(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
ONE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S most prominent voter-registration activists has paid multiple people with criminal records to run get-out-the-vote operations in Pennsylvania since 2024.
Scott Presler, a key Trump-era GOP operative, hired as contractors a man who pleaded guilty to strangulation and a former nurse practitioner who falsified prescriptions for opioids and ran a million-dollar operation to distribute fraudulent COVID vaccine cards. These personnel, whose backgrounds were uncovered in an investigation by The Bulwark, were engaged through Presler’s super PAC, Early Vote Action.
Presler has had these people working for him, notably, even as he has spent time in the past month accusing a Democratic congressional candidate of employing a canvasser who was arrested for indecent exposure—an accusation that, upon closer scrutiny, appears untrue.
Presler and his political operation have already faced criticism this election cycle for their get-out-the-vote operations. That criticism has come even from within the Republican party. Earlier this year, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called Presler—who backed Ken Paxton in this year’s Texas Republican Senate primary—a “grifter.” But these new revelations further call into question not only Early Vote Action’s hiring practices but also Presler’s own credibility.
A dive into Presler’s operations shows that