Meet 63-year-old Chris Arsenault of Scituate.
While most visitors don’t seem to notice the historic cannons near the inside entrance of the Statehouse, Arsenault can tell you the battles in which they were used. He can hold forth on Thomas Wilson Dorr, who led an 1841 rebellion to expand voting rights in the state. And Arsenault, a software developer, is so convinced that Rhode Island’s 2020 election was marred by problems that he started a web site, RI CASE 2020, to document his concerns.
“You’re looking for the entire picture,” he said. “I wanted to see the entire picture.”
RI CASE 2020 argues that pandemic-related changes to the voting process caused “major constitutional issues that disenfranchised all legal voters.”
But through a link to the messaging app Telegram, Arsenault’s website also offers a portal to a world filled with viewpoints and videos from election deniers and conspiracy theorists, including one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
“Once you’ve seen what we’ve seen, and you know what we know, you never go back,” Lindell said during a so-called “Moment of Truth” summit he staged in Missouri last year. “We can never have machines in elections again – period.”
Arsenault prefers talking about his arguments on the main part of RI CASE 2020.
He asserts, for example, that then-Gov. Gina Raimondo violated the concept known as separation of powers by committing a legislative act, using military statutes to modify how voters could cast their ballots in 2020.
Arsenault described RI CASE 2020 as an attempt to stand up for Rhode Islanders on voting and the rule of law – issues that go to the heart of democracy.
“We’re going back to the very problem that initiated why the state of Rhode Island exists in the first place,” he said. “If you know about Cromwell, sovereignty, the commons and all that other stuff. All those things come into play.”
But RI CASE 2020 does not cite any political races in which the outcome was affected by changes to voting processes in 2020. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld how Rhode Island officials made it easier to vote with absentee ballots during the pandemic. More broadly, even members of Trump’s administration and his family have rejected the idea of a fraudulent outcome.
THE LINDELL CONNECTION
The election deniers highlighted on the Telegram account linked with RI CASE continue to make false claims about the 2020 election. Mike Lindell, for example, has poured money into spreading Trump’s narrative about a stolen election.
Arsenault argued that the content on the Telegram account isn’t relevant to this story, although it is billed as “the primary broadcast channel” for RI CASE 2020.
Pressed, he said, “If I’m referencing anything on that web site, it’s because there may be correlations between what I’m seeing in other places and what’s going on in Rhode Island.”
But Lindell isn’t just a remote figure for Arsenault, and one of his legislators, state Rep. Robert Quattrocchi (R-Scituate). Quattrocchi said he traveled to a Missouri summit organized by Lindell in 2021 after Arsenault asked him to get more involved.
“Chris is my constituent and Chris approached me and asked me what I was going to do in regards to the questions of election integrity,” Quattrocchi said during a recent joint interview with Arsenault in the House Republican office at the Statehouse.
“When he said that to me, he kind of caught me off guard,” said the lawmaker, the former owner of a motorcycle company. “I said, ‘well, I’m not an attorney, I don’t know – I don’t have that expertise’. He said, ‘you don’t need to be an attorney.’ So as a representative responding to my constituent I got involved more.”
Representative Quattrocchi talked about his experience at the Lindell event with people back in Rhode Island. He’s among the Rhode Islanders who do not view President Biden’s election as legitimate, although he objects to the phrase ‘election denier.’
“These phrases that are being created, whether it’s election-denier, conspiracy theorist, and on and on and on, and racist, and all these other labels, are nothing more than high school bully tactics,” Quattrocchi said, “to prevent people from speaking out, prevent people from learning, prevent people from diving into things.”
Quattrocchi said the technical details are beyond his understanding, but that if computer experts like Arsenault are raising concerns about election fraud, he’s going to listen.
“This gentleman has 40 years in the computer field,” the lawmaker said. “Him and many other people throughout this country cannot be discounted. They have to be heard. It’s important information they’re trying to get out.”
Quattrocchi isn’t the first state lawmaker in Rhode Island to cast doubt on the 2020 election.
Former state Rep. Justin Price (R-Richmond) attended Trump’s January 6 rally in Washington, D.C. Price, who narrowly lost his re-election campaign to Democrat Megan Cotter last year, said he did not participate in the attack on the Capitol, although he supported a conspiracy theory blaming the assault on Antifa.
In the weeks after January 6, state Sen. Elaine Morgan (R-Hopkinton) shared a Facebook meme blaming leftists for the insurrection at the Capitol. Morgan initially agreed to an interview request for this story last year, but later said she was unavailable and she did not respond to subsequent messages.
Three Rhode Islanders have been charged in the attack on the Capitol.
“OUR GREATEST FEAR”
Secretary of State Gregg Amore rejects Arsenault and Quattrocchi’s concerns about the security of elections. He said the election process is more transparent than ever.
“And in Rhode Island in particular,” Amore said. “I mean, you’re able to track your ballots now, your mail ballots, you’re able to vote in multiple ways using paper ballots … You can go and witness the audits. They’re live-streamed. And it confirmed what happened at precincts.”
Amore said he considers Trump’s mantra of unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election the most dangerous challenge facing the country – more than China, a terrorist attack, or inflation. He cited a speech by Abraham Lincoln.
“Our greatest fear is from within, right?” Amore asked. “We’re either going to live together or commit suicide, right? And people think that’s about the Civil War. It wasn’t. It was about political violence, in 1838.”
DENIERS ON THE ROAD
Arsenault continues to carry his message to Rhode Islanders and beyond. He presented details on his research at a second summit staged by Lindell in Missouri last year, as seen in a video posted on the Telegram account linked with RI CASE 2020.
“Next state is Rhode Island and we have Chris Arsenault,” declared an emcee for the event. “C’mon Chris, come join us ….”
During a 10-minute presentation, Arsenault noted how Raimondo – now the U.S. secretary of Commerce, has oversight of the federal agency responsible for setting standards on voting machines. He cited multiple other concerns, including what he calls gaps in the state’s format for voter registration numbers and inconsistencies in how votes were counted on election night in 2020.
“There’s a story here that needs a deeper investigation,” he said.
Arsenault taught for years at New England Tech, using computer skills he said he learned in the Army while serving during the Cold War.
He declined to say if he considers Biden the lawful president.
Arsenault said there are too many unanswered questions about elections going back to 2016, due to the reliance on computer software, to really know: “How is anyone lawfully elected?” he asked.
The Telegram account linked with Arsenault’s RI CASE 2020 website has publicized appearances by members of a national traveling circuit of election deniers, including Ohio math teacher Douglas Frank, who spoke in Glocester last May, and lawyer David Clements, who appeared in Seekonk, Massachusetts, last October. Arsenault said about 40 people showed up for the latter event.
Even with that modest turnout, Arsenault believes many Rhode Islanders share his concerns about how the state manages its elections – “about half the state,” he said, although he did not cite any specific sources to back up that claim.
Arsenault had hoped to spark a citizen-led audit of public documents from the 2020 state election. At one point, according to RI CASE 2020, close to 1,000 people expressed interest in being involved.
But interest seems to have waned. The Telegram account linked with Arsenault’s website has about 150 subscribers.
When legislative committees held lengthy Statehouse hearings last year on a series of election-related bills, a handful of critics, including 70-year-old Gail Simmons of Coventry – who was clad in a pink Trump sweatshirt – used sweeping assertions to charge that Rhode Island elections are marred by fraud.
“There are all kinds of people that are cheating everywhere and you guys are making more rules to make it even easier,” Simmons said.
Democratic lawmakers pushed back. They said the protocol to verify signatures on absentee ballots is an effective deterrent to fraud.
HOW WIDESPREAD IS DENIALISM?
A series of national polls in recent years showed that a lot of Republicans – in some cases up to 70 percent – believed Trump’s lie about a stolen presidential race. But by last year’s campaign season in Rhode Island, most GOP candidates were focused on issues like inflation and high gas prices.
Still, nothing will convince some Rhode Islanders of anything other than fraud in the 2020 election.
Sheri Rotondo of Foster was among about 100 people who protested near the state Board of Elections in November 2020, in the aftermath of what they called a rigged election. She holds fast to that belief, pointing to how Trump was shown with a lead on TV on election night, before other votes were added.
“Up until midnight, I thought I was going to wake up and he was the winner,” she said.
One of the most nationally prominent election deniers, Middletown native and former general Mike Flynn, is cultivating a far-right following fused with Christianity. At the same time, there’s little visible evidence of an election deniers’ movement in Rhode Island. Compare that with Michigan, where a denier was recently selected to lead the state GOP, or Pennsylvania, where lawsuits alleging fraud in 2020 are still being litigated despite a lack of evidence.
Rhode Island House Republican Leader Mike Chippendale of Foster said he was not aware of the RI CASE 2020 website until he got an interview request for this story.
He said he thinks his constituents largely reject Trump’s tale about a stolen election.
“I don’t think it’s widespread,” Chippendale said. “I just haven’t encountered it. Are there people? Yes. And interestingly enough those same people are the ones with the biggest Trump flag at the end of their driveway but they’re also not registered voters. So yes I am sure that people love to talk about that stuff and keep it going, but in my experience they’re not serious voters or voters at all.”
Gerald Zarrella of East Greenwich, a former Democrat who co-chaired Trump’s Rhode Island campaign in 2020, has since become an independent, because of his frustration with both political parties. He said he believes as time has gone by, and more information came out, most Rhode Island Republicans have accepted Biden’s election as legitimate.
In the run-up to the 2022 election, state GOP Chairwoman Sue Cienki encouraged voters with doubts about the election process to get more actively involved.
“Participate,” she said during an interview last year. “You can be a poll watcher, you can be a poll worker, I know [the state Board of Elections] is looking for people to help, and I think once they do, they will have more confidence in election integrity, election security, once they’re involved in the process. So anybody that has concern, jump up and help.”
Rhode Island has prosecuted a handful of election fraud cases in recent years. John Marion of the non-partisan good government group Common Cause of Rhode Island said the state deserves high marks for its election oversight.
“Rhode Island is one of just a handful of states that does audit the election results using a sort of state of the art method of the risk-limiting audit,” Marion said. “It’s an open, transparent, nonpartisan process. We have safeguards in place, which the RICase2020 website ignores, which are among the best in the nation.”
Marion said it’s concerning even if a small number of Rhode Islanders are election deniers, because, he said, it undermines faith in democracy.
In states across America, voters rejected election deniers running for office last November, in some cases by narrow margins. Now, Donald Trump is running for the White House again, ramping up his false narrative about a stolen election.
This is an expanded version of the audio version of this story.
Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@ripr.org. Follow him on Twitter @IanDon. You can sign up for email delivery of his weekly RI politics newsletter.
