What's your question? No pillows. The same ones that make the hospital and the prison pillows are the same company because I know that. I've been in both. Who are they?

I don't know.

At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month, our team ran into Mike Lindell.

He's the CEO of My Pillow, and he's obsessed with proving that the 2020 election was stolen and fraudulent, which, of course, it absolutely was not, and protecting the 2024 election.

Here's the new plan.

Everybody, whether you're- Honestly, a lot of the stuff he was saying was either bogus or just completely incomprehensible, even for someone like me who follows politics closely.

But he did mention something that caught my attention.

In the United States, the dirtiest voter rolls in the country are right here in Wisconsin. There's 7,100,000 names on the voter rolls, okay?

Voter rolls, the simple list of who is registered to vote. These have become a target of conspiracy theorists like Lindell. And challenges to those lists are already making their way to local election offices around the country. My guest is CNN Senior Investigative Correspondent, Kyung Law. She has the story of a group launching a mountain of challenges with the help of an app, burying innocent voters and officials with paperwork in the process. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Reind.

So, Kyun-Yi, it dawns on me that we are less than 100 days from November fifth, but early voting and vote by mail will get started much, much sooner than that. I also realized at the same time, that baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud have not just gone away since 2020. So it seems like those two tracks are on a collision course. And you and the investigative team here at CNN have been following all this. So what What does that collision course actually look like in real life?

Well, in real life, it's very messy. Everybody's strapped in because a lot of the players that we saw and a lot of the lies and conspiracies from 2020, that has fully baked in among certain voters, especially the very conservative, right-wing Trump followers.

If they don't cheat, we win the state easily. They cheat. They have no shame. They cheat. Do you understand that You crooket people? They're the most crooket.

You hear the former President continue to talk about people who are dead voting, people who aren't citizens voting. All of that leads to everyone repeating these election integrity claims.

They cheated in the last election, and they're going to cheat in this election, but we're going to get them.

And a character group, and I call them a group when really it's just a few people, that we saw really very during 2020, putting out a conspiracy film that was widely debunked in 2022. They're back. And True the vote. This group is basically trying to teach private citizens who believe and have listened to the lies about stolen elections when that is a lie. And they're starting to challenge individual voters in their own communities. And so What True the vote has done is they've made an app that we did see roll out sooner, but now it has become very user friendly. People, especially those who are elderly and at home, can easily learn how to do it. They can take classes online. They can access this data that True the vote is backing and then submit challenges on their neighbors.

So anybody can just download this app, look up this data, and then say, Hey, this person doesn't look like they're registered correctly. Is that the idea?

Essentially, basically, the way this app works is you can look up your suspicions, you can look up names, you can look up addresses, you can cross-reference with Google Maps. And what this does is it raises suspicion that, sure, maybe it looks a little odd that there might be 20 people registered to one commercial address, and so they'll submit that voter challenge. But very easily, you can figure out that that commercial address might be a university.

Right. There's not actually something nefarious going on. It's just the technicality with how a business is registered or something like that.

Let's everybody think about how we all live in this country. Everyone moves. Everyone goes to colleges, or if you're in law enforcement, you might not put your home address as your voting address. You might put your police agency. There are a lot of reasons why There might be so much shifting in the voter registration status across this country. But the system is built to catch all of that. What this is doing, the app that True to the vote is pushing in, it's called IV3. This app is essentially, according to more than a dozen election officials we've spoken with across the country and experts beyond that that we've spoken with, they all say, This is old data. This is repetitive data. What this is essentially doing is it's causing a lot of headaches, but yet the people who are following through the vote and finding these aha moments, they basically deepen the lie within themselves.

What does it look like when these challenges actually reach the election officials who are in charge of investigating whether there's something actually wrong going on?

Let's start by talking about Nancy in Denton County. She is an older, retired lady. We visited her at her home. She has no criminal record. She seems like someone who's truly concerned about the election going correctly. So Nancy in Denton County signs up for Truth of Votes IV3, goes through the training course, and starts counting some addresses and names, and submits this information. One One of the people she submits information about is Daniel.

I personally don't know her. She doesn't know me.

And Daniel is a mild-mannered, kind man.

I've lived in Denton for over 24 years. I have been voting here for two decades.

He is registered to vote at his university because he's a university administrator, and his address is registered there because that's where his housing is. So there is a perfectly good reason why his address is a commercial address.

So that's the thing. My address, students on our campus would use that address. And so that might have... So if they had researched that and looked into that, they would see, Oh.

But Nancy doesn't care about that. Nancy believes that she has caught Daniel, and he is not a real human being. So she submits that challenge about Daniel, including hundreds of people a day and submits them to the county elections official, Frank Phillips, the Denton County Elections Administrator.

She was your first? She was, yes.

And she still- Yeah. Every day?

Nancy sends me something every day.

Frank says, Nancy sends him something every single day.

Every day, wow.

Every day. He's got to look up every single person, every single Daniel, and It's a very quick process, but still it takes time. If you think about what it's like for you to even go through your mail, how annoying that is. Now, imagine you have to open up thousands of pieces like this. Multiply Nancy in every single county in the United States, potentially. While it's not active in every single county, that certainly appears to be the goal of True to the Vote. What would you like to say to Nancy if she's sitting right in front of you?

I'm real, and I'm not going to go away.

When I met Daniel, he is a shy guy, and he began our interview by saying, I'm here. I'm real.

He's a real human being. Flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood. Here, I'm wearing a T-shirt. Can you see? And I have voted in Denton County for 20 years. I was pretty pissed off.

I was.

He was offended. Offended because it is a basic right. And often it's not until you lose that right that you realize how important it is as an American.

It seems like for some reason, they're attacking American voters. And that's our biggest right, right? Is being able to talk to our government and being able to be part of our government. If you're trying to deny someone who's legitimately here their right to be part of the government, then I don't know how you can say that. Is That is American. I think it's un-American to do that.

Well, so for somebody like Frank, the official in Denton County, Texas, it seems like he is willing to go through this barrage of challenges that he gets from Nancy and others. But are there other offices that just don't want to deal with this that are like, Hey, we do this normally. This is our job. Let us do our job, and don't want to deal with what may be conspiracy theory-fueled challenges?

Well, let's start with Frank Phillips, who is incredibly patient, very kind, and feels that the only way out of the morass that we are currently in is by doing it patiently, slowly, slowly and through the goal of education with kindness. Is there anything you can say to these folks? We're going to catch these anyway. Is there anything you could say along those lines?

Well, you would catch them anyway, but I don't fault them for... Well, first of all, they were given the information they were given. I don't know where they get their information from. I don't know what groups are behind it or anything like that. So When they are presented these challenges, in their mind, they think, Hey, you've got thousands of people on your roles that shouldn't be there, which turns out not to be the case, but I don't blame them for it.

It's just- If he immediately jumps to the conclusion that all of these people are conspiratorial nuts, how is that going to open up an avenue where we understand one another? That's his approach.

I think what they have learned through the process is that, Hey, we actually do work these things on a daily basis. We're taking care of it like we should. I think it's an educational moment.

Educational moment means you can teach these folks, but they're still growing in number.

Okay.

That's okay.

Sure.

Yeah. Somebody else to teach.

Others are not so patient. I have spoken to people across this country, registrar, voters from Yavapai County to Pennsylvania. What they will tell you is that it just is tiresome. Not only are they dealing with repetitive challenges to voters, what they have to deal with are foia requests that are nonsensical. It is a deluge of paperwork that they are facing. If you think about the wheels of democracy needing to move very smoothly, this is throwing sand in those wheels.

What What do we know about this group, True the Vote, and what their, pardon the pun, true intentions are?

Well, we went to Texas to try to find them because I don't know, Where's your address? We pull their records with the state and with the federal government. There are a handful of employees, just a handful. Okay, let's try to find the known people. There are a couple of known people. We can't access the head of True the Vot, the leader. I can't find a brick and mortar building in the state of Texas, despite the fact that they list themselves with the state and with the federal government as a nonprofit. They also only have, at any point since they formed, at the most, maybe 10 employees. Usually, there's only a couple of people on the payroll. The amazing thing is if you look at, despite how as a nonprofit, you don't have to report a lot of your financial information, in the last three years, True The vote has pulled in $12 million. Where is all that money going? We just don't know. We did get a statement from True the vote. Even though they wouldn't talk to us on camera, they did send us something over email. Essentially, the heart of it says that it has developed through this app specialized processes technologies and methodologies that have been affirmed by experts and courts.

But David, we sent them a list of specific questions. They wouldn't answer any of them. They wouldn't talk about who their experts and courts are, who they cite. When we go back and talk to the election administrators, both at the county and state level, they say that the app is just kicking out information that's repetitive, and in the case of Daniel, often wrong. I thank True The Vote for replying to us via email. I would have appreciated if they had answered our specific questions.

Well, going forward, as we get closer to November, then, There may be users of this app that are truly operating in good faith. They just want to see secure elections. But it would stand to reason that there are others who believe the lies that Trump and Trump allies continue to put out about the 2020 election being stolen, about dead people voting, all that stuff that you talked about. What are we about to see in terms of the election process, trying to actually count these votes?

There's a lot of concern. What you hear from all the people we speak with is we are now in a place where the lie has been repeated so many times, both by political to your neighbor, to going to a baseball game or a Little League field that it is fully baked in. It is very difficult to tear people away from a reality that they have heard and they long believe in for several years. That's a concern.

We saw on January sixth just how that can become violent, and of course, these threats to election workers that have gone on since all that could continue again. Kyung, thanks so much for the reporting. I really appreciate it.

You got it. Thanks for having me.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paula Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our Senior Producer is Fez Jamil. Our Supervising producer is Greg Peppers, Matt Dempsey is our production manager, Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Littai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manisari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, James André, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarou. Special thanks, as always, to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Wednesday. I will talk to you then.