Ahead of the upcoming election, Donald Trump’s allies are advancing a more organized, more calculated version of their misinformation strategy from 2020.
Like in 2020, these allies are attempting to delegitimize the election before it’s even happened. But unlike last time, their strategy is emerging early, a contrast from the throw-everything-at-the-wall approach in 2020 that rolled attacks on mail-in voting together with conspiracy theories about Italian satellites flipping votes and a Venezuelan strongman’s actions beyond the grave.
They’ve settled on a line of attack — non-citizens are voting for Democrats en masse — and, though these claims are false and easily debunked, there is striking unity across Republican politics: Friendly secretaries of state and governors have blasted out press releases touting their efforts to root out non-citizens who have ended up on voter rolls in violation of the law. Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress have attempted to attach a proof-of-citizenship-to-vote bill to government funding efforts.
And the ecosystem of Republican-aligned think tanks has increasingly gotten in on the action. For example, the Heritage Foundation, released a video earlier this summer that quickly went viral, touting supposedly “staggering” evidence that would prove that close to 50,000 non-citizens are registered to vote in Georgia. The video is the work of a new initiative at the Foundation, called the Oversight Project, which, the New York Times reports, plans to release other, similar videos created using the tactics popularized by the now-defunct Project Veritas.
And although the video, as the Times reported, is full of false claims and has been easily debunked, it’s representative of a trend ahead of November: an organized effort, this time stemming from deep within the Republican Party’s infrastructure, to release false and misleading claims about the election of the sort Trump seized on in 2020 to declare his loss illegitimate.
“There are people that want to succeed where they failed last time,” David Levine, an election integrity consultant and former elections administrator, told TPM. “And I think one of the things about 2020 was that the effort to cast doubt on the election and to subvert it was in some respects ham-handed, disorganized and last minute.”
Since 2020, a significant number of election deniers have made their way into positions of power. Almost a third of sitting members of Congress have engaged in some form of election denialism, according to a tally from the democracy-focused advocacy group States United. Many of the congressional Republicans who opposed Trump’s 2020 efforts have been driven from Congress. In battleground states, election deniers have in some cases secured positions overseeing how elections are run. In Georgia, for example, the majority of the State Election Board are Trump-supporting election deniers. It all gives Trump more levers to pull as he and his allies push conspiracy theories that non-citizens are voting en masse for Democrats.
In reality, non-citizen voting is exceedingly rare, and is almost always accidental. It is illegal in federal elections, and the penalties are steep. Mike Hassinger, spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office told TPM in an interview that the Heritage claims were a “fabrication” and a “lie.”
“Anybody who works in elections knows that you verify the identity, you verify the citizenship,” Hassinger said. “In Georgia, it’s a felony to register if you’re a non-citizen, it’s a felony to vote if you’re falsely registered as a non-citizen. This seems to be one of the many conspiratorial narratives that excite the small-dollar donor base, and that seems to be what Heritage is doing.”
In an email to TPM, Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, said, “Call me when Raffensperger puts his name to that quote instead of doing it through a staffer or through his friends at The New York Times. Citizens who have information regarding election integrity and illegal activity should absolutely not report it to Raffensperger but instead to the Georgia State Election Board. They are actually interested in a secure election as opposed to working with the far Left to seed disinformation to protect political reputations.”
Georgia is one of a few key states that is shaping up to be a battleground for both Electoral College votes and, thus, for Trumpian conspiracy theories about the integrity of those votes. In 2020, the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Raffensperger resisted Trump’s pressure to help him steal the election. But the Georgia State Election Board, new members of which have been directly endorsed by Trump, recently approved two rules, fueled by conspiracy theories about the integrity of the election system, that have the potential to delay election certification. Both rules could give Trump-friendly election workers the opportunity to halt the certification process to examine baseless voter fraud claims, sowing the seeds of chaos as votes are tallied.
“What we are seeing right now are efforts to delegitimize an election in advance of that election,” noted David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, “perhaps in anticipation that the candidate that these groups prefer is going to lose.”
“They want to be able to claim that the election was stolen,” he added.
True the Vote, the right-wing group that pushed notorious conspiracy theories about ballot stuffing during the 2020 election, has similarly been consistently amplifying videos on X of what it claims is non-citizen voting. As recently as Monday, True the Vote shared a viral video on X about non-citizens voting, saying in a quote tweet that “states hope that their admissions of finding and removing ‘x hundreds’ of noncitizens will be enough to convince you there is no problem.”
“This is a con,” the caption continues. “Do not fall for it. NO STATE IN THE UNION HAS ACCESS TO THE DATA THEY NEED TO RECONCILE VOTER ROLLS FOR CITIZENSHIP.”
True The Vote was early to the baseless claims of non-citizen voting: it provided much of the debunked video footage of alleged “ballot harvesters” that formed the basis of the film “2,000 mules,” released in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The group also released a 44-page “advocate handbook” warning about the threat of non-citizen voting.
Levine believes these efforts have the potential to do more than just cast doubt on the election system: viral misinformation and disinformation, over years, actually has the power to modify state rules and procedures in a way that creates opportunities for new misinformation, as evidenced by the Georgia Election Board.
“So what we see are those who are skeptics about the election looking for opportunities to alter legislation, change regulations, cast doubt on the process, potentially even get information in front of others who could have a pivotal role to play to try and see if perhaps they can move them,” he said.
Unspoken Republican rules:
If the truth just won’t do, lie.
If you can’t win fairly, cheat.
When all you’ve got is cheating, all the world is a scam.
This, straight from the mouth of the father of modern Republican conservatism.
Paul Weyrich became severely ill in his later years. He died in excruciating pain. And yet, somehow, I’m pretty okay with that.