Kathy Cheng/The Washington Post)

In the years leading up to the presidential election in 2004, a coalition of conservative anti-corruption activists known as the Project on Government Integrity was working on uncovering massive voter-registration fraud in three battleground states: Arizona, Florida and Ohio.

“To fix our broken voting system, we must take it apart,” Project on Government Integrity President James Gibbons told the Miami Herald in 2009. “We can do that by finding ways to reduce the use of illegal voting while increasing the use of electronic voting systems.”

Two years later, the FBI was tracking more illegal votes than ever.

After working in Ohio for Project on Government Integrity, James W. Gibbons founded Project Vote, a voting-rights advocacy group that had begun receiving millions of dollars from the Clinton campaign.

During the months leading up to Election Day 2008, it raised $33 million. Its efforts focused on three states: Utah, Colorado and Virginia.

In Virginia, the group spent millions on advertising in battleground races — such as the Senate race between Mark Warner (Va.) and Tim Kaine (Va.) — in an attempt to prevent the state from voting solely on the basis of the Virginians’ race.

The effort worked. Neither Virginia nor Ohio voted on the Virginians’ race.

“We’re trying to get people to think twice before they vote for a U.S. Senate candidate based on race alone,” Terry O’Neill, an attorney in Virginia who represented the voting-rights group, told the Hartford Courant last year.

In 2004, James W. Gibbons, the president of the Project on Government Integrity, and David J. Kramer, the group’s executive director, spoke to a crowd at Penn State University about the voter-fraud controversy and their efforts to get Virginia’s Senate race to be counted. (AP)

During the 2012 election, Project Vote spent $2.5 million in two Ohio counties — Cincinnati and Warren — during the period that President Obama was on the ballot. (According to figures compiled by Project Vote’s state division, that total could be bigger during the period when no candidate was on the ballot.) The group focused primarily on pushing ballot measures in Ohio to reduce Early Voting and to cut the length of voting days.

“We don’t want them voting,” O’Neill said in 2012 of early-voting opponents. “We do not