Beverly Pop sits in her Nebraska home. Since voting for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, Ms. Pop has pored over her entire state’s political donation records, searching for signs of illicit money as Trump continues to contest the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
For years, Beverly Pop kept the dial tuned to National Public Radio during her 80-kilometre commute. It was her constant companion as she steered down Nebraska Highway 58, her eyes scanning for deer that occasionally leapt out from the fields of corn and soy.
“I was always listening to them, because I was driving back and forth and needed to stay awake,” she said. “Then they started making me mad.”
Her anger was provoked by the way the public broadcaster covered Donald Trump, the man she remembered as a 1980s playboy. Ms. Pop, a teacher of English as a second language who worked with recent immigrants, was troubled by the idea that Mr. Trump could enter politics, much less run for president.
But something else troubled her, too. She practised empathy in her work, learning how to say things like “bless you” in Sudanese and Somali to connect with her students. She was surprised when colleagues began to mock Mr. Trump. Then she detected a similar tone on NPR.
“The way they were making fun of Trump and the things they were saying about him. They were not missing a chance to make a dig,” she recalled. Then she saw how Mr. Trump responded. He was not cowed.
“I thought to myself, ‘I want someone who will fight for me the way he’s fighting for himself,’” she said.
Years later, after voting for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, she joined a group of Americans who have made themselves foot soldiers in one of the former president’s most fiercely fought battles: his campaign against the election system that tabulated his failure to regain power in 2020.
Days after he survived an assassination attempt, former U.S. president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis.ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/Getty Images
Mr. Trump has still not conceded that loss, and large numbers of his supporters have been convinced by his claims that the election was stolen from him. He has also not committed to accepting the outcome of this year’s presidential vote, and the skepticism he has sowed about election integrity remains a vital force in American politics.
That is in part because of the efforts of people like Ms. Pop, who have sought to expand those claims through their own research, even if there are legitimate explanations for the evidence they believe they have found.
Convinced that elections have become breeding grounds for trickery, Ms. Pop has pored through her entire state’s political donation records, searching for signs of illicit money.
Her desire to contribute grew while watching with dismay as Joe Biden entered office with a series of executive orders that undid some of Mr. Trump’s policies.
“Basically, he changed our country in those 10 days. And all of a sudden I realized we had to do something, or we were going to lose this country,” Ms. Pop said.
Jack Posobiec, a right-wing activist and political strategist who has called for overthrowing the institutions of U.S. power.Rebecca Cook/Reuters
She joined groups dedicated to scrutinizing elections and supporting Mr. Trump on the Telegram chat app – among them, one run by Jack Posobiec, the right-wing activist and strategist who has called for overthrowing the institutions of U.S. power and exacting “righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.”
She started listening to former Trump strategist Steve Bannon. His “War Room” podcast became the audio backdrop to the work she began last year, when she started scrolling through 200,000 lines of data representing political donations made in Nebraska over the past five years, looking for patterns that might reveal flows of illegal cash.
Sitting in her living room in Nebraska’s rural Loup City, computer perched on her lap, Ms. Pop, 69, scrutinized them all.
“I had to have something to do, or I fall asleep watching TV,” she said.
Ms. Pop found donations from people that appear to be dead. And she found some from places that don’t appear to exist, like Tel Aviv, Neb.
But some of the records she found have a much less dramatic explanation.
They included lengthy series of contributions, often only pennies each, made in rapid succession. To anyone who had made more than 50 donations in five years, Ms. Pop sent a letter warning their name may have been used to mask the movement of foreign funds, which are proscribed in U.S. politics.
She printed and sent nearly 1,500 of those letters at her own expense, her garden growing ragged with weeds as she devoted countless hours to the task.
She suspected her work afforded her a glimpse into the shadows of American electoral malfeasance. Each small donation looked to her like a pathway prepared for someone to sneak anti-Trump cash into the system.
“If I were a crooked person with a bunch of dark money, what I would want to do is have some place to dump money very quickly,” she said.
Beverly Pop's garden has become overgrown with weeds as she devotes her time instead to examining election donation records.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Pop sees one woman, who lives in Lincoln, Neb., as one of the state’s most suspicious donors. The woman made more than 7,000 donations – including more than 2,300 one-penny contributions in a period of several minutes one evening in 2018, directed to a Democratic-affiliated organization called It Starts Today.
“If I were setting up for dark money, I would be using her,” said Ms. Pop.
She does not believe the innocent explanations for what she found – including that the long lists of repeated donations were the result of a funding program designed, legally, to do exactly that.
It Starts Today was launched soon after Mr. Trump’s 2016 win, an event that prompted the organization’s founder, Democratic technologist Jonathan Zucker, to think about how he could limit the impact of a Trump presidency.
One way was to put Democrats in control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives – and so Mr. Zucker created a system to channel one-cent donations to each of the 468 Democrats running for Congress in 2018. A person could donate in increments of $4.68. “It was a program literally designed to break up your donation into penny packets,” Mr. Zucker said.
Mr. Zucker understands why the long lists of donations could look strange. It is not, however, dark money. “This is incredibly disclosed money in very small quantities,” he said.
Signs in support of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy are posted on a lawn in downtown Loup City, NE.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Pop’s determination to discover election wrongs places her in the company of many others who have taken it upon themselves to hunt for problems in a system they often do not perfectly understand.
It is “everyday, regular people, stepping up and saying enough is enough,” said Connie Reinke, a volunteer with the Nebraska Voter Accuracy Project, which has raised allegations of a series of problems with elections in the state.
The office of Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen, a Republican whose office is charged with managing elections, has produced a 20-page slide presentation that provides factual counterpoints to allegations of suspicious voting patterns, unreliable voter rolls and demands for hand counts of ballots.
Political leaders from both parties in Nebraska, too, are critical of people such as Ms. Pop who have raised questions about election integrity.
“People start thinking, ‘Hey we lost 2020 because the election was stolen,’ versus getting to the root cause,” said Don Bacon, the U.S. House of Representatives member from the Omaha area, who is a Republican.
Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have had to reassure donors about the letters they received from Ms. Pop. Ms. Pop’s use of public data to reach individual donors is “very wrong,” said Precious McKesson, executive director of the Nebraska Democratic Party. She called it an intimidation tactic.
Ms. Pop offered an apology. “I’m not trying to intimidate people. If I am, I’m sorry,” she said. She believes in democracy, and said she has no desire to stop lawful donations.
She nonetheless has lost faith that the systems of American politics are fair, no matter the evidence to the contrary.
She has come to believe Mr. Trump’s political opponents will not allow another change in government. “They’re going to fight it. They’re going to do horrible things,” she said.
“I’m seeing World War III on its way. They’re going to declare martial law and say we can’t have any elections.”