True the Vote, a Tea Party group that’s working to organize poll-watchers to prevent a “flood of illegal voters” from stealing the 2016 election, organized a conference call last week to explain how a consent decree that the Republican National Committee signed in the 1980s “makes True the Vote the only hope for election integrity this year.”
True the Vote president Catherine Engelbrecht invited a man named Greg Phillips, who she said runs a cyber-security firm, to discuss potential threats to election security, including the recent reported hacks of elections systems in two states. Phillips dismissed the threat of cyberattacks against state elections systems, speculating that the Obama administration may have orchestrated the reported hack in order to justify taking control of elections in the states.
“What the left always does,” he said, “is they create a problem and then they solve their own problem by letting the federal government take it over … All of us in this industry know that the DOJ control of elections is what many of these presidents have wanted and certainly what the DOJ has wanted, but this lawless DOJ, whether it was under the previous attorney general or under the current attorney general, they seek to control all elections. And so they believe, I think, if they go out and they create a problem—they likely, it’s possible they even hired these hackers. They have scores of white-hat hackers that go around doing this kind of thing.”
Their goal in doing such a thing, he said, would have been “to raise enough fear” to justify a federal takeover of elections.
Engelbrecht responded that “there may in fact be a real threat [of] cyberattacks out there or we are citizens in a country whose government is trying to engineer an outcome that would spark fear enough to put elections into the hands of the federal government. It’s all pretty sinister.”
