In the Documents: Cleta Mitchell’s Emails Criticizing Increased Use of Absentee Voting

In late 2021, Cleta Mitchell — a lawyer who less than a year before had played a prominent role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election — was given a seat on the advisory board of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a bipartisan government entity that provides voting resources and information to election officials.

American Oversight sued the EAC in August 2022 for the release of communications between select commissioners and election conspiracy theorists and voting-restriction advocates, including Mitchell. Through these and other records, we uncovered correspondence between Mitchell and right-wing groups from 2020 as well as 2022, after she joined the board, in which she used unfounded claims of voter fraud to oppose expanded access to absentee and mail-in voting. Additional records reveal an EAC commissioner’s communications with right-wing groups about mail-in voting and redistricting. 

Pushing Back Against Pandemic Voting Measures

Records released in response to American Oversight’s lawsuit contain emails from the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in which Mitchell, along with a top official from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), contacted partisan EAC commissioners to complain about new measures that would make it easier for Americans to vote, namely the increased use of absentee voting. 

On March 19, 2020, Michael Bowman, the president of ALEC’s advocacy arm, emailed Mitchell and EAC Commissioner Christy McCormick with the agenda for a conference call the next day called “Understanding How Elections Work.” According to a script for the call, Mitchell would introduce the two speakers, McCormick and fellow commissioner Donald Palmer, who had been appointed by Trump in 2019. McCormick, who had been on the EAC since 2014, had also served on Trump’s short-lived voter-fraud commission in 2017. The script also indicated that the call would be moderated by Arizona Rep. Shawnna Bolick, who after the 2020 election joined other Arizona state lawmakers in signing a letter asking Congress to give Arizona’s electors to Trump. 

Mitchell proposed changing the title and focus of the call to “How Elections Work During a Pandemic,” because “every crazy thing the left wants to do they will try to get done at this time, using this virus as the reason.” She suggested speaking with Palmer and McCormick about how to incorporate the pandemic into their presentation, and added: “The left is on the move. We need to be busy pushing back. And using this to get some of OUR changes such as cleaned voter rolls if there are all mailed ballots.” Bowman agreed to the change, sending a follow-up email to McCormick and Palmer, writing, “We lightly changed the importance of tomorrow’s call with the new title.”

On April 17, Mitchell emailed Bowman, Bolick, McCormick, and Palmer an op-ed titled “America’s hidden voting epidemic? Mail ballot failures” and suggested that it be sent out to the participants of another ALEC call. Bowman responded that he had “already added it.” The op-ed’s authors were prominent voter fraud alarmists Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams. Reporting by Votebeat and CNN, as well as documents American Oversight previously obtained, revealed that Adams pushed for Mitchell’s appointment to the EAC and that he had also floated the possibility of nominating von Spakovsky for the role.

Mitchell’s 2022 Efforts Against Voting by Mail

In response to other requests to the EAC, American Oversight also obtained records of messages sent by Mitchell while she has served as an EAC advisory board member. The messages show that she continued to oppose mail-in voting and disparaged voting rights organizations for being “left-of-center.” 

In January 2022, EAC advisory board members and others received an email containing a toolkit for National Poll Worker Recruitment Day. Copying McCormick and Palmer on her reply, Mitchell wrote to the EAC staffer who sent the email to express concern that the signup link led to the Fair Elections Center, a group dedicated to expanding voting rights. In her email, Mitchell described the Fair Elections Center as “a left-of-center organization that has diametrically opposite views about election law” compared with “the vast coalition” with which she works. Mitchell wrote that it was “disappointing and disturbing” that “federal tax dollars” were being spent “to promote a leftist group.” 

On Feb. 2, 2022, Mitchell, along with several state and Moore County, N.C., activists and officials, received an email from the chair of the Moore County Republican Party relaying concerns about 2020 mail-in absentee vote counts. The email indicated that in Moore County, “the mail-in for every race was won by the Democrat by an average 70%-30% split,” adding that the same trend was true across the state and decrying the “liberalized” rule changes for accepting and counting mail-in ballots.

In her response to the email, Mitchell called for an election integrity task force that would be a “team of people whose only focus is monitoring the absentee voting process in Moore County — and every county.” She wrote that such a group could look for “potential legal challenges” to absentee voting procedures “such as the ones brought in PA and WI.” Earlier in the year, judges in both states had ruled in favor of conservatives seeking to restrict access to mail-in voting. 

Mitchell also wrote that “we need to be absolutely vigilant” about alleged “ballot harvesting activities” conducted by what she called “left wing ‘voting rights’ groups.” (So-called “ballot harvesting” refers to the process in which one person is responsible for depositing absentee ballots filled out by others, a practice that conservatives have pointed to in spreading unfounded claims of fraud.)

EAC Correspondence with Right-Wing Groups about Redistricting and Mail-in Voting 

In response to American Oversight’s lawsuit, we also obtained correspondence between Commissioner McCormick and outside advocacy groups that contain materials related to redistricting efforts and the push for more restrictive voting laws. 

On Feb. 26, 2020, ALEC’s Bowman emailed McCormick and Palmer about “putting together a call with our state legislators” during which the commissioners would speak and answer questions. He also provided them with the phone number of Adam Kincaid, head of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. McCormick replied, thanking Bowman for the contact information and writing, “I am planning on attending at least one of the redistricting sessions.”

The documents also contain a “Redistricting Messaging Guide” from the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which claimed that Democrats want to “give power to unelected judges” and contained a one-pager attacking “socialism in the states.” Also in the records is a “myths vs. facts” guide about redistricting that said, “Republicans oppose proportional representation because it is in direct conflict with our founding principles.” 

A June 10, 2020, email indicated that McCormick attended an “ALEC Legislator Call” that included Jason Snead, the executive director of Honest Elections Project, a group that advocates for restrictive voting laws and has ties to conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo. In the email, AL

EC’s special projects coordinator wrote that she would keep McCormick in the loop “so that together, we can develop persuasive messaging and best practices on how to counter the march towards all-mail elections.”

Previously, American Oversight obtained records from the months before the 2020 election showing EAC officials communicating with voting-restriction activists from ALEC as well as an “Election Law Working Group” convened by the Heritage Foundation.  

The push for stricter voting regulations has been a trend among conservatives for years, sustained by false claims of widespread voter fraud. Recent reporting has pointed out a shift in the Republican Party, with leaders considering whether to reverse course on the Trump-led rhetoric against mail-in voting, in an acknowledgment that it has likely suppressed voter turnout within their own base. Still, the growing prominence of conspiracy-fueled election denial and the influence of figures like Mitchell continues to be a threat to U.S. democracy and the right to vote. You can learn more about American Oversight’s investigations into voting rights issues here.