GoFundMe took down a conservative operative’s fundraising page on Friday, asserting that it was spreading misinformation about the 2020 election.
Matt Braynard, who was an early staffer on the data team for the 2016 Trump campaign, set up the page to finance an investigation into voter fraud. He claimed on Twitter that he had data on absentee ballots and early voters in a number of key swing states and wanted to run them against Social Security and change-of-address databases to determine illegitimate votes.
Comparing the databases would require thousands of dollars, he claimed in a series of tweets on Thursday. He turned to GoFundMe after being unable to get support from the Republican Party or President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. But GoFundMe removed the page the following day, saying that it violated the site’s terms of service and that it “attempts to spread misleading information about the election and has been removed from the platform.”
State election officials have repeatedly rejected that there was any mass voter fraud in the 2020 election, and numerous studies show voter fraud to be exceedingly rare in the U.S. There has been no evidence of major hacking into voting infrastructure, and the election has, by and large, gone smoothly.
But as Trump’s lead in critical swing states slowly slipped from his grasp, the president has been spreading conspiracy theories that fraudulent votes were being dumped to take away his reelection. These claims have no basis in evidence; the evolving numbers in key states reflect the unprecedented number of absentee ballots sent in amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Braynard claims that he raised $220,000 when his page was taken down. A GoFundMe spokesperson told POLITICO that all the money was returned to donors.
Braynard started a new fundraising campaign on another crowdsourcing site shortly after.
“But we won’t be stopped; please give even more on our new Croud Sourcing page,” he tweeted.
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