Anti-Immigrant Election Deniers Have Turned Their Online Following Into an Army of Activists

September 20, 2024:

X owner Elon Musk has also helped the conspiracy theory go viral. In July, he wrote on X that the Democratic party’s “goal all along has been to import as many illegal voters as possible.” Trump even repeated the claim last week during the presidential debate. “Our elections are bad,” said Trump. “And lots of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”

Now, as Trump’s acolytes push this lie at a hyper-local level, experts are concerned about the danger to voters and nonvoters alike.

“There is the potential for intimidation that results from these efforts, [such as] the [Election Integrity Network] activists showing up at the polls and calling into question the eligibility of non-English speakers or nonwhite voters,” Fischer says.

Many of the volunteers participating in the calls organized by the Election Integrity Network also repeated rumors and conspiracies, some in relation to the claims that pro-Democrat NGOs were registering immigrants across the country.

“I would also like to see something like television ads or billboards in Spanish specifically warning, if you are not a citizen and you vote, that is a felony and you would be subject to immediate deportation, something like that, very crisply stated,” an attendee named Pat said at one meeting. She added that the message should be targeted directly at Spanish-speaking communities, resulting in “a lot of people saying, ‘I’m not going to the polls.’”

In some cases, speakers voiced entirely new conspiracies. One woman named Patty King from Tennessee, on a call on August 22, claimed they had “identified illegal immigrants that have registered through the homeless shelters. I have over 564 of them,” adding in the next breath: “Proving that and then proving that they voted is another very big problem.”

A number of participants on the calls self-identified as election officials, poll workers, and representatives of their local Republican Party.

One attendee on a recent call was Deanna De’Liberto, who was recently named by her local Republican Party as the presidential elector for North Carolina’s 5th District. De’Liberto raised a conspiracy about immigrants skewing the electoral maps in favor of the Democrats.

The meetings have also featured a number of prominent guest speakers, including Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. The Heritage Foundation, the ultra-conservative group behind the dystopian Project 2025 plan, has been at the forefront of pushing the lie that noncitizens are voting in huge numbers. The group has also posted a number of “explosive” undercover videos claiming to show how noncitizens can obtain fake documents; a recent New York Times investigation debunked the claims made in a number of those videos.

“[The Biden administration] is mobilizing this huge, targeted, [get out the vote] government-funded operation at their preferred demographics, which obviously includes illegal aliens,” Howell told those listening, without providing any evidence to back up this claim.

And just last week, representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas who is the main sponsor of the SAVE Act in the House, spoke to the weekly meeting, answering questions from attendees and urging them all to continue pushing the conspiracy theory. Days earlier, Mitchell had appeared at a Judiciary Committee Hearing chaired by Roy on Capitol Hill, discussing the very same topic.

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