently backed claims of election fraud — would remain in Huff’s orbit long after the barnstorming Frank left town. Indeed, Senter was only at the beginning of a campaign that would include efforts to drastically cut Huff’s pay and call into question even the most mundane functions of her office.

Huff told ProPublica that, as the men pressured her for more than an hour, Senter threatened that she should comply with their demands or the county commission would fire her. (She initially described this incident in an article by Reuters.) She feared that her reddening face and neck gave away her fear. (The commission has no authority to fire Huff; she is appointed by and answers to the county and state boards of elections. Senter denied threatening Huff’s job and wrote to ProPublica that “I speak loudly because I do not hear well. I drove a loud race car for years and have shot high powered rifles all of my life, so I have high frequency hearing loss.” Frank said that descriptions of Senter as threatening were “overblown,” and that “he might have been emphatic, but never, like, threatening.”)

But Huff refused to give in.

Huff is hardly the only election official struggling to stand up to those who believe the voting system is rigged; such confrontations have dramatically unfolded across the country, from Hood County, Texas, to Floyd County, Georgia, to Nye County, Nevada. Her circumstances illustrate how the efforts to target her are part of a larger playbook, with tactics that are replicated throughout the country.

“Election officials in small rural offices are absolutely more vulnerable,” said Paul Manson, who studies the demography of election officials and serves as the research director for the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College. Because such offices have fewer resources, Manson said, they have a harder time adapting to the increasingly controversial nature of election administration in the United States. These types of offices also represent the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 10,000 election jurisdictions, according to Manson’s research, with 48% of offices staffed by only one or two people and an additional 40% having between two and five. (Huff’s office has four full-time staff members, including her.)

As she juggled budget challenges and harassment, Huff has sought help from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, but that agency has faced struggles of its own. The GOP-dominant legislature has deprived the board of federal funding it had intended to use to hire and retain staff, instead sending it directly to counties. Moreover, groups claiming election fraud have organized campaigns against the agency, leaving it straining to support the 100 far-flung county boards of elections it oversees, officials say.

Laws and regulations were not written for the hostile environment of today, said Richard L. Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Many of the individuals challenging election officials are even using the law itself, such as overwhelming those offices with public records requests, a practice that Senter would soon take up in Surry County and that “election integrity” groups would employ against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Hasen warned: “The country’s election infrastructure isn’t designed to stand up to one of its two major parties turning against it.”

When Michella Huff accepted the job as Surry County’s elections director in 2019, she thought she knew what she was getting into. On her first day, in October, she parked at a strip mall neighbored by corn fields, a hunting supply store and a chicken processing plant, and walked into a former grocery store, which had closed as the region bled jobs and had been renovated to house the county’s tax, agricultural and elections divisions. After more than two decades as the head of groundskeeping for Mount Airy, population roughly 10,500 and the largest town in the county, located about 100 miles north of Charlotte, she was giving her aching back a rest and working in an air-conditioned office.

Each fall, for most of her adult life, she’d taken a few weeks off from mowing and planting to be a poll worker during early voting and then run a polling site as a chief precinct judge on Election Day. Though the days could be long and the pay little, she loved how some people kept their “I Voted” stickers pristine to add to lifetime collections and how others brought in homemade grape jelly for poll workers. Most of all, she was motivated by the certainty that she was making American democracy function.

After the 2020 presidential election went off smoothly, Huff was aware of the “Stop the Steal” movement promoted by Trump, but, given her knowledge of how election security worked, she knew that its claims of Venezuelan software flipping votes from Trump to Biden were baseless. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, she assured herself that that kind of chaos would never come to sleepy Surry County.

Mount Airy, population roughly 10,500, is the largest town in Surry County. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

But instead of the conspiracy theories dying down, they intensified. Soon after taking the job, she had switched her party status to independent “to reflect the way that this office must be portrayed in a nonpartisan manner.” It wasn’t until Biden took office that people in the community began to ask her about this. Huff recalls that one afternoon in early March 2021, she was surprised by a visitor at her office: Kevin Shinault, her former elementary school teacher and a GOP precinct chair, who she said accused her of participating in a debunked conspiracy theory known as “Zuckerbucks.”

In 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had provided grants to election officials through the Center for Tech and Civic Life to help with unexpected pandemic expenses, and critics held that this had been part of a plot to throw the election to Joe Biden. Huff happily explained that the $48,584 she’d received from the group had been used for straightforward expenses, like hiring a Spanish-language interpreter. Nearly every election office in North Carolina had accepted such grants. Shinault, however, argued that hiring a Spanish-language interpreter had nefariously boosted Hispanic participation to the Democrats’ advantage. Huff assured him that helping Spanish-speaking voters wasn’t partisan. (Shinault did not respond to requests for comment.)

That night, Huff attended the biweekly county commissioners meeting, at which the chair of the county Elections Board asked the five county commissioners to split $20,000 left over from the previous year’s federal grants between Huff and her staff as belated hazard pay for their efforts during the pandemic. Huff figured it was a routine request. Numerous other counties had used the money this way; Surry’s bipartisan Elections Board had already signed off on it; and records show that about two months earlier, commissioners had reviewed the grants without comment.

The county commissioners, however, sharply questioned the chair of the Elections Board for nearly an hour, implying that unless more county employees got such pay, it wasn’t fair. Eddie Harris, a commissioner who works at a luxury saddle-making company his family owns, declared, “I will never take one penny from Mark Zuckerberg or any of his ilk,” calling the Meta CEO “a left-wing radical extremist bigot.” (Senter wrote to ProPublica, “As a party, we approached the commissioners and ask [sic] them to send the Zuckerbucks back, and they agreed.” Harris did not respond to requests for comment.)

Huff realized that her decadeslong relationships with people wouldn’t prevent them from envisioning her as part of some dark conspiracy. The next month, the commissioners unanimously voted to return nearly $100,000 in pandemic grant money, including the Center for Tech and Civic Life grant and around $60,000 from the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, named for the former Republican governor of California. They also returned the $20,000 in federal funding, rather than divvying it up among the elections staff.

Huff felt that returning the money was “very unfair,” but she resolved not to let it affect her performance. The best way to rebut conspiracy theories was to run her elections perfectly. She hoped the election conspiracy theories “would be a dead issue after the money was sent back.”

But once Senter and Frank confronted her in March 2022, she realized the target on her back was permanent.

After that heated visit, Senter kept showing up at the elections office. With the service window between them, Huff helped him file public records requests, which he insisted on scrawling by hand. (He explained to ProPublica that the handwritten requests were necessary, “so they could not be doctored by anyone else.”) Huff politely did her duty, but whenever she saw him, “My gut flipped. It makes me angry that he has that power — I can’t help how my body reacts.” When Huff and her staff finished work late in the evening, police escorted them to their cars, past campaign-style signs that Senter had put up reading “The People’s Trust is SHATTERED” and “We DEMAND a Full FORENSIC Audit.” Huff repeatedly took them down, until the sheriff decided the signs should stay up, as they were legal political expression on public property.

In March and April, Senter sent numerous emails and texts to the county commissioners, which ProPublica obtained through public records requests. On March 31, he emailed the commissioners asking them to “please consider our recommendations that are in the attachment,” which included a suggestion to reduce her pay and stated that “there is NO requirement to fund any additional election support staff.” Though Huff answers to the county and state elections boards, the county commissioners set her budget and salary.

Later that day, Senter texted the commissioners, “Y’all might better get Michella in check,” complaining about her charging 5 cents per copy for public records. “It’s gonna get ugly if she don’t jump on board. Cut her salary to 12 bucks an hour like the law says you can do.” (Senter told ProPublica: “The ugly part is in reference to the phone calls, text, threats and pressure I was receiving due to her lies and deceit that she reported to the media”; but his message to the commissioners made no reference to those things, and Huff said she had not spoken to the media about Senter as of the end of March.)

North Carolina law does specify that elections directors can be paid a minimum of $12 an hour (less than $25,000 annually), but two lawyers specializing in elections told ProPublica that any attempt to drastically reduce Huff’s salary, which was $71,000 as of March, would almost certainly be struck down, as courts have found that elections director salaries must be in line with those of their peers; a ProPublica review of elections director salaries in North Carolina found that the average is about $61,000.

Commissioners responded only occasionally to Senter’s messages about Huff, according to the documents ProPublica received from public records requests, such as the commission chair texting Senter instructions for how to avoid paying for public information requests to Huff’s office. (Only one of the county commissioners responded to a request for comment. Mark Marion said, “We have signified that we are behind our elections department.” When pressed for specific instances, he pointed to “our day-to-day conversations and visits” with elections staff.)

At an April 18 commissioners meeting, Senter asked the panel during the public comment period to consider not using the county’s voting machines in the upcoming May primary because of his and others’ suspicions that they had been corrupted. He was backed by a parade of speakers, among them Shinault.

At a commissioners meeting the following month, the room was filled, with the overflow watching on a livestream. Essentially, the whole meeting was given over to election deniers, some of whom traveled from elsewhere in North Carolina and the nation and presented slideshows on the vulnerabilities of voting machines and the so-called evidence from canvassing efforts.

Near the end of the meeting, a commissioner read prewritten remarks explaining that the requests to discard the voting machines were outside their power.

Afterward, the crowd assembled on the courthouse lawn, alongside a memorial to Confederate soldiers. People chanted, “Hell no, the machines gotta go!” A succession of speakers promised to fight on, with one declaiming so vehemently that he tore his lips on the microphone mesh, spotting it with blood.

In late August, Senter traveled to Missouri for a weekendlong gathering of hundreds of election deniers put on by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who claims to have spent at least $35 million of his fortune on efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. At Lindell’s event, activists from all 50 states touted their campaigns, which often involved pressuring county and state election officials. “We’ve had a few victories,” Senter told the crowd when he presented as the representative for North Carolina. “We feel like if you’ve got a committed group of patriots, and some county commissioners that are not afraid to face the establishment and do their job, and local law enforcement that will hear the evidence that you produce to them, we can actually get something done in your county. So if you’d like that strategy, hit us up in North Carolina, and we’ll help you out with it.”

After returning home, Senter submitted to Huff’s office a time-consuming public records request similar to one that Lindell had promoted, which required one of Huff’s three full-time staff members to spend 60 hours at a scanner uploading 2020 “poll tapes,” the physical receipts from tabulators. Across North Carolina and nationwide, short-staffed offices reported being overwhelmed with often identical requests. Senter’s requests to Huff came atop dozens of others from different sources, including a sweeping request from a lawyer for the Republican National Committee. Before 2020, Surry County’s elections office had received an estimated half-dozen public records requests a year; in the first 10 months of 2022, it received 81.

An ally of Senter’s filed requests for court-ordered mediation and a lawsuit against Huff, seeking the same records that Lindell’s campaign has recommended asking for. While none of the legal actions have so far been successful, shortly before Surry County’s 2020 elections-related paper records were to be routinely discarded, the county Board of Elections agreed to preserve them for three more years. Huff said that each legal action resulted in her and her staff having to spend significant time with lawyers and on paperwork, rather than on actual elections administration.

Most laws and regulations that govern public records requests and elections do little to ease the disruptions that Huff and others were enduring — and offer few means to hold anyone accountable. “I don’t think there’s a silver bullet solution, unfortunately,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute. He noted that public records laws are necessary tools to ensure government transparency. “In a lot of cases, if election officials had more resources available to them, it would be easier to push back on some of these things.” He said that officials in smaller jurisdictions often need to turn to professional associations, nonprofits or their state election agencies for help.

The organization most responsible for supporting Huff is the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which is responsible for statewide election infrastructure, such as its voter registration database, and which provides oversight and help for county offices. It had dispatched staff to back up Huff when election deniers were holding rallies in the county and offered legal advice and support over the phone.

But the state board, too, was being overwhelmed by public information requests. Before 2020, only several dozen requests would come in per year, said Patrick Gannon, its public information director. In 2021, there were 380, with some coming from the same people who submitted requests to Huff. Meanwhile, the number of people on the communications team had dwindled from four to two, in large part due to reductions in federal funding and the GOP-led legislature not meeting budgeting requests, according to board officials. By late October, the officials said, five employees had accepted buyout offers. To make payroll, the agency also let two people go and did not fill 17 positions — reducing its staff by more than 20% during its busiest time and limiting the services it could provide counties.

Huff helps election workers test voting machines to ensure each is functioning properly. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

Huff’s experiences with so-called election integrity activists were more intense than what other North Carolina election workers were facing, though many of them were also enduring their own challenges. After the May primary, at least 14 counties reported complaints to the state board about aggressive poll observers, according to an internal survey obtained through a public records request. The complaints and additional documentation from one of the counties described two instances in which observers tailed election workers in their cars, among other examples of observers “intimidating poll workers.” This led the agency to pass rules to ensure that observers — the individuals assigned by political parties to monitor election officials — didn’t do things like stand so close to voting equipment that they could see confidential information. However, these rules were nullified when they were sent for approval to a board appointed by the GOP-controlled state legislature.

Even states considered to be on the forefront of election administration — such as Colorado, where legislators have passed laws addressing rising security risks, and Kentucky, where the Republican secretary of state has pushed back against conspiracy theories — have experienced significant disruptions as a result of the organized campaigns by 2020 election deniers. “It’s the new normal, until we have our political leaders in both parties pushing back strongly against it,” Norden said.

One of the individuals helping Senter in his Surry County campaign is Carol Snow, the North Carolina Audit Force leader who accompanied Senter and Frank to the elections office during their March confrontation with Huff. In a May email from Snow to Senter with the subject line “Surry Co Dirt,” which ProPublica obtained through public records requests, she provides him with a PowerPoint presentation. Its 61 slides outline supposed errors in North Carolina’s voter registration database. In an August email Snow sent to the county commissioners, copying Senter, she presented them with supposed evidence of voter-registration fraud in Surry County assembled through canvassing. She also suggested that law enforcement could subpoena information inaccessible through public records requests, which she claimed might reveal “individual voter fraud” or systemwide “election fraud.” She concluded, “We will get to the bottom of this or die (or be imprisoned for) trying.” The commissioners did not respond to the email.

(Snow declined to comment on the emails; in response to earlier questions about North Carolina Audit Force’s efforts in Surry County, Snow wrote: “Americans have every right to oversee our election process. That’s what should happen in a free society.”)

Until recently, Snow was also a leader in the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a statewide affiliate of the nationwide Election Integrity Network, which has trained thousands of activists in the battleground states to scrutinize election officials. The network’s goal is to make sure there are “local election integrity task forces organized at every local election office in America,” according to its training manual, and it lays out how to aggressively scrutinize officials in ways that are similar to what Huff has experienced, such as through filing public records requests and investigating voting machines and voter lists. “The goal is for the task force members to be ever-present at the election office and board meetings,” it reads.

Jim Womack, the head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told ProPublica that the group had nothing to do with the events in Surry County and that Snow’s actions there were “her business.” He and Snow said she had recently left the organization.

Womack estimated that as of August, the North Carolina Election Integrity Team had trained more than 1,000 volunteers, who would be present in most major North Carolina counties in November, including Surry. “As long as” election officials are “doing things in accordance with the law and the books, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about,” Womack said. “And if that causes stress, I'm sorry.”

In the months before the November 2022 midterm election, Huff decided to go on the offensive against misinformation, giving speeches to various civic groups about how elections actually work, like the local real estate agents association.

One afternoon toward the end of the summer, she showed up at a country club for what she had believed was a concerned citizens meeting — and found waiting for her eight local conservative leaders, including county commissioner Harris, who had fiercely criticized the Center for Tech and Civic Life money. For two and a half hours, Huff answered the Republicans’ questions, largely about election security, explaining the safeguards that kept voting tabulators from being hacked. The discussion was tense but civil, and while Huff kept her hands clasped atop a table, her feet compulsively kicked an orange golf tee beneath it. As Huff headed for the door, she reminded her hosts, “The people who work in the elections office, we’re real people who love our community too.”

Afterward, a ProPublica reporter asked an attendee, Earl Blackburn, a Republican candidate for a local school board, if Huff’s presentation had made him feel better about election security. Though Huff had taken more than 15 minutes to explain directly to Blackburn how the voting machines couldn’t be hacked, he said, “I don’t know that she has satisfactorily answered my question.” To explain how the machines could be hacked anyway, Blackburn referenced a badly reviewed Sean Connery heist movie that hinges on thieves dodging a laser beam alarm system to break into a global bank.

Huff speaks during a September training for election workers at the Surry County Board of Elections. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

On Sept. 19, Huff hosted a watch party in the public meeting room next to the elections office for a livestream of speeches in which experts and North Carolina State Board of Elections members explained election security, hoping that some of the Surry County GOP might attend — or at the very least some skeptical citizens. But the only people who came were longtime poll workers who already understood how elections worked.

As September turned to October, she and her staff hosted another event at which they publicly tested the dozens of voting machines that would be used in November to prove their accuracy. She hoped some of the election deniers might assuage their fears at the event, but none showed up.

No matter how many questions she answered or how many times she proved the soundness of the voting machines, it wasn’t clear that she was convincing anyone.

When Huff had taken the job in 2019, she had told the Board of Elections that she expected to stay 20 years. But recently there had been many nights she had wondered how she could continue. She said, “If this is what every day and every night looks like, how could anyone keep this up for 17 more years?” She wasn’t just thinking of herself but also about how the stress she brought home and the controversies surrounding her would affect her children, who are in high school and college, and her husband.

Coming home late from work each night, Huff parked beside a plot that was normally filled with heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and peppers, but which was now just dirt. Instead of tending her garden, she was trapped all day in the halogen-lit office. Still, in her most hopeful moods, she could imagine that instead of cultivating the land she was cultivating democracy. “It’s a seed. You plant it. It grows. It flowers. It fruits,” she said. “It takes careful tending to make sure that it survives and becomes something beautiful.”

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Six days before a local runoff election last year in Frisco, a prosperous and growing suburb of Dallas, Brandon Burden paced the stage of KingdomLife Church. The pastor told congregants that demonic spirits were operating through members of the City Council.

Grasping his Bible with both hands, Burden said God was working through his North Texas congregation to take the country back to its Christian roots. He lamented that he lacked jurisdiction over the state Capitol, where he had gone during the 2021 Texas legislative session to lobby for conservative priorities like expanded gun rights and a ban on abortion.

“But you know what I got jurisdiction over this morning is an election coming up on Saturday,” Burden told parishioners. “I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.”

What Burden said that day in May 2021 was a violation of a long-standing federal law barring churches and nonprofits from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Although the provision was mostly uncontroversial for decades after it passed in 1954, it has become a target for both evangelical churches and former President Donald Trump, who vowed to eliminate it.

Burden’s sermon is among those at 18 churches identified by the news organizations over the past two years that appeared to violate the Johnson Amendment, a measure named after its author, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Some pastors have gone so far as to paint candidates they oppose as demonic.

At one point, churches fretted over losing their tax-exempt status for even unintentional missteps. But the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, are greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.

In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.

Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions.

(Video editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, KingdomLife Church.)

Trump’s opposition to the law banning political activity by nonprofits “has given some politically-minded evangelical leaders a sense that the Johnson Amendment just isn’t really an issue anymore, and that they can go ahead and campaign for or against candidates or positions from the pulpit,” said David Brockman, a scholar in religion and public policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.

Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who studies Christian nationalism, said the ramping up of political activity by churches could further polarize the country. “It creates hurdles for a healthy, functioning, pluralistic democratic society,” he said. “It’s really hard to overcome.”

The Johnson Amendment does not prohibit churches from inviting political speakers or discussing positions that may seem partisan nor does it restrict voters from making faith-based decisions on who should represent them. But because donations to churches are tax-deductible and because churches don’t have to file financial disclosures with the IRS, without such a rule donors seeking to influence elections could go undetected, said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“If you pair the ability to wade into partisan politics with a total absence of financial oversight and transparency, you’re essentially creating super PACs that are black holes,” Seidel said.

Churches have long balanced the tightrope of political involvement, and blatant violations have previously been rare. In the 1960s, the IRS investigated complaints that some churches abused their tax-exempt status by distributing literature that was hostile to the election of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. And in 2004, the federal agency audited All Saints Episcopal Church in California after a pastor gave an anti-war speech that imagined Jesus talking to presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. The pastor did not endorse a candidate but criticized the Iraq war.

Some conservative groups have argued that Black churches are more politically active than their white evangelical counterparts but are not as heavily scrutinized. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was accused of turning Sunday sermons into campaign rallies and using Black churches to raise funds. In response to allegations of illegal campaigning, Jackson said at the time that strict guidelines were followed and denied violating the law.

While some Black churches have crossed the line into political endorsements, the long legacy of political activism in these churches stands in sharp contrast to white evangelical churches, where some pastors argue devout Christians must take control of government positions, said Robert Wuthnow, the former director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.

Wuthnow said long-standing voter outreach efforts inside Black churches, such as Souls to the Polls, which encourages voting on Sundays after church services, largely stay within the boundaries of the law.

“The Black church has been so keenly aware of its marginalized position,” Wuthnow said. “The Black church, historically, was the one place where Black people could mobilize, could organize, could feel that they had some power at the local level. The white evangelical church has power. It’s in office. It’s always had power.”

At the end of his two-hour sermon that May, Burden asserted that his church had a God-given power to choose lawmakers, and he asked others to join him onstage to “secure the gate over the city.”

Burden and a handful of church members crouched down and held on to a rod, at times speaking in tongues. The pastor said intruders such as the mayor, who was not up for reelection last year but who supported one of the candidates in the race for City Council, would be denied access to the gates of the city.

“Now this is bold, but I’m going to say it because I felt it from the Lord. I felt the Lord say, ‘Revoke the mayor’s keys to this gate,’” Burden said. “No more do you have the key to the city. We revoke your key this morning, Mr. Mayor.

“We shut you out of the place of power,” Burden added. “The place of authority and influence.”

Johnson Amendment’s Cold War Roots

Questions about the political involvement of tax-exempt organizations were swirling when Congress ordered an investigation in April 1952 to determine if some foundations were using their money “for un-American and subversive activities.”

Leading the probe was Rep. Gene Cox, a Georgia Democrat who had accused the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others, of helping alleged Communists or Communist fronts. Cox died during the investigation, and the final report cleared the foundations of wrongdoing.

But a Republican member of the committee argued for additional scrutiny, and in July 1953, Congress established the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. The committee focused heavily on liberal organizations, but it also investigated nonprofits such as the Facts Forum foundation, which was headed by Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, an ardent supporter of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who was best known for holding hearings to investigate suspected Communists.

In July 1954, Johnson, who was then a senator, proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that would strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status for “intervening” in political campaigns. The amendment sailed through Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Johnson never explained his intent. Opponents of the amendment, as well as some academics, say Johnson was motivated by a desire to undercut conservative foundations such as the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, founded by newspaper magnate Frank Gannett, which painted the Democrat as soft on communism and supported his opponent in the primary election. Others have hypothesized that Johnson was hoping to head off a wider crackdown on nonprofit foundations.

Over the next 40 years, the IRS stripped a handful of religious nonprofits of their tax-exempt status. None were churches.

Then, just four days before the 1992 presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York ran two full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Times urging voters to reject then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in his challenge to Republican President George H.W. Bush.

The ads proclaimed: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They asserted that Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads said, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”

The IRS revoked the church’s tax-exempt status, leading to a long legal battle that ended with a U.S. appeals court siding with the federal agency.

The case remains the only publicly known example of the IRS revoking the tax-exempt status of a church because of its political activity in nearly 70 years. The Congressional Research Service said in 2012 that a second church had lost its tax-exempt status, but that its identity “is not clear.”

Citing an increase in allegations of church political activity leading up to the 2004 presidential election between incumbent Bush and Kerry, IRS officials created the Political Activities Compliance Initiative to fast-track investigations.

Over the next four years, the committee investigated scores of churches, including 80 for endorsing candidates from the pulpit, according to IRS reports. But it did not revoke the tax-exempt status of any. Instead, the IRS mostly sent warning letters that agency officials said were effective in dissuading churches from continuing their political activity, asserting that there were no repeat offenders in that period.

In some cases, the IRS initiated audits of churches that could have led to financial penalties. It’s unclear how many did.

In January 2009, a federal court dismissed an audit into alleged financial improprieties at a Minnesota church whose pastor had supported the congressional campaign of former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota.

The court found that the IRS had not been following its own rules for a decade because it was tasked with notifying churches of their legal rights before any pending audits and was required to have an appropriately high-level official sign off on them. But a 1998 agency reorganization had eliminated the position, leaving lower IRS employees to initiate church investigations.

Following the ruling, the IRS suspended its investigations into church political activity for five years, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office report.

During the hiatus, a conservative Christian initiative called Pulpit Freedom Sunday flourished. Pastors recorded themselves endorsing candidates or giving political sermons that they believed violated the Johnson Amendment and sent them to the IRS. The goal, according to participants, was to trigger a lawsuit that would lead to the prohibition being ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The IRS never challenged participating churches, and the effort wound down without achieving its aim.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the IRS produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.

Despite the agency’s limited enforcement, Trump promised shortly after he took office that he would “totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”

As president, Trump tried unsuccessfully to remove the restrictions on church politicking through a 2017 executive order. The move was largely symbolic because it simply ordered the government not to punish churches differently than it would any other nonprofit, according to a legal filing by the Justice Department.

Eliminating the Johnson Amendment would require congressional or judicial action.

Although the IRS has not discussed its plans, it has taken procedural steps that would enable it to ramp up audits again if it chooses to.

In 2019, more than two decades after eliminating the high-level position needed to sign off on action against churches, the IRS designated the commissioner of the agency’s tax-exempt and government entities division as the “appropriate high-level Treasury official” with the power to initiate a church audit.

But Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney and University of Pittsburgh tax law professor, said he doesn’t read too much into that. “I don’t see any reason to believe that the operation of the IRS has changed significantly.”

The Pulpit and Politics

There is no uniform way to monitor church sermons across the country. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches now post their services online, and ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed dozens of them. Many readers shared sermons with us. (You can do so here.)

Texas’ large evangelical population and history of activism in Black churches makes the state a focal point for debates over political activity, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“Combine all of that with the increasing competitiveness of Texas elections, and it’s no surprise that more and more Texas churches are taking on a political role,” he said. “Texas is a perfect arena for widespread, religiously motivated political activism.”

The state also has a long history of politically minded pastors, Wuthnow said. Texas evangelical church leaders joined the fight in support of alcohol prohibition a century ago and spearheaded efforts to defeat Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party, in 1928. In the 1940s, evangelical fundamentalism began to grow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Today, North Texas remains home to influential pastors such as Robert Jeffress, who leads the First Baptist megachurch in Dallas. Jeffress was one of Trump’s most fervent supporters, appearing at campaign events, defending him on television news shows and stating that he “absolutely” did not regret supporting the former president after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Burden went a step further, urging followers to stock up on food and keep their guns loaded ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. He told parishioners that “prophetic voices” had told him in 2016 that Trump would have eight consecutive years in office.

The Frisco Conservative Coalition board voted to suspend Burden as chair for 30 days after criticism about his remarks.

Burden called his comments “inartful” but claimed he was unfairly targeted for his views. “The establishment media is coming after me,” he said at the time. “But it is not just about me. People of faith are under attack in this country.”

Since then, Burden has repeatedly preached that the church has been designated by the Lord to decide who should serve in public office and “take dominion” over Frisco.

As the runoff for the Frisco City Council approached last year, Burden supported Jennifer White, a local veterinarian. White had positioned herself as the conservative candidate in the nonpartisan race against Angelia Pelham, a Black human resources executive who had the backing of the Frisco mayor.

White said she wasn’t in attendance during the May 2021 sermon in which Burden called her the “candidate that God wants to win.” She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active.

“I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won't take a political stance,” White said in an interview. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”

Pelham’s husband, local pastor Dono Pelham, also made a statement that violated the Johnson Amendment by “indirectly intervening” in the campaign, said Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles

In May 2021, Pelham told his church that the race for a seat on the City Council had resulted in a runoff. He acknowledged that his church’s tax-exempt status prevented him from supporting candidates from the pulpit. Then, he added, “but you’ll get the message.”

“It’s been declared for the two candidates who received the most votes, one of which is my wife,” Pelham said. “That’s just facts. That’s just facts. That’s just facts. And so a runoff is coming and every vote counts. Be sure to vote.”

Pelham then asked the congregation: “How did I do? I did all right, didn’t I? You know I wanted to go a little further, but I didn’t do it.”

Angelia Pelham, who co-founded Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in 2008 with her husband, said the couple tried to avoid violating the Johnson Amendment. Both disagreed that her husband’s mention of her candidacy was a violation.

“I think church and state should remain separate,” Angelia Pelham said in an interview, adding: “But I think there’s a lot of folks in the religious setting that just completely didn’t even consider the line. They erased it completely and lost sight of the Johnson Amendment.”

She declined to discuss Burden’s endorsement of her opponent.

In his sermon the morning after Pelham defeated his chosen candidate, Burden told parishioners that the church’s political involvement would continue.

“So you’re like, but you lost last night? No, we set the stage for the future,” he said, adding “God is uncovering the demonic structure that is in this region.”

“Demonic” Candidate

Most Americans don’t want pastors making endorsements from the pulpit, according to a 2017 survey by the Program for Public Consultation, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

Of the nearly 2,500 registered voters who were surveyed, 79% opposed getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. Only among Republican evangelical voters did a slight majority — 52% — favor loosening restrictions on church political activity.

But such endorsements are taking place across the country, with some pastors calling for a debate about the Johnson Amendment.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, New Mexico became an island of abortion access for women in Texas and other neighboring states.

The issue raised the stakes in the upcoming Nov. 8 New Mexico governor’s race between incumbent Lujan Grisham, a supporter of abortion rights, and Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti, who advocates limiting access.

“We’re going to fast become the No. 1 abortion place in all of America,” a pastor, Steve Smothermon, said during a July 10 sermon at Legacy Church in Albuquerque, which has an average weekly attendance of more than 10,000 people. Smotherman said the governor was “wicked and evil” and called her “a narcissist.”

“And people think, ‘Why do you say that?’ Because I truly believe it. In fact, she’s beyond evil. It’s demonic,” Smothermon said.

He later added: “Folks, when are we going to get appalled? When are we going to say, ‘Enough is enough’? When are we going to stop saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s a woman’s right to choose’? That’s such a lie.”

Church attendees had a stark choice in the upcoming election, Smothermon said. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti.”

The governor’s campaign declined to comment. Neither Legacy Church, Smothermon nor Ronchetti responded to requests for comment.

(Video Editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Adria Malcolm for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Legacy Church.)

The sermon was a “clear violation” of the Johnson Amendment, said Sam Brunson, a Loyola University Chicago law professor. But Smothermon showed no fear of IRS enforcement.

Those who thought he crossed the line were “so stupid,” Smothermon said during the sermon. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

In another example, pastors at a Fort Worth church named Mercy Culture have repeatedly endorsed candidates for local and statewide offices since its founding in 2019.

“Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” the lead pastor, Landon Schott, said in a February sermon about a church member who was running to fill an open state representative seat.

Johnson Amendment rules allow pastors to endorse in their individual capacity, as long as they are not at an official church function, which Schott was.

In other services, Schott challenged critics to complain to the IRS about the church’s support of political candidates and said he wasn’t worried about losing the church’s tax-exempt status.

“If you want it that bad, come and take it. And if you think that we will stop preaching the gospel, speaking truth over taxes, you got another thing coming for you,” Schott said in May.

Schatzline, a member of Mercy Culture, received 65% of the vote in a May 24 runoff against the former mayor of the Dallas suburb of Southlake. He works for a separate nonprofit founded by Heather Schott, a pastor at Mercy Culture and the wife of Landon Schott.

Schatzline said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that Landon Schott, not the church, endorsed him. He added that the church sought legal advice on how to ensure that it was complying with the Johnson Amendment.

“I think prayers can manifest into anything that God wants them to, but I would say that the community rallying behind me as individuals definitely manifested into votes,” Schatzline said.

Mercy Culture also supported Tim O’Hare, a Republican running for Tarrant County judge, this year after he came out against the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. His opponent in the primary had ordered churches and businesses to temporarily close when she was mayor of Fort Worth.

O’Hare came to prominence as the mayor of suburban Farmers Branch, where he championed a city ordinance to prohibit landlords from renting to immigrants without legal status. A federal court declared the ordinance unconstitutional in 2010 after a legal battle that cost the city $6.6 million.

O’Hare has pledged to hire an election integrity officer to oversee voting and “uncover election fraud.”

“The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Begin to pray for righteous judges in our city,’” Heather Schott said during a Feb. 13 service. “I am believing that Mr. Tim O’Hare is an answered prayer of what we have been petitioning heaven for for the last year and a half.”

Neither Mercy Culture, Landon Schott nor Heather Schott responded to requests for comment. O’Hare also did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.

Schott’s comments were a prohibited endorsement, said Aprill, the emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles.

“It doesn’t say ‘vote for him’ but is still an endorsement,” she said. “There’s no other way to understand the statement that O’Hare has answered prayers for righteous judges.”

Two weeks later, O’Hare won his primary. He faces Deborah Peoples, a Democrat, on Nov. 8.

A New Tactic

On April 18, 2021, a day before early voting began for city council and school board elections across Texas, pastors at churches just miles apart flashed the names of candidates on overhead screens. They told their congregations that local church leaders had gathered to discuss upcoming city and school elections and realized that their members were among those seeking office.

“We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running,” said Robert Morris, who leads the Gateway megachurch in Southlake and served as a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

On the same day, Doug Page gave a similar message less than 5 miles away at First Baptist Grapevine.

“And so what we decided to do is look within our church families and say, ‘Who do we know that’s running for office?’ Now, let me clarify with you. This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you.”

Saying that you are not endorsing a candidate “isn’t like a magic silver bullet that makes it so that you’re not endorsing them,” Brunson said.

(Video editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Gateway Church, First Baptist Grapevine.)

The churches’ coordination on messaging across the area is notable, according to University of Notre Dame tax law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, who said he hadn’t before seen churches organizing to share lists of candidates.

“I do think this strategy is new,” said Mayer, who has studied the Johnson Amendment for more than a decade. “I hadn’t heard of that before. It’s quite a sophisticated tactic.”

Eight of the nine candidates mentioned by the pastors won their races.

Mindy McClure, who ran for reelection to the Grapevine-Colleyville school board, said she thought church involvement contributed to her defeat in a June 5, 2021, runoff by about 4 percentage points. Her opponent campaigned on removing critical race theory from district curriculum, while McClure said students “weren’t being indoctrinated in any way, shape or form.” Critical race theory is a college-level academic theory that racism is embedded in legal systems.

McClure said pastors endorsing from the pulpit creates “divisiveness” in the community.

“Just because you attend a different church doesn’t mean that you’re more connected with God,” she said.

Lawrence Swicegood, executive director of Gateway Media, said this month that the church doesn’t endorse candidates but “inform(s) our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.” Page told ProPublica and the Tribune that “these candidates were named for information only.”

Eleven days after responding to ProPublica and the Tribune in October, Morris once again told his church that he was not endorsing any candidates during the last Sunday sermon before early voting. Then, he again displayed the names of specific candidates on a screen and told parishioners to take screenshots with their cellphones.

“We must vote,” he said. “I think we have figured that out in America, that the Christians sat on the sidelines for too long. And then all of a sudden they started teaching our children some pretty mixed up things in the schools. And we had no one to blame but ourselves. So let’s not let that happen. Especially at midterms.”

Help Us Report: How Do Religious Institutions in Your Area Involve Themselves in Elections?

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune want to understand how the Johnson Amendment is enforced — or isn’t. Please send us examples of any political activity you see at churches or other religious institutions, and we’ll look into whether or not it breaks the rules. We want to hear about examples across the political spectrum.

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Oct. 31, 2022: This story originally misstated the name of the university where Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist, works. It is Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, not University of Indiana-Purdue.

by Jessica Priest and Jeremy Schwartz

Under federal law, churches and other nonprofit organizations are prohibited from electioneering.

The Johnson Amendment, a 1954 congressional measure, bans tax-exempt organizations from interfering directly or indirectly in a political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to a candidate. Violators risk having their tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune want to understand how the amendment is enforced — or isn’t. That’s where you come in: We can’t be everywhere, so we need your help identifying violations and understanding the government’s response to them.

What does a Johnson Amendment violation look like? The IRS says pastors endorsing candidates from the pulpit is “clearly prohibited,” but other situations are less clear. Please send us examples of any political activity you see at churches or other religious organizations, and we’ll look into whether it breaks the rules. These could include, but are not limited to:

• Criticizing or praising candidates, politicians or political parties during a religious sermon or function.
• Helping a candidate raise funds.
• Sharing campaign literature or posting signs.
• Publishing a voter guide.
• Hosting candidates.

We know that some people think religious institutions should be more involved in politics. No matter what you believe, we want to hear about examples across the political spectrum.

You don’t have to belong to a congregation to participate. If you’re a ProPublica or Texas Tribune reader, we’d love your help.

A note about our commitment to your privacy: We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting, and we will not publish your name or information without your consent.

by Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies

Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.

In one instance, Google continued to place ads on a publication in Bosnia and Herzegovina for months after the U.S. government officially imposed sanctions on the site. Google stopped doing business with the site, which the U.S. Treasury Department described as the “personal media station” of a prominent Bosnian Serb separatist politician, only after being contacted by ProPublica.

Google ads are a major source of revenue for sites that spread election disinformation in Brazil, notably false claims about the integrity of the voting system that have been advanced by the incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro. Voters in Brazil are going to the polls on Sunday with the outcome in doubt after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round of voting.

The investigation also revealed that Google routinely places ads on sites pushing falsehoods about COVID-19 and climate change in French-, German- and Spanish-speaking countries.

The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google.

Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world. But Google hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public.

Google’s publicly announced policies bar the placement of ads on content that makes unreliable or harmful claims on a range of issues, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Yet the investigation found Google regularly places ads, including those from major brands, on articles that appear to violate its own policy.

ProPublica’s examination showed that ads from Google are more likely to appear on misleading articles and websites that are in languages other than English, and that Google profits from advertising that appears next to false stories on subjects not explicitly addressed in its policy, including crime, politics, and such conspiracy theories as chemtrails.

A former Google leader who worked on trust and safety issues acknowledged that the company focuses heavily on English-language enforcement and is weaker across other languages and smaller markets. They told ProPublica it’s because Google invests in oversight based on three key concerns.

“The number one is bad PR — they are very sensitive to that. The second one is trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny or potentially regulatory action that could impact their business. And number three is revenue,” said the former leader, who agreed to speak on the condition that their name not be used in order not to hurt their business and career prospects. “For all these three, English-speaking markets primarily have the biggest impact. And that’s why most of the efforts are going into those.”

ProPublica used data provided by fact-checking newsrooms, researchers and website monitoring organizations to scan more than 13,000 active article pages from thousands of websites in more than half a dozen languages to determine whether they were currently earning ad revenue with Google. (To read a detailed breakdown of how ProPublica obtained and analyzed the data, see this accompanying article.)

The analysis found that Google placed ads on 41% of roughly 800 active online articles rated by members of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network as publishing false claims about COVID-19. The company also served ads on 20% of articles about climate change that Science Feedback, an IFCN-accredited fact-checking organization, has rated false.

A number of Google ads viewed by ProPublica appeared on articles published months or years ago, suggesting that the company’s failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem.

In one example, Google recently placed ads for clothing brand St. John on a two-year-old Serbian article falsely claiming that cat owners don’t catch COVID-19. Google placed an ad for the American Red Cross on a May 2021 article from a far-right German site that claimed COVID-19 is comparable in danger to the flu. An ad for luxury retailer Coach was recently attached to an April article in Serbian that repeated the false claim that the COVID-19 vaccines change people’s DNA.

Last August, the Greek edition of the Epoch Times, a far-right U.S. publication connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, published an article that falsely claimed the sun, and not increased levels of carbon dioxide, could be responsible for global warming. That story had multiple Google ads when ProPublica viewed it, even though it appears to clearly violate Google’s policy against climate disinformation.

A spokesperson for the Red Cross said its ad appeared on the far-right German site due to an automated placement it did not directly control.

“Please note that based upon our Fundamental Principles of impartiality and neutrality, the Red Cross does not take sides in issues of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature, so we would purposefully not advertise on a story or site such as the one you shared with us,” said a statement from the organization.

Coach and St. John did not respond to requests for comment.

Google’s policy is to remove ads from individual articles that violate its rules, and to take sitewide action if violations reach a specific undisclosed threshold. Google removed ads from at least 14 websites identified in the investigation after being contacted by ProPublica.

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the company has put more money into non-English-language enforcement and oversight, which has led to an increase in the number of ads blocked on pages that violate its rules. He declined to provide figures or to say how many people Google has working on non-English-language content and ad review.

“We’ve developed extensive measures to tackle misinformation on our platform, including policies that cover elections, COVID-19 and climate change, and work to enforce our policies in over 50 languages,” Aciman said. “In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world.”

Google continues to review the sites and pages ProPublica shared with it and is "taking appropriate action on any content that violates our policies," Aciman said.

The data about ad removals comes from Google's most recent Ads Safety report, which emphasized the removal of ads from more than half a million pages that violated policies against harmful claims about COVID-19 and false claims that could undermine elections. But Google does not release a list of pages or publishers it took action against, the countries and languages they operate in or other data related to its Ads Safety report.

Google has been vocal about its $300 million commitment, announced in 2018, to fight misinformation, support fact-checkers and “help journalism thrive in the digital age.” But the investigation shows that as one arm of Google helps support fact-checkers, its core ad business provides critical revenue that ensures the publication of falsehoods remains profitable.

Laura Zommer, the general director of the Argentina-based Chequeado, founded in 2010 as the first fact-checking organization in Latin America, said Google’s failure to invest in oversight of sites in languages other than English causes serious harm in emerging democracies.

“The problem is that disinformation that takes hold in less developed democracies can cause even more damage than the disinformation circulating in countries with more developed democracies,” said Zommer, who is also the co-founder of Factchequeado, an initiative to counter Spanish-language disinformation in the U.S.

In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, three Balkan countries where democracy is fragile, 26 of the 30 most prolific publishers of false and misleading claims in the region earn money from Google, according to data from local fact-checkers.

“If the world’s largest online advertising platform doesn’t care that it has made false information, hate speech and toxic propaganda profitable in societies like ours, and has no intention to do anything to change because it wouldn’t financially pay off, that is devastating,” said Tijana Cvjetićanin, a member of the editorial board of Bosnian fact-checking site Raskrinkavanje, which shared data with ProPublica.

A comparison with English-language outlets suggests Google is more rigorous in choosing its publisher partners in that language. ProPublica found Google placed ads on 13% of English-language websites that NewsGuard deemed unreliable for having repeatedly published false content or deceptive headlines and failing to meet transparency standards. In contrast, ProPublica’s analysis found anywhere from 30% to 90% of the sites most often flagged for false claims by fact-checkers in the non-English languages examined were monetizing with Google.

Along with unequal enforcement across languages, ProPublica found disparity across and within regions.

Africa Check shared a list of 68 active English-language URLs that had been fact- checked as false by teams in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya since 2019, as well as 45 French-language articles that had been debunked by its French-language checkers. ProPublica’s analysis found that 57% of debunked English-language articles in Africa had ads from Google, while the percentage was higher, 66%, for French-language articles.

Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a non-profit organization that researches disinformation, said Google should be required to equally enforce its policies across languages and regions and to be transparent about its oversight decisions.

“These companies have decided to go global in their services, and that was their own decision for growth and to make revenue,” he said. “It’s not possible to make this choice and not face the accountability needed to be in all of these countries at the same time.”

Google’s Global Ad Dominance

Google is the world’s biggest digital advertising business. Last year it generated a record $257 billion in revenue. Most of that money comes from companies paying to place ads on Google products such as search and YouTube. But in 2021 Google earned $31 billion by placing its customers’ ads on more than 2 million websites around the world. They’re part of what the company calls the Google Display Network.

These publishing partners range from major news outlets such as The New York Times to small sites run by individuals. In order to join the Google Display Network, a publisher must meet requirements that include publishing original content and adhering to policies against unreliable and harmful claims and sexually explicit content, among others. Once accepted, Google says, publishers in the network receive 68% of the money spent on each ad placed on their site.

Google’s ad systems are also used to place ads on websites that are not necessarily members of its Display Network. These publishers work with ad technology companies that have partnered with Google, and which use its technology to buy and sell ads. As with ads placed on sites in the Display Network, Google and the publisher both earn money.

Google places ads on publisher sites using an automated auction system called programmatic advertising. The process starts when a person visits a webpage or opens an app. As the page loads, the site or app owner collects information about the ad space available along with data about the user, which can include location, age range, browsing history and interests.

The data is sent to an ad exchange like the one operated by Google, where ad buyers — ranging from major brands like Spotify to smaller local businesses — can place a bid to show an ad to the specific user visiting the website or app. Bids are placed, or not, based on the user and publisher data shared with potential advertisers and the price an advertiser is willing to pay to reach that person.

In the blink of an eye, the top bidder wins the auction and the ad loads on the page. Money flows from the ad buyer to the ad exchange (and any other intermediaries involved in the transaction), eventually making its way to the website or app publisher.

In 2019, the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit that analyzes websites for false and misleading content, estimated that disinformation websites earned $250 million per year in revenue, of which Google was responsible for 40% and the rest came from other ad tech companies. NewsGuard, which employs human reviewers to evaluate and rate websites based on a set of criteria including accuracy, estimated in 2021 the annual ad revenue earned by sites spreading false or misleading claims is $2.6 billion. The report did not say how much of that Google might be responsible for.

How much of Google’s revenue comes from monetizing false and misleading content is difficult to estimate. Each of the billions of digital display ads placed every day by Google has a different price point that fluctuates based on the combination of advertiser, target website and the users the ad will be shown to. It’s all part of a complex, opaque and largely automated digital ad buying and selling process dominated by Google. This means advertisers have to rely in part on the mix of automation and human review Google uses to ensure its publisher partners don’t violate its rules.

The findings of fact-checkers could be used by Google to enforce its policy against placing ads next to content that makes unreliable and harmful claims. There are more than 350 fact-checking projects around the world that employ journalists, and in some cases scientists, to identify and investigate claims spreading on the web, on social media and in traditional media. Their articles and associated ratings are used by platforms including Meta to help enforce policies around false and harmful content. Google already highlights fact-checks in search and Google News results to direct people to trustworthy information. But the company does not use fact-checks to keep ads off of pages with unreliable or harmful claims. And unlike Meta and TikTok, it does not pay fact-checkers for the results of their research.

“When it comes to ads, they obviously monetize disinformation. Whether it’s without knowing or knowing, it doesn’t matter,” said Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. “There has never been a public announcement from Google’s side that has acknowledged fact-checking as a signal for their ads monetization business.”

Google’s Aciman declined to comment on Google’s relationship with fact-checkers.

Failed Enforcement in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia

On Sept. 20, as he prepared to mobilize part of the country’s population to fight in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Milorad Dodik, a member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency and Bosnian Serb separatist leader who has expressed strong support for the invasion.

The Putin meeting was a propaganda coup for Dodik. Even better for him, Google helped ensure it was lucrative.

After the meeting, the homepage of the Serbian media site ATV featured articles praising the meeting and quoting Dodik about plans for greater economic cooperation with Russia, while sowing doubt about genocide committed during the Bosnian war, a frequent Dodik talking point. A ProPublica reporter viewing those stories was served ads for Saks Fifth Avenue department store, New Balance shoes and eBay that were placed via Google’s ad systems. ProPublica also documented ads from brands such as Guess on false ATV articles claiming that Serbia had found a cure for COVID-19 and NATO was planning to deploy troops to Ukraine.

A Saks spokesperson said its ads were not supposed to have appeared on ATV, and that the company would block the site from future campaigns.

“It was not our intention to advertise on this site as it violates the brand safety guidelines we have in place with our ad partner,” said a statement from the company.

An eBay spokesperson also said its ad was not placed “intentionally” on ATV. Guess and New Balance did not respond to requests for comment.

Ads for Guess appeared recently on an ATV article from 2020 that falsely claimed Serbia had a cure for COVID-19. (ProPublica screenshot)

Google is helping the site earn money by placing ads on false and divisive content in spite of the ATV website and its related TV station being sanctioned in January by the U.S. Treasury Department due to Dodik’s “corrupt activities and continued threats to the stability and territorial integrity” of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dodik “exerts personal control over ATV,” approves content and corruptly funnels government contracts to the outlet, according to the Treasury Department’s sanctions announcement.

Google removed ads from the ATV website after being contacted by ProPublica, but declined to comment on its relationship with the site. “Google is committed to complying with all applicable sanctions,” Aciman said. ATV and representatives from Dodik’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

ATV is one of the 30 most frequent sources of false and misleading content published in the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language, according to data provided to ProPublica by Raskrinkavanje. Of the 30 sites most flagged by Raskrinkavanje for false claims, 26 made money with Google. The list included popular sites in the region, such as the websites of tabloid newspapers, as well as smaller operations that in some cases don’t disclose their owners or are run by fringe figures.

ProPublica also scanned close to 10,000 active articles that fact checkers in the three Balkan countries flagged for false claims since 2019. Just over 60% were earning money with Google. The articles included a range of falsehoods about national politics, the pandemic, vaccines, the war in Ukraine and other topics.

“It might just be a financial matter for Google, but for us it’s a corrosive influence on our already very fragile democracies,” Cvjetićanin said.

Ads for Amazon Prime Video, Spotify, BetMGM and a women’s clothing site were placed via Google’s systems on a Srbin.info article falsely claiming COVID-19 vaccines can change people’s DNA. (ProPublica screenshot)

Dejan Petar Zlatanovic operates Srbin.info, a Serbian website that publishes pro-Kremlin propaganda copied from Russian state media, election conspiracies about the U.S. and anti-LGBTQ content. Its homepage features a prominent hyperlink directly to the official Kremlin website. Google ads abound there and on article pages.

Zlatanovic said in an email that Srbin.info earns between $5,000 and $7,000 per month, with Google ads providing a key portion of the revenue.

"The editorial policy of Srbin.info from the beginning was to offer relevant alternative news, not to brainwash people or to determine how they should live,” Zlatanovic wrote in Serbian. “All our lives we have lived in a communist and post-communist society based on single-mindedness and we got sick of single-mindedness.”

In April, Srbin.info published an article claiming that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could change the genetic makeup of people and alter “human genetics forever.” The story cited debunked claims by an American doctor who falsely claimed children’s DNA could be altered by the vaccines.

Ads from Amazon Prime, BetMGM, Spotify, and StyleWe were shown to a ProPublica reporter who viewed the story. The companies did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment on the Balkan sites and articles identified by ProPublica in the analysis.

Zlatanovic told ProPublica in an email that the vaccines article contained information he felt was “relevant for the public” because it came from a medical professional.

Google also placed ads on an article making a similar false claim when it spread across a set of sites in the region in late 2020, according to local fact-checkers. The false claim that mRNA vaccines can change “the genetic structure of a person” was reported by B92, which is among the 30 sites in the region most often flagged by fact-checkers. It eventually corrected its story, but has a history of publishing false claims and potentially harmful health content.

B92 has published articles claiming that baking soda can save your life; that watermelon can cure cancer but could be poisonous if the fruit is cracked (it later corrected this story); and that there’s a juice that can kill cancer cells in 42 days, to name some of the stories local fact-checkers have had to debunk. All had ads from Google when viewed by ProPublica, except for the cancer cure story, which was deleted by the site at some point after publication.

B92 did not respond to a request for comment.

The rampant anti-vaccine and COVID-19 disinformation appears to have contributed to low vaccination rates in the region. Just 25% of people are fully vaccinated in Bosnia, while 47% are vaccinated in Serbia and 55% in Croatia, among the lowest rates in Europe. A survey of unvaccinated Bosnians published in April by Raskrinkavanje’s parent company suggests conspiracy theories have taken hold among the population. Almost half of respondents agreed with the false claim that vaccines contain “dangerous nanoparticles,” and 38% believe the mRNA vaccines “alter DNA.”

Brazil’s Disinfo Boom

For at least four years, Brazilian president Bolsonaro has sowed doubt and spread disinformation about the country’s electoral process and the reliability of the country’s electronic voting system, leading to a 2021 Supreme Court investigation that documented his false claims.

Aiding his efforts are pro-Bolsonaro websites with big audiences — and a slew of ads courtesy of Google.

One of the largest is Terra Brasil Notícias, a two-year-old site run by a couple based in one of Brazil’s northeastern provinces. This summer, it published a story containing a clip from “Last Week Tonight” where host John Oliver explained the risks of electronic voting machines. The site used this to undermine confidence in Brazil's electronic voting system. Brazil’s electronic voting machines do not use paper audits, but have repeatedly been proven secure, and there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the country.

On Oct. 2, the day Brazilians voted in the first round of the presidential elections, Terra Brasil Notícias was one of several pro-Bolsonaro websites threatened with a fine by the head of the country’s Superior Electoral Court for publishing a falsehood about Bolsonaro’s opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Terra Brasil Notícias and other sites spread the false claim that the leader of a criminal organization had said he’d vote for Lula.

Marie Santini, director of the Netlab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the number of junk news and disinformation sites like Terra Brasil Notícias, as well as their audience, exploded in Brazil in part because Google ads make it easy for people to earn money from this type of content. She likened it to people who might drive for Uber to earn extra cash.

“You don’t need to make quality content or really work with journalists. You can copy things, you can use bots, you can recycle news, and you do it from your house and you receive some money,” she said. “It’s a way to make money for people that are without opportunity. But who is making money on a large scale? Of course, it’s the platform, Google.”

In response to the court’s finding, Terra Brasil Notícias took down the story that repeated the false claim about Lula. It also deleted its article about U.S. voting machines after Brazilian fact-checking organization Aos Fatos contacted the site last month. In an email, Aos Fatos listed eight recent articles from the site that it rated as false, and asked Terra Brasil Notícias to comment on its relationship with Google. In response, the site published the email from Aos Fatos and defended the articles. It later deleted all of them. As of this writing, it still earns money with Google.

Terra Brasil Notícias did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment.

Santini’s Netlab team monitors thousands of right-wing and left-wing messaging groups and websites. They shared a list of 262 active Portuguese-language websites in Brazil that circulated in messaging groups and were labeled by researchers as publishing false or misleading information. ProPublica found that 46% of the more than 250 sites flagged for disinformation earn money with Google. When that list was compressed to the 30 most shared sites in WhatsApp and Telegram groups, ProPublica found that 80% of them earn money with ads placed via Google.

“This ecosystem of sites is very important for politics in Brazil,” said Santini. “They are very powerful because people consume this thinking that it’s journalism, but it’s only propaganda. And it’s paid by Google ads.”

Ads are also funding COVID-19 disinformation in Brazil. Google placed ads on a false October 2021 story from Stylo Urbano that claimed people could develop AIDS as the result of COVID-19 vaccinations; a false December 2020 story on the same site claiming that COVID-19 PCR tests have a 97% false positive rate; and a false February 2021 article on the site that said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “deliberately violated several federal laws” by inflating the number of deaths due to COVID-19.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed its ads from the site. Stylo Urbano did not respond to a request for comment.

Brazil is one of several countries in Latin America where false claims are funded by Google ads. A coalition of fact-checking organizations in Latin America provided ProPublica with a list of websites they said are frequent sources of false and misleading claims. Of the 49 active sites on the list, 19 (or 39%) currently earn money with Google.

The coalition was led by Chequeado, the Argentinian nonprofit fact-checking organization. Zommer, its founder, said Chequeado has received support from Google over the years in the form of grants and training. But it and other platforms’ ongoing failure to enforce their policies in Spanish and other languages outside of English make their work more difficult, according to her.

"The fight against disinformation is unequal, as is the world,” Zommer said.

An Anonymous Network in Spain

Google’s enforcement failures in Spanish, a language spoken by roughly 550 million people, extend beyond Latin America.

On Sept. 22, the site Euskal News, based in the autonomous Basque region of Spain, published an article that suggested excess deaths in the Netherlands and other countries were the result of COVID-19 vaccines. The article, which was reprinted from another site, said the vaccines are possibly “causing deaths in a figure well above the average. The failure could not be more resounding.”

There is no evidence to support claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing excess mortality. But the story is standard fare for Euskal News, a Google publishing partner that mixes anti-immigrant content and vaccine disinformation with warnings of an impending globalist and EU takeover.

A EuskalNews story with Google ads that falsely linked excess death figures in the Netherlands to vaccines. (ProPublica screenshot)

Google placed ads on a May 6 article that falsely linked the presence of microplastic fibers in people’s lungs to mask wearing, even though the study in question was conducted pre-pandemic. Google also placed ads on a page on the site that falsely says Pfizer’s vaccine resulted in thousands of adverse effects. That claim, and the internal Pfizer documents it’s based on, has repeatedly been debunked by fact-checkers. Though it placed ads on that article, Google blocked them from another on the same site that falsely claims the Pfizer vaccine had 160,000 adverse effects.

ProPublica documented additional pages on Euskal News with vaccine disinformation where Google appears to have blocked ads. Google declined to say how many pages it blocks before examining its overall relationship with a site, but it did remove ads from the site after being contacted by ProPublica.

Euskal News, launched in the spring of 2019, does not list an owner, and its articles do not have bylines. However, research by a Spanish digital security and investigations firm identified connections between the site and a far-right Basque politician named David Pasarin-Gegunde. In a 2020 interview, he declined to say who runs Euskal News but said it’s a person from his “ideological environment.” The site lists its webmaster as Eneko Eastresana, but he and Pasarin-Gegunde did not respond to requests for comment.

Euskal News was one of 32 active Spanish sites flagged by the Brussels-based EU DisinfoLab as frequent sources of false and misleading claims. ProPublica found that 14 of the sites, or 44%, earn money with Google.

Alaphilippe, who runs the DisinfoLab, said the sites on the list “regularly publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information and often lack credible or transparent sources.”

Google declined to comment on the Spanish sites and articles identified in ProPublica’s analysis.

Media Capture and False Content in Turkey

Over the past two decades, Turkey’s media environment has transformed dramatically.

National newspapers and TV stations have been taken over by people aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leading Reporters Without Borders to assess that 90% of Turkey’s national media is under government control. The outlets adhere to “a tight chain of command of government-approved headlines, front pages and topics of TV debate,” according to a recent Reuters investigation.

One byproduct of Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian information environment — RSF says there are currently nine journalists in jail in the country — is that once-reliable publications publish false articles about politics, the pandemic and a range of clickbait meant to attract and earn money from traffic coming via Google search, according to Emre Kızılkaya, chair of the International Press Institute’s National Committee in Turkey. He cited a study he produced for IPI revealing how Google search rewards pro-government outlets and the at times false information they publish.

“President Tayyip Erdoğan and his cronies used multiple tactics for media capture in the past two decades, enabling them to control most of the largest news outlets today. These outlets owe most of their digital traffic — and revenue — to Google Search,” Kızılkaya, who also edits a nonprofit news site that reports on Turkish media, told ProPublica.

ProPublica analyzed over 1,000 articles rated false by Turkish fact-checking operation Teyit since 2019, and found that 73% are earning money from Google ads. Of the 50 outlets contained in that data that were most frequently flagged by fact-checkers, 45 earn money with Google. That’s the highest of any country analyzed in the investigation.

“In Turkey, disinformation pays and propaganda works. Google is still a part of this problem, despite its promises to help solve it,” Kızılkaya said. “The ProPublica data confirm the findings in our recent studies that demonstrated Google's algorithmic bias towards Turkey's pro-government media outlets at the expense of endangering fragile communities here.”

Google declined to comment on its search and ad efforts in Turkey.

Monetizing the German Far Right

In Germany, the right-wing, anti-immigration website Freie Welt is run by the husband of Beatrix von Storch, the former deputy leader of Germany’s major far-right AfD party.

One of the website’s articles, which had Google ads on it, falsely argues that the shortage of wheat in Ukraine was a result of U.S. companies buying one-third of Ukrainian land suitable for cultivation. Another article with ads claimed that 44% of pregnant women in Pfizer’s vaccine trial miscarried, a lie that has been debunked by fact-checkers.

Freie Welt is one of 30 German-language sites the EU DisinfoLab identified as consistent sources of false and misleading content. A third of them earn money with Google.

An ad for the American Red Cross was placed on a Journalistenwatch article that claimed COVID-19 was like the flu. Image has been blurred by ProPublica to conceal other ads on the page. (ProPublica screenshot)

The list includes Journalistenwatch, a leading platform of the “Neue Rechte,” a far-right political movement in Germany. Google placed an ad from the American Red Cross on an article falsely claiming that COVID-19 is like the flu. Another article falsely linking the decline in the birth rate in Germany to COVID-19 vaccines also earned money from Google.

Journalistenwatch and Freie Welt did not respond to requests for comment.

Google placed ads on a Report24 article that falsely claimed the World Health Organization warned against kids getting the COVID-19 vaccines. (ProPublica screenshot)

Some of the German-language sites identified by the EU DisinfoLab are based in neighboring Austria and Switzerland. One is Report24, an Austrian website that regularly spreads false information about COVID-19 measures and vaccination, according to fact-checkers. A ProPublica reporter was shown an ad for Hydeline, an American furniture retailer, on an article from June 2021 that falsely claims that the World Health Organization advises against children and teenagers getting COVID-19 vaccines.

Hydeline did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson from Report24 who did not provide their name said the above articles were “carefully researched and contain all necessary sources — as every article on our website does.” They said ProPublica’s questions and findings are similar to “the biased, fake news producing, pharma industry funded fact-checkers.”

The site claimed that no Google ads appeared on the articles in question, and there hadn’t been any “for a long time.” The site did not respond after being sent screenshots showing Google ads on the article pages.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed ads from Report24. The company declined to comment about the German sites and articles identified in the analysis.

Money for Falsehoods in French

Last October, just ahead of the United Nations global climate summit, Google announced it would no longer place ads on content that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus” on climate change.

“Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content,” read a notice attributed to the Google Ads team.

But as with its policy about COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation, Google often fails to enforce its climate policy across languages. Science Feedback, a French nonprofit fact-checking organization that employs journalists and scientists, provided ProPublica with 427 active URLs of articles about climate change in French and other languages it has rated false since 2021. A fifth of them were earning money with Google, according to the analysis.

A story with false claims about climate change had ads for eyewear company Caddis and furniture maker Rove and a health PSA from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry association. (ProPublica screenshot)

In just one example, the French site 1 Scandal published an article in January falsely stating that global warming is “statistically insignificant” and “the climate emergency is imaginary.” Google had placed multiple ads on the page when ProPublica reporters visited it, including for Caddis eyewear and Rove furniture, as well as a public service announcement about diabetes supported by the CDC, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry body.

Kathy Kayse, chief media strategy and partnerships officer for the Ad Council, said in a statement that the organization relies on donated media space to place ads for its public service campaigns. This means the organization did not pay to place its ad on 1 Scandal.

“Because of this model, we cannot always predict or control where our content will be placed,” Kayse said, noting that they were responding on behalf of the Ad Council and the American Media Association.

Caddis, Rove, the CDC and 1 Scandal did not respond to requests for comment. Google appears to have removed ads from the site in response to questions from ProPublica.

ProPublica also analyzed two sets of French-language articles rated false by IFCN-accredited fact-checkers in France and Senegal.

Among the recent fact-checked French links earning money with Google is a May article from InfoDuJour that falsely claimed people vaccinated against COVID-19 were experiencing an “increase in adverse effects.” The story cited other false claims, which have been the subject of multiple fact-checks, that warned people against receiving doses of the “harmful” vaccines.

The same site also recently published an article that claims athletes are dying in greater numbers and that the cause “most likely lies in the introduction of an experimental injection that was supposed to protect against Covid-19 disease, but which, on the contrary, caused untold damage to the immune system and cardiovascular problems.”

On Aug. 1, InfoDuJour published an article headlined “Anti-Covid vaccines finally recognized as dangerous!” The page currently brings up a notice from the site that says Google found the article violated its policy about harmful COVID-19 misinformation. “To meet the digital giant’s conditions and avoid penalty, we have decided to delete the article,” the page says.

Marcel Gay runs InfoDuJour from Nancy, a city in the northeast of France. He told ProPublica that his site’s coverage of the pandemic and vaccines provided it with unprecedented traffic.

“Our media has gained a lot of visibility,” he said in an online message sent via the site’s customer support tool. “Last July we recorded 3.2 million unique visitors. And the advertising earnings from Google, about €3,000!” — roughly $2,979 at current exchange rates.

Gay defended his site’s pandemic content, saying it is “taking care to balance the information and to give divergent opinions.” He complained that traffic has since fallen since Google and Twitter took action against his site, noting that it was removed from Google News and Google Discover, the latter of which highlights news stories in the Google app. He said he deleted some anti-vaccine articles in order to keep earning money with Google.

“This planetary censorship is unique in the history of humanity,” Gay said. “It is reminiscent of the Inquisition that prevailed in the Middle Ages.”

Google declined to comment on InfoDuJour and 1 Scandal.

Another French-language site earning money with Google, this time in Africa, is 24Jours.com. Two years ago, it was the subject of separate investigations by the EU DisinfoLab and fact-checkers at Les Observateurs that revealed it was part of a network of more than 10 sites publishing false information, reprinting Russian propaganda and stealing content from other outlets.

In the ensuing years the site continued to earn money from Google on articles with false claims that cunnilingus can help prevent cancer, a man killed over 20 pizza delivery men, and a woman named her children Corona and Virus. Ads from Google also appear on content that 24Jours.com copies word-for-word from other sites — even articles stolen from fact-checkers such as Les Observateurs.

The operator of 24Jours.com, who on WhatsApp identified himself as Kennedy and said he was in Cameroon, told ProPublica that he stopped posting “fake news” in 2019, and that many sites copy content from sources such as Reuters. After being informed that sites pay to license content from Reuters and other sources, Kennedy said he would remove the infringing content.

“Less than 10% of the content on my website are copied from other websites,” he said.

Kennedy estimated Google is currently blocking ads from 26 articles on his site. When told that ProPublica was reaching out to Google to ask about his site, he said he would disable Google ads.

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Update, Oct. 31, 2022: This story was updated with Google’s comment that it continues to review sites and pages shared with it by ProPublica.

Correction

Oct. 29, 2022: An animation with this story originally misattributed the location of an article on climate change. It is from France, not Africa.