Before I could knock on the door of the house in rural, upstate New York, a big, burly man dressed in a plaid lumberjack jacket came outside to greet me. “I’m looking for Yvette Ovitt,” I told him, when he asked me what I wanted. “Oh, she’s dead,” he replied calmly. “She died back in June. Heart attack.”
After expressing my condolences, I explained my mission: I was testing a get-out-the-vote app that the Turning Point Action political action committee is using this election season. On its website, Turning Point says this app “is vital” to what it claims “will be the largest and most sophisticated ballot chasing operation the movement has ever seen.” The conservative youth organization is specifically deploying the technology to try to turn out “low-propensity” voters in Republican areas—people they believe are Trump supporters but who have rarely voted in recent elections. People like Yvette, apparently, may she rest in peace.
Rather than rely on the traditional campaign or Republican Party apparatus for the 2024 election, the Trump campaign has outsourced much of its ground game to Turning Point and other conservative PACs. The strategy is largely untested, as are the groups running the operation. Turning Point has promised to spend more than $100 million on its “chase the vote” effort this cycle to get Trump elected. The youth group was involved in such efforts in 2022, and many of the most high-profile candidates it backed lost. Others, like America PAC, a super PAC funded almost entirely by billionaire Elon Musk, got into the game just this summer.
Bad addresses, dead voters and people who refuse to answer the door are a regular feature of political canvassing for both the parties, so I wasn’t especially surprised to find that one of Turning Point’s targets was no longer with us. Fortunately, I wasn’t using the app to persuade people to vote. I was at the Ovitt house because I was interested in how well this app worked. I also wanted to know how Republicans it identified might feel about the ease with which I was able to access their personal information with it.
Phone apps are now a canvassing staple for elections. When they’re used by the major political parties, their use is closely supervised by the campaigns. The primary app used by Democrats is called MiniVan. When I downloaded MiniVan, I needed a code from a campaign official to access any of the data, which I did not have. No such privacy protections exist for the Turning Point app, where its extensive data is accessible to anyone with a phone.
Turning Point’s app was developed by a company called Superfeed that has close ties with its founder Charlie Kirk, whose mother-in-law is on the Superfeed board. Superfeed’s former CEO, Jeff DeWitt, was previously the Arizona GOP chairman, until he resigned from the party post in January after news broke that he’d allegedly tried to bribe Kari Lake to keep her from running for his state’s Senate seat.
Turning Point officials have marketed the Superfeed app to other conservative groups. Also using the app this cycle is Early Vote Action, a PAC founded by MAGA activist Scott Presler, whose GOTV work for Trump was recently boosted with a $1 million donation from Elon Musk. Presler has spent the past year trying to register Republican voters in overlooked groups, like hunters and the Amish. He claims to have flipped the voter registration figures in several Pennsylvania counties from blue to red. The Nevada, Delaware, Georgia and Arizona state Republican parties have also adopted the app.
The Superfeed corporate website is nonfunctional, but the Apple store says the Turning Point app allows users to “read original content and feeds from TPUSA top creators.” The app originally started as a vehicle for right-wing news distribution, not for election work. Giving how much is riding on the app in this election, I decided to give it a test run this month when I was in upstate New York leaf peeping in the reddest part of a reliably blue state.
After downloading the app, I discovered a mess of X social media posts on the home screen, from Kirk and other Turning Point surrogates including: pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec; Benny Johnson, a right-wing influencer and former Turning Point employee who was allegedly duped into taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a front group to create pro-Russia content; and Tyler Bowyer, the Turning Point COO who’s been indicted in Arizona for his alleged participation in Trump’s “fake elector” scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. (Bowyer has also served on the Superfeed board.)
Among the social media posts is a button that says, “Register To Vote: Tap Here.” Users are then led to the Turning Point Action website, where they’re instructed to fill out a form as if they were registering to vote. But there are clues that this is not an authentic voter registration form—“referred by,” and “referral email,” queries that have nothing to do with voting and a lot to do with data harvesting. Once the form is filled out, a new window opens announcing, “Wait! One more step! Confirm your state to register to vote online.” That’s when users click a state and are redirected to a government website where they can legitimately register to vote.
The arrow for the election “activist suite” is buried like an afterthought among the other junk on the app home screen, and accessing these tools requires users to again provide all their personal information and enable location tracking. Turning Point Action did not respond to questions about its privacy protocols and what it does with the data collected through the app.
The “activist“ tools include, among other things, a text-spamming and calling feature, both of which employ the users’ actual phone number. In contrast, Democratic phone banks always anonymize phone calls to protect the privacy of volunteers. There’s also a feature that invites users to upload all their phone’s contacts into the app. Users’ friends will no doubt appreciate this giveaway of their lucrative personal information once they start getting spammed with texts and calls.
I declined to give Turning Point my phone book, skipped the spam texts, and instead hit “knock on doors.” Then I hopped in my car to try to find the “voters near me” listed in the app, all of which eventually led me to Yvette Ovitt’s home.
As a journalist, I have never canvassed for any political party or candidate, so I am unfamiliar with these types of operations. Yet even my unsophisticated use of the app felt like a massive privacy violation. As I drove, a list of target contacts appeared, with the names, addresses, ages, and phone numbers of people up and down the road. Several entries were tagged with a red flag indicating that the address was home to multiple voters over the age of 75—a potential goldmine because older voters tend to vote more than younger ones.
This feature alone should be cause for concern by app users and potential contacts alike. A Democratic National Committee spokesperson told me that the party’s canvassing app doesn’t allow this sort of universal, geolocated address lookup; the party provides canvassers only a predefined walking list created by campaign administrators. The DNC spokesperson also says the systems are protected with encryption, two-factor authentication and other modern security measures—none of which was present on the Turning Point app.
Once I settled on an address to visit, I had trouble locating the scripts the app provided for talking to any potential voters. A so-called training video that I found on the Turning Point Action website was an hour-long gabfest on Rumble, frequently interrupted with ads for Ivermectin, so I didn’t finish it. By comparison, the Democrat’s MiniVan training video is a quick, ad-free five minutes.
No one was home at the first couple of addresses I tried, but I finally hit pay dirt at a large house with a beat-up old truck covered with graffiti parked on the road out front. A man outside asked me suspiciously if I had come up his driveway to buy his pickup. I explained that I was looking for a 22-year-old woman named Sophie, and showed him the app. He grudgingly informed me that Sophie was away at college.
He declined an interview and warned me not to knock at the house next door. A woman there, also listed in the app, was his 80-something year old mother. “She won’t want to talk to you,” he told me in a tone suggesting he was just about to yell at me to get off his lawn.
I moved on to a few more empty houses, and one address I simply couldn’t find. Finally, the app directed me to Yvette Ovitt’s home, a modest wood structure fully decked out with yards of artificial spider webs that looked professionally wrapped around the fence and adorned with smiling pumpkins and spooky signs wishing people a Happy Halloween.
The man who came out to meet me turned out to be Yvette’s older brother, Randy Ovitt. He lived there, too, so I showed him her name and asked what he thought about how easy it was for anyone to find this much information about his sister and their neighbors. “That’s fucked up—I mean messed up,” he corrected, laughing as he lit up a cigarette.
Looking at Yvette’s listing, I asked Randy whether his sister was a 51-year-old Republican. While he could confirm that his sister had died just shy of her 51st birthday, which happened to be the day I showed up, Randy had no idea about her party affiliation. They didn’t talk about politics, he said, except about the “towelheads they keep dropping in here, getting their $1,000 debt cards.”
Randy was referring not to a Fox News myth, but a story that has gained prominence on the network and morphed into a MAGA talking point. In March, New York City mayor Eric Adams started giving pre-paid debt cards—valued at about $1,440 a month for a family of four—to migrants who had been bused to the city from Texas, so they could buy food and baby supplies. The cards were a cheaper way for the city to provide meals to the new arrivals than the city’s food-service contracts but they’d quickly become an anti-immigration talking point.
Randy was not listed in the app, possibly because he may have been a registered Democrat. At first, he told me he thought he wouldn’t vote in November. “It’s terrible, ain’t it?” he said of this year’s election. But after his second cigarette, he confessed that he “might of” voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and hinted that he might vote for Harris, too. When I showed him the list of voters I was looking for, he pointed to one name and said the man had been dead for a while. Randy explained that someone else listed at the same address was the partner of the dead man’s daughter Dawn, who also lived there. “Ernie will talk to you,” he said.
Encouraged, I headed down the road to a large compound in the woods, full of trailers, a mobile home, a small house, plus several vehicles. There I found Ernie Gray, cutting plywood to build an enclosed deck on the mobile home for Dawn. He told me he’d swapped a 4 x 4 for the work on the roof because at 60, he thought he was too old to be getting up on the ladder. He was doing the rest of the work himself.
I showed him the Turning Point app with his listing in it. “How the hell did you get that?” he asked with a good-natured growl. “All my information is supposed to be private!” The app had his phone number wrong—it had belonged to Dawn’s deceased father and had been disconnected ages ago—but the rest was spot on.
Dawn and Ernie were die-hard Trump fans, not low-propensity voters. He said they’d both already voted for Trump in the primary and planned to do it again in November. Ernie elaborated extensively on the many ways he hated Joe Biden, as Dawn nodded along from behind the screen door, where she stood with a tiny dog at her feet. Ernie, too, complained about immigrants getting debit cards, an issue that seems to rank high on the list of concerns of voters in these parts.
It was getting late in the day, so I bid Ernie farewell and packed it in. After two hours of driving around, I’d used the Turning Point app to identify two dead people, one missing college student, an elderly woman with a protectively hostile son, a closet Democrat, and one Trump supporter who needed no persuasion.
Later, I spent some more time noodling around on the app. I finally found the door-knocking script, which instructed me to ask potential voters questions such as “Do you usually get an early ballot?” or “Can we help get your ballot in on time?” Just to see what happened, I clicked “no” or “I need more help” on these questions for a voter in Virginia and then hit “submit.” The app then helpfully made a pie chart report on all my efforts. Apparently, once I tagged these people as contacted, they dropped off the list so other canvassers would not bother them. The potential for mischief with this app seemed very high and I wondered: Is this the way to win an election?
“These people are amateurs,” a longtime Republican consultant who wanted to remain anonymous told me after I described my app test results. In a close presidential election, he said, “People are voting not because someone came to their door, certainly not because somebody they never met came to the door. They’re going to vote because of something they’ve read or seen, or because someone they know dragged them to the polls.” Still, he predicted, “I think Republicans are going to have a good night in 11 days, and then all these grifters are going to take credit for it.”
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