Hi Friend —
We are under attack. This is one of several emails we’ll be sending over the coming days because … we have had enough. Buckle up. Round 1. Please read to the end.
Democracy Docket recently published a piece portraying True the Vote as part of an outside network supposedly shaping the Trump administration’s election policy.
Here is the article:
There is a problem with that story.
One of the central facts it reports about me is simply false.
The article states that I attended a meeting in Washington with Cleta Mitchell and other election-integrity advocates ahead of President Trump’s remarks on elections.
I was not there.
Not “I don’t remember being there.” Not a disagreement over how the meeting should be characterized.
I was 100% not there. True the Vote did not participate in that meeting.
That matters because Democracy Docket then uses my supposed attendance as part of the foundation for its broader claim that True the Vote is an influential force “shaping” administration policy.
Remove the false premise, and that conclusion becomes considerably harder to support.
And that is important because Democracy Docket is what we call a “canary in the coal mine”. Their goal is to establish a narrative that the mockingbirds will faithfully repeat.
True the Vote is not an arm of this administration — or any administration.
We are an independent organization that works with American citizens. Voters. All of them, irrespective of party.
For sixteen years, our focus has remained remarkably consistent: citizens should be able to understand how their elections work, participate meaningfully in the process, examine public records, raise legitimate questions, and expect election systems worthy of public confidence.
When an administration takes meaningful steps toward those goals, we applaud it.
We applaud the efforts by the Trump Administration and we understand just how difficult it is to achieve meaningful reform in this environment.
There is an extraordinarily well-funded ecosystem of lawyers, NGOs, political operatives, and media outlets prepared to challenge almost every serious attempt to improve election transparency or accountability — silenced before the proposal can even be fairly considered.
And there is some relevant history you deserve to know.
Democracy Docket was founded by Marc Elias. His law firm, Elias Law Group, represents Fair Fight in years-long litigation against True the Vote.
We won that case at the district-court level. The litigation continues on appeal.
Democracy Docket’s own case page is here:
Democracy Docket says its newsroom operates independently of Elias Law Group. But when an outlet founded by the lawyer whose firm represents our legal adversary publishes an article portraying us as dangerous “election deniers,” readers are entitled to understand the history surrounding that coverage.
They are also entitled to expect the basic facts to be right. In this instance, they weren’t. And it’s far from the first time this has happened.
Then there is Gregg Phillips.
Democracy Docket could not resist inserting a sneering aside that Gregg once claimed he had “teleported into a Waffle House,” complete with a parenthetical “don’t ask.”
It has nothing to do with election policy.
Nothing to do with the White House. Nothing to do with the premise of the article. It is there to discredit him.
But what they leave out is the human context.
Gregg’s comment was made on my personal podcast. I unwittingly created this hurt for him by asking him to allow me to chronicle his battle against cancer.
I’m writing the following with his permission.
Gregg has been fighting prostate cancer since 2019, which in 2023 progressed to stage-four metastatic bone cancer. In 2024, he had been given a devastating prognosis. He had been through aggressive radiation. It didn’t work. The next option was chemo, but he was forewarned, in his case there was no cure. What sustained him, then and now, was his faith. All glory to God.
In 2025, he embarked on an unbelievably tough alternative protocol.
Thousands of people were following his battle, asking how he was doing and praying for him. So we made the decision to document the journey.
All of it.
The treatments. The fear. The hope. The setbacks. The things that worked. The things that didn’t. And, yes, the supernatural experiences Gregg described during one of the most physically vulnerable periods of his life.
The conversation Democracy Docket chose to mock came during the very beginning of an intensive treatment protocol, while Gregg was heavily medicated and simply speaking openly about experiences he could not explain.
Even the word “teleportation” was not Gregg’s characterization, it was mine. I’d been with him through the valley and then, as now, I believe in the power of miracles. God’s hand was all over Gregg and never for a second did I believe we should be shy about sharing what was happening.
We showed Gregg’s cancer journey the way it actually happened — unfiltered — because that was the promise we had made to the thousands of people following along.
Reducing one moment from that journey to a cheap punch line tells readers considerably more about the people who chose to include it than it does about Gregg.
And at the time these attacks intensified, Gregg was serving as a federal employee (as he still is, which is another factually inaccurate datapoint) and was constrained in his ability to publicly defend himself.
So we did.
Here is what we wrote at the time:
None of this means True the Vote expects immunity from criticism. Quite the opposite.
Challenge our research. Question our conclusions. Ask hard questions about our methodology. We have spent years working in an arena where disagreement is inevitable.
But criticism is different from caricature.
And advocacy masquerading as settled fact becomes especially problematic when the underlying reporting contains factual errors.
True the Vote does not work for Donald Trump. We do not work for the Republican Party. We do not work for Washington. We work with American citizens.
When government does the right thing, we will say so. When government fails, we will say so.
When powerful organizations use litigation, money, political influence, or media narratives to prevent citizens from asking legitimate questions about their elections, we will continue to stand our ground.
And when someone publishes something about us that simply isn’t true, we are going to correct the record.
We have spent a long time absorbing attacks.
We are fighting back.
Not with personal smears or manufactured narratives. With facts. With records. With evidence. And with the American citizens who have stood beside us from the beginning.
The Irish-philosopher Edmund Burke is often cited as having said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Rise up, friend. Don’t do nothing. It’s time to fight.
Keep the faith. Never quit. Ephesians 6 FTW!
Ever onward —
P.S. — Marc Elias and Democracy Docket: this is a direct request to correct the record.
Your article states as fact that I attended the White House meeting you describe.
I did not. I was not there. True the Vote did not participate in that meeting.
You then use my supposed attendance as evidence for the much broader assertion that True the Vote is helping shape administration policy. That premise is false.
So I am calling on Democracy Docket to retract the false statement, correct the article, and clearly disclose the correction to your readers.
If you have evidence that I was present, publish it. If you do not, retract it.
You are free to disagree with us. You are free to criticize our work. You are not entitled to invent our attendance at meetings we did not attend and then use that fiction to support a predetermined narrative.
Marc, your law firm has spent years litigating against True the Vote. Democracy Docket has now published a demonstrably false statement about me. This is an opportunity to show your readers that, whatever our differences, facts still matter.
Correct it.
And while you are reviewing the piece, I hope you will reconsider the gratuitous attempt to discredit Gregg Phillips by mocking an intensely vulnerable moment from his documented battle with metastatic cancer — a detail that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of your article.
You may disagree with Gregg. You may dislike him. But turning a man’s battle with cancer into a punch line was beneath the subject, beneath the article, and frankly, beneath you.
If you didn’t know when you wrote it, you know now.
If you knew and still wrote it, may God have mercy on your soul.