Beyond Trump, there There are few election deniers more zealous than Cleta Mitchell once a liberal A Democratic Oklahoma lawmaker who built a vast conservative apparatus promoting the lie of noncitizen voting.
Mitchell moved to the right in the 1990s and represented tea party politicians in campaign finance matters. He co-founded the Public Interest Law Foundation in 2012 to root out voter fraud. It used to be a lonely business.
“We can fit in a phone booth for those who care about election integrity,” Mitchell said.
But Trump’s insistence that the election is not secure has made Mitchell’s project a talking point for Republicans. Mitchell volunteered as Trump’s legal counsel in Georgia during the 2020 election overturn attempt. As Mitchell says, the leaking, now-the infamous call Trump’s 11,780 votes in calling on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to help him “find” him forced him to resign from his Washington law firm.
So Mitchell got to work Election Integrity Network A hub for Trump loyalists in 2021, a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, which aims to push the country further to the right. He recruited election deniers into a national army of poll workers, poll watchers and hobbyist activists, and focused on challenging voter rolls and issuing public records requests. Tax returns in 2022 show the Election Integrity Network brought in more than $750,000, mostly from the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Mitchell created earlier this year Only Citizens Coalition Voteswhich he describes The turning point is US President Charlie Kirk like “a national neighborhood watch to try to find these pockets of non-citizens being added to the rolls.”
Mitchell declined to be interviewed by NBC News, describing the list of questions as “a vintage ‘Do you still beat your wife?’ story.”
Mitchell’s group, which collaborated with about 80 other organizations, helped develop the project model state legislation banning all non-citizen voting accepted by American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative network. The Citizens Only Voting Coalition held its September constitutes The American Voter Eligibility Act – or SAVE Act – which advocates for a federal bill requiring documentary proof of citizenship, researchers found to support would disproportionately disenfranchise colored voters. Mitchell testified An appearance at a House hearing that became an Election Integrity Network ad.
Despite the urgency and Trump promptsThe SAVE Act — included in the stalled funding bill — was defeated with 14 Republicans voting against it. The bill’s failure was a blow, but not a fatal one, to the cottage industry of national MAGA groups rallying only under the banner of Citizens Voice and “election integrity.”
Their names and red-white-and-blue logos are strikingly similar, and their goals—organizing activists, drafting legislation, and lobbying lawmakers and election officials—are almost interchangeable. Among them is Americans for Civic Vote gathered Republican lawmakers in eight states support ballot measures banning noncitizen voting; The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project solicits and publishes propaganda promoting the myth of non-citizen voting; the Election Transparency Initiative, led by Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney general and one-time acting Homeland Security deputy secretary; and the Fair Elections Project, founded by conservative rights activist Leonard Leo to conduct research and polling.
This year, these conservative activists are on the same page as they were in 2020, when Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen from him came out. a thousand cuts. Disinformation flooded social and right-wing media, but the narratives were disjointed and mixed, including viral false claims of fraudulent mail-in ballots and rigged voting machines.
Similarly, sin was widespread. Fingers pointed at low-paid poll workers, state election officials, voting machine manufacturers and, ultimately, members of Congress and the then-Vice President who barricaded themselves in the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The obsession with postal voting has backfired this year most Republicans they gave up on this conversation. Now the focus is sharper.
the right voice An arm of the Texas tea party behind some of the most absurd election fraud conspiracy theories, put it this way in a March fundraising email: “In 2020, mass mailings and dropboxes were introduced to provide the level of engineered chaos needed to control the results. Chaos will occur in 2024 through massive illegal voter registration.”
Not Trump’s the first campaign to stoke unfounded fear of immigrants. Every few decades, this feeling ignites supported and encouraged by politicians who want to capitalize on concerns about the impact of immigration on national security, the economy, and culture.
It was there before Trump Pat Buchanan. In three failed presidential campaigns, Buchanan tapped into the far right of the era, visited Confederate monuments and in 1990 asked on immigration, “Does this first-world nation want to be a third-world country?” Belief in the threat of white extinction orchestrated by leftists and Jews through immigration, a racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement,” was a hallmark of white nationalists. supported by the public Buchanan.
In the mid-1990s, American support for immigration began to rise rise up. But the 2000s came tea partyWhile Democrats were more supportive of immigration, it pushed the Republican Party further.