Voting fraud conspiracy group has pipeline to Florida governor as election changes considered

As Florida GOP leaders consider new restrictions on voting, they are getting a big push from a new conservative group that claims to have documented widespread “voting irregularities” across the state.

Started by the Lakewood Ranch leader of a pro-Donald Trump women’s organization, Defend Florida has mobilized an army of volunteers to collect “affidavits” that raise questions about whether voters cast legal 2020 ballots. The group has collected more than 5,000 affidavits in 34 counties, implying each is a possible instance of voter fraud.

The claims appear to be getting serious consideration from GOP officials. Defend Florida co-founder Caroline Wetherington said the group met with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ top staff on six occasions, while also securing meetings with Secretary of State Laurel Lee and top GOP legislators.

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Local elections and law enforcement officials, however, have dismissed Defend Florida’s claims.

Manatee County, where Wetherington lives, has the largest number of alleged voting irregularities. Defend Florida posted on its website that it documented 758 possible fraud cases in Manatee as of Jan. 28.

Yet the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office and the Manatee County Supervisor of Elections office say they’ve seen no evidence indicating that election fraud is a problem in the county.

“We looked into (it) and found no evidence of a crime,” Manatee County Sheriff’s spokesman Randy Warren said in an email.

Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett met with Wetherington, who runs the realty division of luxury homebuilder Lee Wetherington Homes, and other Defend Florida representatives last October. Bennett said he quickly debunked the example Wetherington gave to argue there are problems with the county’s voting roll.

“I caught them flat-footed,” Bennett said, adding: “Since she didn’t know how the system worked she thought there was something nefarious going on and we had all these unregistered voters. Simply not true.”

Despite being rebuffed by local authorities, Defend Florida still is highly active.

The group held a press conference in Tampa on Thursday to draw attention to its allegations. About 50 people held signs with slogans such as “We Want Election Integrity Now” and “Protect Our Votes.” One man had a Trump bumper sticker on his tricorn hat. Others had “Let’s Go Brandon” paraphernalia, a phrase used by conservatives to denigrate President Joe Biden.

A few days later, Defend Florida hosted prominent individuals involved in trying to overturn the 2020 election results, such as former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Trump adviser Roger Stone, at a conference in Tampa.

Wetherington appears to have close ties to many of these individuals, making her a growing force on the far right in Florida and an increasingly influential player in GOP politics. Videos on Defend Florida’s website feature her and another Defend Florida leader interviewing Flynn and Sydney Powell, an attorney known for filing unsuccessful lawsuits to overturn 2020 election results.

While local elections officials have rebuffed Defend Florida’s efforts to raise questions about votes cast in 2020, the group still is pressing for changes in advance of the 2022 election, including purging voter rolls and overhauling state election laws during the legislative session that runs through early March.

Defend Florida’s ideas appear to be gaining traction among leading Florida Republicans, including DeSantis, even as the foundation for these proposals – that the election system is rife with fraud – crumbles upon examination. New election legislation unveiled by GOP leaders last week mirrors some of Defend Florida’s ideas.

Much like Trump, Wetherington and her collaborators are undeterred by those who dismiss their claims about widespread voting problems for lack of evidence. Even in a state Trump won easily, and where GOP leaders say the 2020 election went smoothly, they have turned the false stolen election premise into a rallying cry for a new wave of political activism that could have implications for 2022 and beyond.

‘Proud of the patriots’

A longtime California resident, Wetherington moved to Florida eight years ago after marrying Sarasota County-based homebuilder Lee Wetherington, but only recently emerged as a force in state politics.

In 2019, Wetherington – who served as president of her college Republican club but says she wasn’t very politically active for years – founded Women for Trump Sarasota Manatee Inc. and later changed the group’s name to Women for Trump Florida Inc., growing it to about 3,000 members. She still serves as president of the organization, which was active in promoting Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Defend Florida grew out of Wetherington’s Women for Trump activism.

Wetherington traveled to Washington, D.C., for Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021 and watched the violence at the U.S. Capitol unfold from outside the building. In an interview the next day with a California television station, Wetherington described scenes of people being pepper sprayed and protesters taking helmets and shields from police.

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Wetherington told the television station that she was “not happy” about the violence “but I’m proud of the patriots who went to peacefully protest, which is what the majority of the almost 2 million people who were there did.”

Raj Doraisamy, a Sarasota resident who co-founded Defend Florida with Wetherington, also was outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“I didn’t go in the building, but I saw what happened; I filmed it,” Doraisamy told the Herald-Tribune. “It should never have happened but there were, I would say, 500 people from what I saw that went in ... We got 330 million people in this country, 500 people had bad judgment.”

More than 700 people have been charged so far in relation to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

Wetherington and Doraisamy were introduced a short time after Jan. 6 by a pastor.

“We say God brought us together,” Wetherington said.

Doraisamy met Wetherington at her house and they clicked.

“We sat around a table and we talked and decided that we needed to defend our state because we didn’t have any control over our federal government anymore,” Wetherington said.

Defend Florida formed in January 2021. In April, the group helped coordinate a rally that featured Flynn and Stone. The rally attracted a large number of individuals from the far right nationalist Proud Boys, some of whom appeared on stage with a pro-Trump rapper.

The Proud Boys are a self-described “western chauvinist” group.  A number of their members, including some from Florida, were arrested for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Wetherington once wrote “God Bless the Proud Boys” in a Facebook post that is no longer viewable, according to a screen shot shared with the Herald-Tribune.

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Before the Bradenton rally, Wetherington said in an interview that “people are very concerned about elections.”

“I mean, if the elections can be stolen in Georgia and Michigan and Arizona, other red states, they can be stolen here,” Wetherington said, repeating baseless claims made by Trump that he won those swing states. “So there’s a concern that that could happen here, and we know the left is coming after DeSantis in 2022 so we need to do some things preemptively to prevent the left from stealing the election here.”

At the time, Wetherington already was turning her attention to changing Florida’s election laws and voting systems.

Gathering ‘affidavits’

Last year as the Florida Legislature advanced S.B. 90, which put new restrictions on voting by mail, Defend Florida joined with other conservative groups to pressure GOP lawmakers to support the bill.

“As far as election integrity, one of our ... major emphasis is working with our state legislators,” Wetherington said in April.

With S.B. 90 poised for a final vote in both chambers, Defend Florida helped lead a coalition that bombarded lawmakers.

“They were flooded with phone calls and emails supporting those bills,” she said.

The legislation passed.

Defend Florida was just getting started.

Across the state, a door-to-door canvassing effort swelled throughout 2021, attracting volunteers from the Panhandle to South Florida who worked to ferret out alleged voting problems.

Such canvassing efforts have been criticized. Republicans in the Arizona Senate backed away from using door-to-door canvassing as part of a controversial audit of ballots in Maricopa County after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division sent a letter raising concerns about voter intimidation.

On Defend Florida’s website, the group says that of the 5,571 affidavits it has collected through Jan. 28 alleging “voting irregularities,” 89% of those involve voters who allegedly do not live at the address where they are registered.

Wetherington insisted in an interview last week that Defend Florida is not making accusations of voter fraud, saying that’s for authorities to determine.

“They are evidence of voting irregularities, I can’t say whether they are fraud or not,” she said of the affidavits.

But a Defend Florida graphic, which is posted on the group’s website and was distributed as a flyer at the Tampa rally, summarizing the group’s canvassing results states: “You’ve Got Fraud – By Mail!” And Wetherington told a tea party group in August that “we’re actually targeting the counties where we’re finding the most fraud, that’s the counties we need to audit.”

Wesley Wilcox, the Marion County Elections Supervisor and the head of a group representing supervisors in all 67 Florida counties, said he doubts “that the affidavits are valid.”

For one thing, officials said in recent interviews that Defend Florida hadn’t provided the affidavits to them. Bennett hadn’t seen any of them as of Friday morning. Neither had Wilcox. Warren said last month that the Manatee Sheriff’s Office hadn’t received them.

A Manatee sheriff’s detective participated in the October meeting between Bennett and members of Defend Florida.

“In that meeting, nothing was presented that showed evidence of wrongdoing,” Warren, the sheriff’s spokesman, wrote. “Wetherington and Doraisamy were also unable to provide copies of the mentioned affidavits.”

Wetherington said the detective “had the wrong understanding” of the intention of the meeting, which wasn’t about pushing for criminal charges.

“All of our meetings with the supervisors of elections are information gathering and information sharing,” she said.

Sarasota County Elections Supervisor Ron Turner and Charlotte County Elections Supervisor Paul Stamoulis also told the Herald-Tribune recently that no affidavits had been provided to them by Defend Florida, which claims to have uncovered 97 voting irregularities in Sarasota and 27 in Charlotte.

“If you’ve got an affidavit and you’re alleging fraud, let’s go clean it up,” Wilcox said. “But by you alleging it and then not showing proof, what does that do to the average person? It causes them doubt, and therefore I have doubts.”

Wetherington said Thursday that all of the affidavits have been shared with the governor’s office – they take up 17 binders, she said – and the secretary of state, and that they soon would be shared with local elections officials.

“Raj and I are only two people,” she said Thursday. “We have 34 people who manage the county level. We’ve asked our county level people to take the affidavits to their supervisor of elections. They’re not employees of ours, we can’t withhold their paycheck if they don’t do their job.”

Wetherington sent an email to the Herald-Tribune late Friday saying “the canvassing findings from our affidavits” were sent to elections officials. She forwarded an email sent by Defend Florida member Dan Heim to Wilcox Friday. Heim told Wilcox that he put a spreadsheet in a Dropbox folder Friday afternoon that details the “findings and date canvassed for each county.”

Elections officials are skeptical that there are widespread problems.

Wilcox noted that roughly 10% of the population moves every three months, so it’s highly likely that canvassers will come across situations where voters no longer live at residences where they are registered. That doesn’t mean they didn’t live there previously and cast a valid ballot.

Wilcox recently received a list of 8,000 voters whose registrations were flagged by Defend Florida. They want him to remove inactive voters from the rolls.

“I think the second voter I pulled up was an active duty member of the military who hadn’t voted in eight years,” Wilcox said. “So I said: ‘Ok, we have this young man serving overseas and you want me to remove his record?’ That’s not the case, that’s not what they want me to do.”

Defend Florida subsequently sent certified letters to Florida elections officials about cleaning voter rolls. Wilcox said the information he received from Defend Florida included a second list with more than 18,000 voters, and other elections officials received similar lists.

“What I believe to be the sole reason they were listed on the report is they have never voted, or not in the last 10 years, which in and of itself is not a requirement,” Wilcox said, noting that voters have the right to be registered and not cast a ballot.

Yet the push to purge voters from the rolls is gaining traction.

Wetherington told the Manatee County tea party group that she was meeting with an influential lawmaker to push for a voter roll purge, a proposal echoed by DeSantis in a recent speech and included in legislation filed last week by a Republican state senator.

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Florida’s 60-day legislative session kicked off in early January and runs through March 11, and election issues will get significant attention.

In November, DeSantis announced a proposal to create a state police force aimed solely at investigating election fraud allegations.

Defend Florida put out a press release on Nov. 7 praising the governor’s proposal, but the group wants to go further.

Wetherington’s group has fixated on alleged problems with voting rolls. She said in August that Defend Florida planned: “to present that evidence and say: ‘Houston, we have a problem here, we have to clean up our voter rolls.’”

The idea of purging voter rolls later made it into the governor’s State of the State speech last month. The GOP elections bill filed last week would require elections supervisors to conduct voter list maintenance every year, instead of every other year.

Efforts to remove voters from the rolls have been controversial in Florida over the years.

Former Gov. Rick Scott, who is now a U.S. senator, ordered his secretary of state to scour the rolls for any noncitizens, who are not allowed to vote, and remove them. An initial list of 182,000 flagged voter registrations was whittled down to 2,700 individuals, who received letters demanding they prove their citizenship. Among them was a 91-year-old World War II veteran from Broward County who was wrongly targeted.

Yet shortly after Defend Florida met with DeSantis’ staff in December, the governor highlighted the voter purge idea.

“We also need to ensure that supervisors clean the voter rolls,” DeSantis said in his speech kicking off the 2022 legislative session. “That only citizens are registered to vote and that mail ballots only go to those who actually request them before each individual election.”

DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw noted that the governor has long advocated for cleaning voter roles. He said in 2019 that: “We are confident that by improving the accuracy of our voter rolls, we will reduce the potential for voter fraud.”

“Yes, members of the Governor’s staff have met with representatives of Defend Florida, as well as other outside groups working on priority issues,” Pushaw said. “We share their goal of protecting the integrity and security of our elections. The Governor’s Office meets frequently with citizens and organizations interested in a range of policy areas.”

Wetherington said the governor’s office asked Defend Florida in early December “to bring as much evidence as we could, like hard evidence, affidavits of people who don’t live somewhere, or double voters or whatever, because they wanted to have that evidence to talk to the Legislature about what needs to be done.”

Pushaw ignored a question about whether the governor’s office has reviewed Defend Florida’s findings and drawn any conclusions.

Wetherington also has the attention of GOP lawmakers. Her group met with Sen. Travis Hutson, who introduced the election legislation in the Senate last week, Rep. Daniel Perez, who heads the elections committee in the House and is in line to be speaker, Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, who often is involved in elections bills, and the chief of staff for Senate President Wilton Simpson, she said.

Sarasota state Rep. Tommy Gregory, who participated in meeting between GOP lawmakers and Defend Florida members, said: “I applaud their goal, as we all should, to ensure we have safe secure and verifiable elections.”

Sarasota state Sen. Joe Gruters, the chair of the Florida GOP, said he met with Wetherington “a couple of times.”

“She is a wealth of knowledge,” Gruters said. “They have the same goal as a lot of other people, to make sure we have elections with voter confidence and there aren’t a lot of shenanigans going on. They have come up with ways we can strengthen voter protection laws.”

The elections bill that emerged in the Legislature last week that includes ideas that Defend Florida is advocating, although Wetherington said she wants to see it go further.

The legislation creates a new state office to investigation election fraud, requires individuals submitting mail ballots to include more personal identifying information and requires more frequent voter roll purges.

The bill appears likely to pass, as Defend Florida and others push GOP leaders to act based on false claims of widespread voting problems.

“I haven’t talked to anybody who thinks the election is fair,” Wetherington said.

Follow Herald-Tribune Political Editor Zac Anderson on Twitter at @zacjanderson. He can be reached at zac.anderson@heraldtribune.com

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Defend Florida lobbying Legislature and Ron DeSantis for voting restrictions