MAGA’s “Voter Fraud” Watchdog Votes in a Swing State. He Doesn’t Live There.

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Jack Posobiec is very concerned about voter fraud. An influential MAGA voice and prominent conspiracy theorist, he’s perhaps best known for amplifying the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy^[3], which culminated in a man firing a gun in a D.C. pizza restaurant. In the years since, Posobiec has loudly espoused a range of debunked conspiracy theories. That includes the GOP theory—once semi-fringe and now thoroughly MAGA mainstreamed—that Democrats have won elections via millions of fraudulent votes. The Republican National Committee last fall enlisted him to speak to poll watchers about election security^[4]. Posobiec is particularly focused on Pennsylvania, repeatedly accusing the state’s Democratic officials of fraud, even spreading conspiracy theories^[5] that were followed by an RNC lawsuit.

The focus on voter fraud in Pennsylvania is particularly ironic because it sure looks like, and a trail of documentation suggests, that Posobiec is living in Maryland but voting in Pennsylvania. If so, that would be a violation of voting laws, experts say.

The 40-year-old Posobiec has voted in Pennsylvania elections from 2004 to 2024, both in person and by mail, according to a copy of his voting record viewed by Slate and the Handbasket. Until 2016, Posobiec used military and civilian overseas ballots. After resigning from his job as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer^[6] in 2017, he remained in Maryland while becoming a full-time influencer and political activist with groups such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. He continued voting in Pennsylvania via absentee ballots and, later, in-person on-demand mail voting^[7], using his parents’ home address in 2018, 2022, and 2024, according to an official copy of his voter information file from Montgomery County obtained through a right-to-know request.

There’s nothing untoward about any of that, provided Posobiec actually lives in Pennsylvania. But the evidence is extremely strong that he doesn’t. Instead, it suggests that, despite growing up in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Posobiec has lived in Maryland for almost a decade.

In a 2017 divorce complaint from his first wife, Posobiec listed a Maryland apartment as his address. Both he and his current wife, Tanya, have posted on their personal social media accounts photos of the suburban Maryland home they appear to have resided in since 2018. Tanya often calls the house “home”—at least five times, according to our review—and shows many milestones of family life there. She also lists her location as the District of Columbia on Facebook and enrolls in family crafts and lessons in the area, according to her social media posts. She registered to vote at their Maryland address on Election Day 2020. (Posobiec voted that year in person in Pennsylvania.)

Perhaps most damningly, Posobiec listed a Maryland address—the same one he and his wife show in social media posts—more than a dozen times in his 2024 political contributions, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Some of those contributions (which, again, listed Maryland as his home address) were made on Oct. 27, 2024. Exactly two weeks earlier, Posobiec posted a photo on X^[8] featuring a Pennsylvania ballot and captioned: “SECURED THE BAG. Just stopped by the county voting board and did the deed—easy and even open on Sunday! Vote Early, Pennsylvania!” His voting record shows that he voted by hand-delivered mail-in ballot that day.

So is this the dreaded “voter fraud” that Posobiec has been warning America about? Determining legal residency for voting takes multiple factors into account, but Posobiec’s situation appears problematic, according to Pennsylvania election law expert and attorney Adam Bonin. “Your legal residence is where your life is rooted, the place you come back to,” he explained. “Usually, where your spouse lives is where you are presumed to live, but we look at the totality of the circumstances,” adding that other evidence, like where someone pays taxes, whether they have a full-time job nearby, and whether their home is intended to be permanent, all comes into play. “You only have one residence for voting, and you can’t choose where you vote based on convenience or politics,” Bonin said.

(College students and members of the military are two exceptions and are allowed to vote in the place of their most recent legal residency, Bonin noted, as those two groups’ situations are considered temporary.)

Posobiec has not been charged with any violation of voting laws, but both the Pennsylvania state attorney general’s office and the Montgomery County district attorney’s office were previously made aware of Posobiec’s possible residency in Maryland, a source with knowledge told us. A spokesperson for the county DA’s office said they do not comment on active investigations. A spokesperson for Attorney General Dave Sunday’s office said that the office does not discuss investigations or confirm their existence, but that, “generally speaking, our office has jurisdiction over the Pennsylvania Election Code.”

In a brief phone call, Posobiec said he was unavailable to speak. He did not reply to a list of emailed questions.

There’s a strong political incentive to vote in Pennsylvania: It’s an all-important swing state, where voters wield tremendously outsize influence over the future of American politics. Maryland, meanwhile, is a solidly blue state (at least in national elections), whose voters—thanks to the U.S. Electoral College system—are effectively sidelined when it’s time to pick the president.

The whole saga is a bit rich. For more than a decade, Republicans have been pushing conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud. Even before Donald Trump, they used those claims as the basis for laws that make it more difficult to vote. And MAGA’s ascendancy has supercharged the conspiracy: The belief that 2020 was a “stolen election” is now gospel for much of the GOP, and it was at the heart of efforts to overturn the result—in court, in Congress, and, most famously, via the Capitol insurrection.

But for all the bleating, the conspiracy theorists have continually failed to find widespread fraud. Despite court cases and mass searches, there have been vanishingly few substantiated instances of voters illegally casting ballots.

Perhaps, for Posobiec, it’s a grand exercise in projection.

Posobiec was part of extensive efforts to spread conspiracies about the results of the 2020 presidential election, posting often to Twitter (now X) with the movement’s catchphrase, “Stop the Steal,” as early as September of that year^[9]. He spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally^[10] in Washington on Jan. 5, 2021, the prelude to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Posobiec was again pushing voting fraud claims along with other prominent Trump supporters—particularly in Pennsylvania. His claims about fraudulent registrations in the state went viral throughout that fall, as Pennsylvania became ground zero of the closely contested election. He accused Gov. Josh Shapiro of “disenfranchising” voters by not posting about extended early voting days in Bucks County and claimed: “Thousands of fraudulent registrations have already been reported in multiple counties across PA and we all saw Josh Shapiro sit silent as officers blocked people from early voting yesterday.” Here he was, echoing Trump’s assertion in the days before the election that “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.” State officials repeatedly denied Trump’s and Posobiec’s allegations.^[11][12][13]

Posobiec zeroed in on his parents’ Democratic-leaning county, falsely accusing^[14] a Montgomery County commissioner of voting illegally. The RNC sued the county with related allegations four days after Posobiec’s post but withdrew the suit weeks later^[15]. The judge opined that^[16] “the Petitioners have failed to produce any evidence that Montgomery County has violated any federal or state law … [or] that the testing procedures employed by Montgomery County are unlawful or inaccurate.”

Many of Posobiec’s attacks on election integrity in the state focused on Shapiro, accusing him of various electoral improprieties and “MAGA suppression^[17].” Shapiro, like Posobiec, grew up in Montgomery County, and his 2011 election to its board of commissioners flipped control from a GOP stronghold to a reliably blue county.

“Yesterday in Pennsylvania I saw officers blocking people from voting early in person. I saw Democrats wearing fake badges illegally posing as election officials. And I didn’t see Gov Josh Shapiro doing a single thing about it. This is who Shapiro is. A bum,” he posted^[18] on Oct. 30.

“The integrity of our elections is paramount. Voter fraud is extremely rare and in the few circumstances where it occurs, individualized,” said Neil Makhija, chair of Montgomery County’s Board of Commissioners and Board of Elections, in a statement sent to Slate and the Handbasket.

He continued: “As chairman of Montgomery County Board of Elections, I take all allegations of election fraud seriously and make referrals as appropriate to our law enforcement partners. We are grateful that these crimes are assiduously investigated and prosecuted by our DAs, AG and DOJ, ensuring the integrity of our elections, as evidenced by these recent prosecutions by the USAO of the EDPA. We do not comment on individual matters.”

Despite—or perhaps because of—his role promoting voting fraud conspiracies, Posobiec has become a high-profile figure on the right. He was invited to join Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on his first trip to Europe in February, a decision that sparked alarm among defense officials^[24] concerned about the optics of a divisive political figure attending a trip to meet U.S. allies. Last month, CNN drew criticism for platforming^[25] the conspiracy theorist to speak about slain colleague Charlie Kirk, describing him simply as “a friend” of Kirk’s and a “conservative commentator.”

This past April, Posobiec was a panelist at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference^[26], where the state’s Republican attorney general, Dave Sunday, was a speaker. The conference focused in part on election integrity.

Sunday’s spokesperson said the two do not have a relationship.

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