About
Seth Keshel, a retired Army captain and veteran of the war in Afghanistan, is now primarily known as an election denial “influencer” who goes by the nickname Captain K. According to his personal website, he holds an MBA and was an intelligence specialist with the Army. On his LinkedIn profile, he promotes himself as a technology company sales manager and former baseball analyst.
Based near Fort Worth, Texas, Keshel had traveled the country spreading 2020 election fraud theories through public speeches and appearances on right-wing media outlets. He appeared on the Stew Peters Show, Flyover Conservatives, and at an event titled “What Happened In The Texas Primaries?” He has also encouraged others to hold events on election fraud.
After the 2020 election, Keshel was part of a group dubbed the “Bad News Bears,” which coordinated with the Trump campaign by establishing bases of operations in Trump hotels to monitor election results and look for signs of fraud. This supposed evidence was then fed to Trump attorneys and allies like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Keshel claims that he joined the group after contacting Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn via LinkedIn.
Reacting to Keshel’s election fraud theories and propaganda, Trump praised him at a rally on Aug. 3, 2021, telling a crowd in Alabama: “Highly respected Army intelligence captain Seth Keshel has just released his Report on National Fraud Numbers with respect to the 2020 presidential election. I don’t personally know Captain Keshel, but these numbers are overwhelming, election-changing, and according to Keshel, could be even bigger in that they do not account for cyber-flipping of votes.”
The Big Lie
- On his homepage, Keshel claims that on Election Day Trump was headed for “a modern-day landslide” but that it “slip[ped] away into mail-ballot induced oblivion.” He also called election fraud the “civil rights issue of our lifetimes.”
- On Aug. 2, 2022, an article on the far-right media outlet the Gateway Pundit cited Keshel’s conclusion that there were eight million “excess votes” for Biden that accounted for his victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Keshel based his unsubstantiated figures on “trend analysis of population growth, voter behavior and party registration.” USA Today debunked this claim by interviewing several election experts, including Charles Stewart, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and attempted to obtain more information from Keshel, who declined to provide any.
- Keshel claimed that he toured 46 states in 2021 to discuss his election fraud theories. He even visited Hawaii, where he appeared at an event titled “Behind the Election Corruption Curtain: Hawaii” with Pastor Jr. Tupa’i, a candidate for lieutenant governor in the state.
- After media outlets such as the Minnesota Reformer contacted Keshel asking for more evidence about his “predictive modeling” analysis, he responded by saying that he did not have time to explain but that “full forensic audits” would validate his claims.