FAKE ELECTORS HALL OF SHAME

FLIPPED: James Renner, Michigan

James "Jim" Renner, 77, of Lansing, Michigan, a former police officer, had all charges against him dropped in the autumn of 2023 after he entered into a cooperation agreement with the attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel. Nessel charged Renner and 15 other fake electors with eight felony charges each related to election crimes and forgery carrying a maximum penalty of 14 years in state prison. Renner testified against the others in their initial appearances between October 2023 and January 2024, indicating he will likely take the stand against them when their cases go to trial.

INDICTED: Kent Vanderwood, Michigan

Kent Vanderwood, 70, is the mayor of Wyoming, Michigan, population nearly 77,000. Involved in politics since the late 1980s, he served in the Wyoming City Council from 2006 to 2022 before being elected to his current position and assuming office in December of that year. Vanderwood has resisted calls to resign from office; he faces the same eight felonies as Michigan's other fake electors.

INDICTED: Stanley Grot, Michigan

Stanley Grot, the town clerk of Shelby Township, Michigan, was a local chair of the Michigan GOP who formerly ran for Michigan Secretary of State and Michigan House. In July 2021, the Michigan GOP agreed to pay $200,000 to resolve a campaign finance violation after Grot was allegedly paid a six-figure sum to exit the GOP primary in the former office. After being charged for his role in the fake electors plot, Grot, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees, was stripped of his electoral duties and suspended from the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks. However, he was allowed to keep his job; he is up for re-election in November 2024.

INDICTED: Amy Facchinello, Michigan

Amy Facchinello is the former vice-president of the Genessee County Republican Party and a current member of the Grand Blanc School Board, with her term expiring in 2026. Facchinello attempted to have her case moved to federal court, but a judge denied her order, saying that electors aren't federal officers and that she was never an elector to begin with. She has called the charges and a failed recall effort against her the efforts of "far-left extremists" targeting "conservatives because they demand total ideological conformity."

INDICTED: Kathy Berden, Michigan

Kathy Berden is a farmer and the Republican National Committeewoman for Michigan. In 2017, she became involved in the Presidential Nominating Process Committee, and she has prior experience as a precinct delegate and a county chair. She faces the same eight felony charges as the other Michigan fake electors.

INDICTED: Meshawn Maddock, Michigan

Meshawn Maddock is probably the most despicable of the Michigan fake electors. An owner of A1 Bail Bonds in Milford, she called Pete Buttigieg a "weak little girl," called a black Michigan elected official a "scary masked man," spread a false rumor that litter boxes were popping up in schools where children identified as cats, and publicly advocated for secession from the United States Maddock, the wife of Michigan State Representative Shawn Maddock, was a delegate in the 2016 Republican Convention, served as co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party from 2021 to 2023, and organized buses of Michiganders to travel to the Capitol on January 6th.

INDICTED: Marian Sheridan, Michigan

Marian Sheridan of West Bloomfield is a sales representative at Eggland's Best. The grassroots vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party, she was also a plaintiff in a frivolous lawsuit seeking to overturn Michigan's election results that led to sanctions against Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and other Trump attorneys.

INDICTED: Mari-Ann Henry, Michigan

Mari-Ann Henry is the former president of the Greater Oakland Republican Club and the treasurer of the 7th Congressional District Republican Committee. She has claimed that her role as a fake elector was "ceremonial" and that the felony charges she's facing are "spurious," and she has had $8,300 raised on her behalf on the "Christian crowdfunding" site GiveSendGo, a common platform used by January 6th defendants to raise funds.

INDICTED: Rose Rook, Michigan

Rose Rook, 81, is the former chair of the Van Buren County Republican Party and a current member of its executive committee. The Paw Paw resident, who faces the same eight felony charges as the other fake electors in the state, has raised $24,000 on GiveSendGo.

INDICTED: William "Hank" Choate, Michigan

William "Hank" Choate is a dairy farmer who attended an April 2017 agriculture event with Donald Trump and then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. He was the Michigan Farm Bureau's 2022 Volunteer of the Year. Like the other 14 defendants in this case, he has pleaded not guilty to eight felonies.

INDICTED: Clifford Frost, Michigan

Clifford Frost, a realtor from Macomb County who worked as a poll watcher during the 2020 election and shared election conspiracy theories on social media in the days before his arrest, requested federal courts to intervene and prevent Attorney General Nessel from prosecuting him and the other fake electors, a motion that was quickly denied.

INDICTED: John Haggard, Michigan

John Haggard, an Army veteran who actually served as a legitimate Trump elector in 2016 and who was another plaintiff in the Sidney Powell-led lawsuit challenging Michigan's election results, also published a GiveSendGo account, although his has since been deleted. Haggard said, "Apparently our attorney general doesn't believe in freedom of speech," in the same statement in which he suggested he knew that Donald Trump lost Michigan in the 2020 election. Well, John, "free speech" doesn't apply to knowingly lying on fake documents and then sending them to various figures in the legislative and judicial branch.

INDICTED: Timothy King, Michigan

King was yet another plaintiff in the frivolous lawsuit that aimed to overturn Michigan's 2020 election results. His lawyer has said that King suffers from "delusional" and "illogical" thinking, but that won't help him escape the felony charges and 14-year prison sentence he faces.

INDICTED: Michele Lundgren, Michigan

Michele Lundgren stuck out immediately among her co-defendants. The Republican candidate for a House seat located in Detroit during the 2022 midterms, she lost overwhelmingly to the Democratic incumbent in the heavily-liberal metro area. After her arrest, she answered calls from news stations to proclaim her innocence, saying she and her fellow fake electors were "duped" and had no reason to believe they were doing anything illegal.

INDICTED: Mayra Rodriguez, Michigan

Rodriguez was the 14th Congressional District Republican chair and a Republican National Convention delegate in 2020 as well as a former at-large board member of the Eastside Republican Club. An attorney who is currently facing disciplinary action for her involvement in the plot, she has pleaded not guilty in her criminal case.

INDICTED: Ken Thompson, Michigan

Orleans resident Ken Thompson, like Renner before him, was brought on to replace an original GOP fake elector who was "uncomfortable with the whole thing" and refused to participate in the felony conspiracy.

INDICTED: Michael McDonald, Nevada

McDonald served on the Las Vegas City Council from 1995 to 2003. During his time, although never charged with a crime, he was implicated in an ethics investigation, hit with a tax fraud inquiry, and caught up in an FBI sting operation. McDonald as a senior deputy in the office of the Nevada state treasurer from July to October 2015 before resigning due to the controversy caused by past allegations of wrongdoing. He has served as the chair of the Nevada Republican Party since April 2012, when he defeated the preferred candidate of then-Republican Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval. He served on the board of Miracle Flights for Kids and as a partner of Med Lien Management. He was sued by the former after Miracle Flights for Kids loaned Med Lien over $2 million and Med Lien defaulted, with the suit alleging that the company was a scam enterprise and that McDonald used his position in the charity to leverage the loan. McDonald was also an elector at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and has been called "Donald Trump's man in Nevada." Like the other Nevada fake electors, he has been charged with two felony counts of offering a false statement for filing and uttering a forged instrument. He also had his phone seized by the FBI and was interviewed by the January 6th Committee.

INDICTED: Jesse Law, Nevada

Jesse Law has served as the chair of the Clark County Republican Party since July 2021. A graduate of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, he founded Advantage Nursing in January 2007 and managed it for three years. From February 2005 to December 2013, he was a loan officer at the Flagship Financial Group. He was also a loan officer at Low VA Rates from July 2014 to January 2016, a principal consultant at Reach for the Sky from February 2010 to December 2016, and a senior vice president and WHITE HOUSE LIAISON at the Import-Export Bank of the United States from January 2017 to September 2018. He currently works as the chief strategist at JL Offerings. Nevada's fake electors scheme is particularly egregious, as there was NO PENDING LITIGATION seeking to overturn the 2020 election, meaning that this set of fake electors' sole purpose was to sow chaos when it came time to count the electoral votes on January 6th.

INDICTED: Jim DeGraffenreid, Nevada

A district-level delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention and the vice-chair of the state party, DeGraffenreid is an independent insurance professional and the president of Summit Partners Insurance Services. Along with Michael McDonald, he was subpoenaed to testify before the Washington, D.C. grand jury investigating Trump's involvement in January 6th. He faces the same two felony forgery-related charges as the other five Nevada fake electors, and, like them, he could face up to four years in prison if convicted.

INDICTED: Durward James Hindle III

The county clerk and treasurer of Storey County, Nevada, since September 2022 as well as a managing partner at Cascade Survey Research since August 2001, Hindle earned his BA in Biology from Lawrence University in 1982 and his MBA in Marketing and Finance from Washington University in St. Louis in 1984. He worked at Inland Steel Company from June 1984 to December 1996, Shanghai Ryerson Ltd. from December 1996 through May 1998, IMF Steel International from May 1998 through March 2000, Ryerson from March 2000 to March 2001, and at Trade Register from October 2006 through April 2008. His future, though, is less bright, as he faces the same felony charges as the other Nevada fake electors.

INDICTED: Shawn Meehan

One of the more prominent people on this list, Shawn Meehan has been the CEO of VitalStocks since January 2001 and has been involved in Republican Party politics since at least 2012. He was an executive board member for the Douglas County Republican Central Committee from February 2012 to November 2017 and has been again since March 2019; he was also the communications director of the body from September 2013 to April 2016. He was an alternate presidential elector in 2016 and a primary elector in 2020, which makes his fake elector role in the 2020 general election all the more ironic.

INDICTED: Eileen Rice

Although most of these fake electors are prominent figures, I can't find very much information on the only female fake elector in Nevada, Eileen Rice. In November 2020, she said she believed that mail-in voting had the potential for discrepancies but that it wouldn't be sufficient to change the outcome of the election, and, in spite of that and the fact that there was no pending litigation related to the state's election results, she signed forged documents. Like the other fake electors, she is scheduled to go on trial in January 2025.

Joseph Brannan

Listed as "unindicted co-conspirator number nine" in the Fulton County racketeering indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others, Brannan graduated Pacelli High School in 2001 and Auburn University in 2008. He was the station manager at WEGL Radio from 2001 to 2003, assistant engineer at Auburn Network from 2003 to 2005, an audit intern in 2008, a market controller and IT manager at Clear Channel Radio from 2000 to 2009, and has been the assistant manager and then general manager of PMB Broadcasting since then. Brannan, a youth orchestra treasurer in Columbus and a member of the Rotary Club who served as a Trump elector in 2016 and as the Georgia GOP treasurer, texted David Shafer ahead of the December 14th, 2020, fake electors meeting at which he signed forged documents. Brannan invoked the Fifth Amendment after being named as a target of the investigation. He has since claimed he was merely trying to "protect Trump's legal rights."

Mark Amick

Amick graduated from the University of Kansas before attaining a business degree from the University of Missouri. He worked for companies like Microsoft and Sprint and has been involved in the Milton Historical Society. After losing a 2019 bid for city council, he served on the Milton Election Feasibility Committee, which sought to determine whether Milton should hold its own municipal election. A board member of the Georgia Republican Foundation, Milton worked as a poll monitor in Fulton County during the 2020 election. He falsely claimed before the Georgia State Senate that he identified 9,000 Trump votes going to Biden and repeated similar lies to the Milton City Council at an August 2021 meeting.

Ken Carroll

Ken Carroll graduated from Georgia College and State University in 1981. He was the COO of Georgia Media Services from 2008 to 2020 before becoming an independent insurance agent out of Hawkinsville, Georgia. he was the campaign manager for Ken DeLoach in 2011 and 2012, ran a political blog called "Below the Gnat Line" that he described as being "from the perspective of a rural libertarian-leaning conservative activist/writer with a sense of humor" from 2009 to 2013, and spent four years as the vice-chairman and then chairman of the 8th Congressional District Republican Party of Georgia. Carroll spoke to the special grand jury investigating attempts to overturn Georgia's 2020 election before the fake electors were listed as targets of the investigation, though Carroll would never be charged.

Brad Carver

Carver is a graduate of Duke University and studied law at the University of Georgia School of Law. He is a partner and senior managing director at Hall Booth Smith, P.C., and has been referred to the Georgia State Bar for his participation in the fake electors scheme. Carver, a married lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, was involved in Newt Gingrich's 2012 campaign and is very active in Georgia political circles, continuing to attend events with the likes of fellow unindicted co-conspirator Senator Kelly Loeffler and indicted co-conspirator Georgia State Senator Shawn Still.

Vikki Consiglio

Vikki Consiglio studied at the Gateway College of Evangelism from 1973 to 1974 before graduating from Columbus State Community College in 1982. She was an executive director at the Georgia Utility Contractors Association in Forest Park, Georgia, from 1995 to 2021 before retiring in 2022, although she is still active at Grace Summit Church. She was elected to the Henry County Soil and Water Conservation Commission in 2014 before being appointed to the Georgia Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Directors in August 2020. Since May 2019, she has been the assistant treasurer for the Georgia GOP.

John Downey