The episode is among eight known attempts to gain unauthorized access to voting systems in five U.S. states since the 2020 election. All involved local Republican officeholders or party activists who have advanced Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods or conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, according to a Reuters examination of the incidents. Some of the breaches, including the one in Elbert County, were inspired in part by the false belief that state-ordered voting-system upgrades or maintenance would erase evidence of alleged fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, state election officials say, those processes have no impact on the voting systems’ ability to save data from past elections.

The incidents include a North Carolina case, first reported last week by Reuters, in which a local Republican Party leader threatened to get a top county election official fired or have her pay cut if she didn’t give him unauthorized access to voting equipment. In southern Michigan, a pro-Trump clerk who has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory on social media defied state orders to perform maintenance on a voting machine on the unfounded belief that doing so could erase proof of alleged fraud. In another Michigan case, a Republican activist impersonated an official from a made-up government agency in a plot to seize voting equipment.

Some of the people and groups involved in the vigilante election-investigator movement are drawing financial support from Lindell, the My Pillow Inc chief executive and one of the most visible backers of Trump’s false fraud claims.