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Tag: election integrity

  • Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis said to agree to testify to Republican-led committee

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    ATLANTA — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will finally testify to a special committee of the Georgia Senate after rebuffing their demands for more than a year, the committee’s leader said Friday.

    After refusing to appear last year and fighting a committee subpoena in court, Willis will comply with a new subpoena to be issued by the Senate Special Committee on Investigations to appear on Nov. 13, said its chairman, Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens.

    It will be an opportunity for Republican lawmakers to ask her about the election interference case she brought against President Donald Trump and his allies.

    Cowsert said she agreed to testify to a limited scope of questioning that he could not disclose.

    Willis’ office did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

    Republicans have been vilifying Willis ever since she pursued the case, but Cowsert said his committee members want neither to persecute nor humiliate her.

    They just want her advice on legislation to regulate prosecutorial misconduct, he said.

    Willis was dislodged from her Trump prosecution after the state Supreme Court declined in September to consider her appeal of a Georgia Court of Appeals order disqualifying her from prosecuting conspiracy charges against Trump and eight others.

    The appeals court had found an appearance of impropriety in her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she had assigned to the case.

    Republicans have raised questions about her use of taxpayer dollars in hiring him.

    “She can’t continue to create this impression that the laws don’t apply to her — that she’s being an obstructionist,” Cowsert said.

    Sen. Harold Jones, II, D-Augusta, one of two Democrats on the eight-member committee, welcomed Willis’ testimony. It will be an opportunity to give her side of the story, said Jones, who is the Senate minority leader.

    Despite her agreement to testify, the state Supreme Court will still hear oral arguments Nov. 4 in the dispute over the original subpoena, Cowsert said.

    Cowsert’s committee also got an update from a new commission established by the General Assembly to investigate allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

    Investigators with the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission have considered 36 complaints filed in 2024 and 86 so far this year. None merited promotion to a hearing panel, said Ian Heap, the commission executive director.

    The details of cases are not public unless they merit formal charges, so Heap could not answer Cowsert’s question about whether the commission had considered allegations against Willis.

    Cowsert said after the hearing that he merely wanted to know if her Nov. 13 testimony to his committee might be constrained by concerns about self-incrimination connected with any commission investigation.

    Cowsert said Heap’s report on the escalation in the number of complaints — there were only seven in 2023 — was new information to him. He wondered whether it indicated many prosecutors were misbehaving and the public now has a vehicle to complain — or whether the complaints were merely frivolous.

    Jones focused on Heap’s disclosure that all the complaints so far were deemed meritless and on the relevance of the law that created the commission.

    “I think that kind of shows that the law was not needed,” he said.

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    Dave Williams and Capitol Beat News Service

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  • Dallas Woodhouse will help guide NC elections. Here’s what he’s said about voting

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    Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the NC Republican Party, talks with reporters prior to the second day of a public evidentiary hearing on the 9th Congressional District voting irregularities investigation Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019, at the North Carolina State Bar in Raleigh.

    Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the NC Republican Party, talks with reporters prior to the second day of a public evidentiary hearing on the 9th Congressional District voting irregularities investigation Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019, at the North Carolina State Bar in Raleigh.


    TRAVIS LONG

    tlong@newsobserver.com

    RALEIGH

    When news broke last week that Dallas Woodhouse would serve in a new role as the North Carolina state auditor’s election liaison, the name was familiar to many.

    Woodhouse, who served as the executive director of the state Republican Party from 2015 to 2019, has had a long and outspoken career in North Carolina politics.

    From sparring with reporters on Twitter, to bringing handcuffs as a prop to an MSNBC interview to being admonished by his mother on live television for fighting with his liberal brother about politics, Woodhouse has been a consistent presence in the state’s political sphere.

    Throughout his career, he’s also frequently voiced his support for conservative views on a variety of election issues that he may now be tasked with overseeing.

    While the auditor’s office has released scant details about Woodhouse’s new role, it did say he would work to “ensure election integrity” with local officials and be a resource in developing early voting plans.

    Here’s a look at some of Woodhouse’s past statements on election policy and more:

    Early voting

    For much of his career, Woodhouse advocated for limiting early voting and eliminating Sunday voting altogether.

    In 2016, he asked county election board members to “make party line changes to early voting” by cutting hours at polling sites and potentially getting rid of voting sites on college campuses.

    He also told county board members that he believed same-day registration was “ripe with voter fraud, or the opportunity to commit it.”

    Defending the requests, he told The News & Observer at the time that he was “an unabashed partisan.”

    In a 2022 tweet, Woodhouse railed against Sunday voting, saying the day is for “faith, family and friends.”

    “We will concede rather than take part of that scourge on our society,” he wrote.

    Traditionally, Sunday voting has been popular among Black voters and has been featured in “souls to the polls” events organized by churches.

    In 2024, Woodhouse shifted stances on some election policy issues.

    In an opinion piece for the Carolina Journal, Woodhouse encouraged Republicans to vote early or by mail.

    “If you wait longer to vote, your vote costs conservative candidates and parties more money,” he wrote. “Less money is available to turn out other voters needed to cross (the) finish line. Conservatives must play the game by today’s rules, which means maximizing our efforts to bank votes before Election Day.”

    NCGOP scandals

    Woodhouse’s resignation as director of the state GOP in 2019 came on the heels of several scandals, including one that resulted in a party official pleading guilty to federal charges.

    The first incident stemmed from the 2018 midterm elections. Republican Mark Harris, who was running for the state’s 9th Congressional District, became mired in a ballot harvesting scandal that eventually led the state to call a new election.

    As director of the party, Woodhouse defended Harris throughout much of the ensuing drama, urging the state to certify Harris as the winner despite evidence that an operative for the campaign had harvested ballots.

    “If the disputed ballot count don’t fly high, you must certify,” he tweeted in 2019.

    Ultimately, the state held a new election, which Harris did not run in.

    In 2024, however, Harris ran for an open congressional seat and won.

    Shortly after the ballot harvesting saga, the NC GOP became embroiled in a corruption scandal involving party chair Robin Hayes.

    Hayes was indicted as part of a federal bribery investigation involving a North Carolina billionaire.

    Woodhouse, who was not a target of the investigation, resigned shortly after Hayes was indicted.

    Hayes eventually pled guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI and was sentenced to a year’s probation. President Donald Trump pardoned Hayes in the last hours of his first term.

    January 6

    Following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Woodhouse quickly denounced the rioters and affirmed his belief in the 2020 election results.

    “I believe @JoeBiden won the election,” he wrote on Twitter. “I said that the night the race was called. @realDonaldTrump could have done things different to change the outcome, months ago. But I believe in elections, the rule of law and peace.”

    Woodhouse did question an investigation into former U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, whose candidacy was challenged because of his alleged ties to Jan. 6.

    Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican, had spoken at Trump’s rally near the Capitol prior to the attack.

    “There is no public evidence that Cawthorn did anything other than engaging in political speech on January 6,” Woodhouse wrote in the Carolina Journal.

    A judge later rejected the challenge to Cawthorn’s candidacy.

    In his opinion piece, Woodhouse called Jan. 6 “disturbing” but said that whether the events rose to the definition of an insurrection was “a matter of considerable debate.”

    Griffin/Riggs fight

    Woodhouse also weighed in several times on the recent legal battle over the results of the 2024 Supreme Court election.

    While Election Day results initially favored Republican Jefferson Griffin, the race narrowly flipped in Democrat Allison Riggs’ favor after outstanding absentee and provisional ballots were counted.

    Woodhouse declared victory for Griffin before ballot counting had finished, calling Riggs an “election outcome denier” on Twitter.

    After the final vote totals showed Riggs in the lead, Griffin sued and attempted to throw out over 60,000 ballots cast in the race using a variety of then-untested legal arguments.

    When Riggs revealed that her parents were two of the voters Griffin was attempting to disqualify, Woodhouse sarcastically responded to the news by saying, “Breaking: Supreme Court Justice accuses her own parents of voter fraud !!”

    Griffin’s legal battle lasted six months and ended in May after a federal judge ruled decisively in Riggs’ favor. Griffin conceded the race shortly after.

    Woodhouse did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

    Related Stories from Raleigh News & Observer

    Kyle Ingram

    The News & Observer

    Kyle Ingram is a politics reporter for the News & Observer. He reports on the legislature, voting rights and more in North Carolina politics. He is a graduate of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC-Chapel Hill. 

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    Kyle Ingram

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  • Federal judge lets Iowa keep challenging voter rolls although naturalized citizens may be affected

    Federal judge lets Iowa keep challenging voter rolls although naturalized citizens may be affected

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    A federal judge ruled Sunday that Iowa can continue challenging the validity of hundreds of ballots from potential noncitizens even though critics said the effort threatens the voting rights of people who’ve recently become U.S. citizens.U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sided with the state in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in the Iowa capital of Des Moines on behalf of the League of Latin American Citizens of Iowa and four recently naturalized citizens. The four were on the state’s list of questionable registrations to be challenged by local elections officials.Related video above: Get the Facts: Counting votesThe state’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state argued that investigating and potentially removing 2,000 names from the list would prevent illegal voting by noncitizens. GOP officials across the U.S. have made possible voting by noncitizen immigrants a key election-year talking point even though it is rare. Their focus has come with former President Donald Trump falsely suggesting that his opponents already are committing fraud to prevent his return to the White House.In his ruling Sunday, Locher pointed to a U.S. Supreme Court decision four days prior that allowed Virginia to resume a similar purge of its voter registration rolls even though it was impacting some U.S. citizens. He also cited the Supreme Court’s recent refusal to review a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision on state electoral laws surrounding provisional ballots. Those Supreme Court decisions advise lower courts to “act with great caution before awarding last-minute injunctive relief,” he wrote.Locher also said the state’s effort does not remove anyone from the voter rolls, but rather requires some voters to use provisional ballots.In a statement on Sunday, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, celebrated the ruling.“Today’s ruling is a victory for election integrity,” Reynolds said. “In Iowa, while we encourage all citizens to vote, we will enforce the law and ensure those votes aren’t cancelled out by the illegal vote of a non-citizen.”Rita Bettis Austen, legal director for the ACLU of Iowa, said some voters could be disenfranchised due to the ruling and Secretary of State Paul Pate’s directive.“We are obviously disappointed with the court’s decision not to outright block Secretary Pate’s directive, which we still fear threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters simply because they are people who became citizens in the past several years,” Austen said in a written statement. “Even the Secretary agrees that the vast majority of voters on his list are United States citizens.”Even still, Austen said the lawsuit forced Pate to back away from forcing everyone on the list to vote provisionally only. County auditors may permit a voter on the list to cast a regular ballot if they deem it appropriate, and voters can prove they are citizens with documentation, she added.After Locher had a hearing in the ACLU’s lawsuit Friday, Pate and state Attorney General Brenna Bird issued a statement saying that Iowa had about 250 noncitizens registered to vote, but the Biden administration wouldn’t provide data about them.Pate told reporters last month that his office was forced to rely upon a list of potential noncitizens from the Iowa Department of Transportation. It named people who registered to vote or voted after identifying themselves as noncitizens living in the U.S. legally when they previously sought driver’s licenses.”Today’s court victory is a guarantee for all Iowans that their votes will count and not be canceled out by illegal votes,” Bird said in the statement issued after Sunday’s decision.But ACLU attorneys said Iowa officials were conceding that most of the people on the list are eligible to vote and shouldn’t have been included. They said the state was violating naturalized citizens’ voting rights by wrongfully challenging their registrations and investigating them if they cast ballots.Pate issued his directive Oct. 22, only two weeks before the Nov. 5 election, and ACLU attorneys argued that federal law prohibits such a move so close to Election Day.The people on the state’s list of potential noncitizens may have become naturalized citizens after their statements to the Department of Transportation. Pate’s office told county elections officials to challenge their ballots and have them cast provisional ballots instead. That would leave the decision of whether they will be counted to local officials upon further review, with voters having seven days to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship.In his ruling, Locher wrote that Pate backed away from some of his original hardline positions at an earlier court hearing. Pate’s attorney said the Secretary of State is no longer aiming to require local election officials to challenge the votes of each person on his list or force voters on the list to file provisional ballots even when they have proven citizenship at a polling place.Federal law and states already make it illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the first question on Iowa’s voter registration form asks whether a person is a U.S. citizen. The form also requires potential voters to sign a statement saying they are citizens, warning them that if they lie, they can be convicted of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.Locher’s ruling also came after a federal judge had halted a similar program in Alabama challenged by civil rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that roughly 2,000 of the more than 3,200 voters who were made inactive were actually legally registered citizens.In Iowa’s case, noncitizens who are registered are potentially only a tiny fraction of the state’s 2.2 million registered voters.But Locher wrote that it appears to be undisputed that some portion of the names on Pate’s list are registered voters who are not U.S. citizens. Even if that portion is small, an injunction effectively would force local election officials to let ineligible voters cast ballots, he added.Democrats and Republicans have been engaged in a sprawling legal fight over this year’s election for months. Republicans have filed dozens of lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied. Democrats have their own team of dozens of staffers fighting GOP cases.Immigrants gain citizenship through a process called naturalization, which includes establishing residency, proving knowledge of basic American history and institutions as well as taking an oath of allegiance to the United States.—-Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas, and Goldberg, from Minneapolis.

    A federal judge ruled Sunday that Iowa can continue challenging the validity of hundreds of ballots from potential noncitizens even though critics said the effort threatens the voting rights of people who’ve recently become U.S. citizens.

    U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sided with the state in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in the Iowa capital of Des Moines on behalf of the League of Latin American Citizens of Iowa and four recently naturalized citizens. The four were on the state’s list of questionable registrations to be challenged by local elections officials.

    Related video above: Get the Facts: Counting votes

    The state’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state argued that investigating and potentially removing 2,000 names from the list would prevent illegal voting by noncitizens. GOP officials across the U.S. have made possible voting by noncitizen immigrants a key election-year talking point even though it is rare. Their focus has come with former President Donald Trump falsely suggesting that his opponents already are committing fraud to prevent his return to the White House.

    In his ruling Sunday, Locher pointed to a U.S. Supreme Court decision four days prior that allowed Virginia to resume a similar purge of its voter registration rolls even though it was impacting some U.S. citizens. He also cited the Supreme Court’s recent refusal to review a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision on state electoral laws surrounding provisional ballots. Those Supreme Court decisions advise lower courts to “act with great caution before awarding last-minute injunctive relief,” he wrote.

    Locher also said the state’s effort does not remove anyone from the voter rolls, but rather requires some voters to use provisional ballots.

    In a statement on Sunday, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, celebrated the ruling.

    “Today’s ruling is a victory for election integrity,” Reynolds said. “In Iowa, while we encourage all citizens to vote, we will enforce the law and ensure those votes aren’t cancelled out by the illegal vote of a non-citizen.”

    Rita Bettis Austen, legal director for the ACLU of Iowa, said some voters could be disenfranchised due to the ruling and Secretary of State Paul Pate’s directive.

    “We are obviously disappointed with the court’s decision not to outright block Secretary Pate’s directive, which we still fear threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters simply because they are people who became citizens in the past several years,” Austen said in a written statement. “Even the Secretary agrees that the vast majority of voters on his list are United States citizens.”

    Even still, Austen said the lawsuit forced Pate to back away from forcing everyone on the list to vote provisionally only. County auditors may permit a voter on the list to cast a regular ballot if they deem it appropriate, and voters can prove they are citizens with documentation, she added.

    After Locher had a hearing in the ACLU’s lawsuit Friday, Pate and state Attorney General Brenna Bird issued a statement saying that Iowa had about 250 noncitizens registered to vote, but the Biden administration wouldn’t provide data about them.

    Pate told reporters last month that his office was forced to rely upon a list of potential noncitizens from the Iowa Department of Transportation. It named people who registered to vote or voted after identifying themselves as noncitizens living in the U.S. legally when they previously sought driver’s licenses.

    “Today’s court victory is a guarantee for all Iowans that their votes will count and not be canceled out by illegal votes,” Bird said in the statement issued after Sunday’s decision.

    But ACLU attorneys said Iowa officials were conceding that most of the people on the list are eligible to vote and shouldn’t have been included. They said the state was violating naturalized citizens’ voting rights by wrongfully challenging their registrations and investigating them if they cast ballots.

    Pate issued his directive Oct. 22, only two weeks before the Nov. 5 election, and ACLU attorneys argued that federal law prohibits such a move so close to Election Day.

    The people on the state’s list of potential noncitizens may have become naturalized citizens after their statements to the Department of Transportation. Pate’s office told county elections officials to challenge their ballots and have them cast provisional ballots instead. That would leave the decision of whether they will be counted to local officials upon further review, with voters having seven days to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship.

    In his ruling, Locher wrote that Pate backed away from some of his original hardline positions at an earlier court hearing. Pate’s attorney said the Secretary of State is no longer aiming to require local election officials to challenge the votes of each person on his list or force voters on the list to file provisional ballots even when they have proven citizenship at a polling place.

    Federal law and states already make it illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the first question on Iowa’s voter registration form asks whether a person is a U.S. citizen. The form also requires potential voters to sign a statement saying they are citizens, warning them that if they lie, they can be convicted of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.

    Locher’s ruling also came after a federal judge had halted a similar program in Alabama challenged by civil rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that roughly 2,000 of the more than 3,200 voters who were made inactive were actually legally registered citizens.

    In Iowa’s case, noncitizens who are registered are potentially only a tiny fraction of the state’s 2.2 million registered voters.

    But Locher wrote that it appears to be undisputed that some portion of the names on Pate’s list are registered voters who are not U.S. citizens. Even if that portion is small, an injunction effectively would force local election officials to let ineligible voters cast ballots, he added.

    Democrats and Republicans have been engaged in a sprawling legal fight over this year’s election for months. Republicans have filed dozens of lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied. Democrats have their own team of dozens of staffers fighting GOP cases.

    Immigrants gain citizenship through a process called naturalization, which includes establishing residency, proving knowledge of basic American history and institutions as well as taking an oath of allegiance to the United States.

    —-

    Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas, and Goldberg, from Minneapolis.

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  • Breathlessness. Unformed facial features. Manipulative. Here’s how to spot a political deepfake

    Breathlessness. Unformed facial features. Manipulative. Here’s how to spot a political deepfake

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    You’ve probably seen the word “deepfakes” in the news lately, but are you confident you would be able to spot the difference between real and artificial intelligence-generated content? During the summer, a video of Vice President Kamala Harris saying that she was “the ultimate diversity hire” and “knew nothing about running the country” circulated on social media. Elon Musk, the owner of X, retweeted it. This was, in fact, a deepfake video.By posting it, Musk seemingly ignored X’s own misinformation policies and shared it with his 193 million followers. Although the Federal Communication Commission announced in February that AI-generated audio clips in robocalls are illegal, deepfakes on social media and in campaign advertisements are yet to be subject to a federal ban. A growing number of state legislatures have begun submitting bills to regulate deepfakes as concerns about the spread of misinformation and explicit content heighten on both sides of the aisle. In September, with less than 50 days before the election, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills that target deepfakes directly — one of which takes effect immediately. AB 2839 bans individuals and groups “from knowingly distributing an advertisement or other election material containing deceptive AI-generated or manipulated content.” This ban would take effect 120 days before an election and 60 days after it, an aim at reducing content that may spread misinformation as votes are being counted and certified. “Signing AB 2839 into law is a significant step in continuing to protect the integrity of our democratic process. With fewer than 50 days until the general election, there is an urgent need to protect against misleading, digitally altered content that can interfere with the election,” said Gail Pellerin, the chair of the Assembly Elections Committee.According to Public Citizen, 25 states have now either signed a bill into law that addresses political deepfakes or have a bill that is awaiting the governor’s signature. Do you know how to spot a deepfake?According to cyber news reporter and cybersecurity expert Kerry Tomlinson, “a deepfake is a computer-created image or voice or video of a person, either a person who doesn’t exist but seems real, or a person who does exist, making them do or say something they never actually did or said.”Tomlinson says there are several giveaways to identify a deepfake. Objects and parts of the face, such as earrings, teeth or glasses, may not be fully formed. Pay attention to the breathing. The speaker takes no breaths while speaking. Ask yourself: Is the message potentially harmful or manipulating?Can the information be verified?Ultimately, Tomlinson encourages people to “learn about how attackers are using deepfakes. Learn about how politicians and political parties are using deepfakes. Read about it. It’s as simple as that.”

    You’ve probably seen the word “deepfakes” in the news lately, but are you confident you would be able to spot the difference between real and artificial intelligence-generated content?

    During the summer, a video of Vice President Kamala Harris saying that she was “the ultimate diversity hire” and “knew nothing about running the country” circulated on social media. Elon Musk, the owner of X, retweeted it. This was, in fact, a deepfake video.

    By posting it, Musk seemingly ignored X’s own misinformation policies and shared it with his 193 million followers.

    Although the Federal Communication Commission announced in February that AI-generated audio clips in robocalls are illegal, deepfakes on social media and in campaign advertisements are yet to be subject to a federal ban.

    A growing number of state legislatures have begun submitting bills to regulate deepfakes as concerns about the spread of misinformation and explicit content heighten on both sides of the aisle.

    In September, with less than 50 days before the election, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills that target deepfakes directly — one of which takes effect immediately.

    AB 2839 bans individuals and groups “from knowingly distributing an advertisement or other election material containing deceptive AI-generated or manipulated content.”

    This ban would take effect 120 days before an election and 60 days after it, an aim at reducing content that may spread misinformation as votes are being counted and certified.

    “Signing AB 2839 into law is a significant step in continuing to protect the integrity of our democratic process. With fewer than 50 days until the general election, there is an urgent need to protect against misleading, digitally altered content that can interfere with the election,” said Gail Pellerin, the chair of the Assembly Elections Committee.

    According to Public Citizen, 25 states have now either signed a bill into law that addresses political deepfakes or have a bill that is awaiting the governor’s signature.

    Do you know how to spot a deepfake?

    According to cyber news reporter and cybersecurity expert Kerry Tomlinson, “a deepfake is a computer-created image or voice or video of a person, either a person who doesn’t exist but seems real, or a person who does exist, making them do or say something they never actually did or said.”

    Tomlinson says there are several giveaways to identify a deepfake.

    • Objects and parts of the face, such as earrings, teeth or glasses, may not be fully formed.
    • Pay attention to the breathing. The speaker takes no breaths while speaking.
    • Ask yourself: Is the message potentially harmful or manipulating?
    • Can the information be verified?

    Ultimately, Tomlinson encourages people to “learn about how attackers are using deepfakes. Learn about how politicians and political parties are using deepfakes. Read about it. It’s as simple as that.”

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  • Far-Right Sheriffs Want a Citizen Army to Stop ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Voters

    Far-Right Sheriffs Want a Citizen Army to Stop ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Voters

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    Boone Cutler, who has written a number of books with Flynn about “fifth-generational warfare”—military actions like social engineering, misinformation, and cyber attacks—described immigrants as “weaponized diaspora communities” who are being brought into the country to commit “terrorism.” Cutler announced, without providing any details, that he would be providing “irregular warfare training” to CSPOA officers ahead of the election.

    John Ferguson, who owns an aerospace company that he claims tracks activity along the border, boosted the dangerous and untrue myth that immigrants are crossing the border with military training and could pose a serious threat to the US. “The problem is that a lot of these people, there’s times where over 90 percent of the people that are being apprehended are all fighting-aged males, Chinese, Central and South Americans,” he said. “I have been south of the border doing missions in Mexico, and I have flown my unmanned aircraft over the training camps where they’re training.”

    The claim that “military-aged men” are being systematically brought across the border into the US is a conspiracy that has been around for some time and is increasingly gaining traction in mainstream GOP circles.

    And though they appear to have reached a new pitch, these claims about immigrants voting have been around for years. Trump has been promoting bogus claims about “illegal” immigrants voting since 2016, when he said the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton was due, in part, to many immigrants voting fraudulently.Trump repeated the claim in 2020 to explain the reason he lost to Biden in key swing states like Arizona—a claim he referred to in his speech ahead of the January 6 riot.

    Trump hasn’t stopped: “Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” Trump said last month during a speech in North Carolina. “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters, and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”

    There is no evidence to back up any of these claims, however, and research from the Brennan Center for Justice and other organizations has shown that the number of noncitizens voting in US elections is statistically insignificant. In one study from the Brennan Center on the 2016 election, researchers found that non-citizens were suspected (not even confirmed) to have voted in just 0.0001 percent of the 23.5 million votes cast.

    Still, these assertions have continued to gain traction as tensions at the US-Mexico border escalate. Republicans have also continued espousing the belief that the US population is being systematically replaced by minorities, a conspiracy known as the great replacement. Despite the theory being widely debunked, the conspiracy has taken hold in MAGA and increasingly mainstream right-wing circles, with speaker of the House Mike Johnson recently announcing a bill to prevent noncitizens from voting in elections—even though that is not an issue.

    Earlier this month, the far-right X account known as EndWokeness posted misleading statistics about a supposed dramatic rise in the numbers of migrant voters registering in the US to vote without IDs to its 2 million followers. The stats were quickly debunked by election officials, but the post, which is still on the site without a Community Note, has been viewed over 65 million times. Elon Musk, X’s CEO, shared the post with the comment: “Extremely concerning.”

    At the CSPOA conference, Wayne Allen Root, a right-wing radio host who promoted the false conspiracy about former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate, repeated Trump’s claims about immigrant voters.

    “The [2020] election was stolen in the six battleground states that would have given Trump a landslide win, instead of a landslide electoral loss,” Root said, without providing any evidence to back it up. “Those six states were decided by the votes of illegal aliens who came in through our open borders. That’s who’s voting. That’s our elections.”

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    David Gilbert

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  • Inside Election Conspiracy Groups on Super Tuesday

    Inside Election Conspiracy Groups on Super Tuesday

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    Super Tuesday was a blowout for former president Donald Trump, who won 14 out of 15 states. And yet, Trump’s most ardent supporters who believe that all votes and elections are now irredeemably fraudulent spent the day boosting wild conspiracies online, predicting what would happen in November, and guessing how their perceived enemies will conspire to defeat Trump.

    Voting rights groups reported very few issues impacting Super Tuesday voters, but that didn’t stop members of election-denial groups. Instead, they grasped onto anything they could find that seemingly indicated a grand election conspiracy. Accusations of fraud trickled in slowly on Tuesday before exploding around 10:30 am when users of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads all found out that the platforms were offline.

    Rather than wait to find out the real reasons—which turned out to be a technical issue that Meta fixed within 90 minutes—members of election-denial groups and conspiracy channels on Telegram quickly claimed foul.

    “Today is Super Tuesday and almost every single major tech platform is down,” one election denial influencer wrote on Telegram. “That is not a coincidence … The very definition of a ‘Dry-Run’ is a rehearsal of a performance or procedure before the real one.” They then claimed that the fact X, Telegram, and Truth Social remained online was “evidence” that these platforms “may very well be the only ones available on Election Day.”

    The belief that the Meta outage was planned was shared widely on multiple platforms, including X and pro-Trump message boards like The Donald. “Practice run for November?” wrote Rogan O’Handley, a major far-right influencer with 1.4 million followers, in a post on X that has been viewed more than 3 million times.

    “They are practicing shutting down communication, so you don’t report election fraud,” a user of The Donald wrote in a thread.

    Other influencers spent the day harkening back to 2020 election-fraud claims. In the Telegram channel run by David Clements, one of the most influential election-denial figures to emerge since 2020, the day began with the public release of a film he made about the 2020 presidential election being stolen.

    As the day progressed, Clements shared Super Tuesday conspiracies, including an unsubstantiated claim that voters received an error message when they tried to vote in Dallas.

    The claim was based on a picture first posted by a writer for the conspiracy website Gateway Pundit. However, election integrity group Common Cause pointed out in a post on X that the picture wasn’t actually showing a voting machine but rather what’s called an “emergency drawer.”

    “It is a locked, secure ballot receptacle to store and scan ballots ensuring they’re included in the polling place’s count at the end of the day,” the group explained.

    But on Telegram, such explanations were not seen or were otherwise ignored. “Keep watching & pointing out their corruption everyone,” one Clements supporter wrote.

    Later in the day, news broke that Taylor Swift had urged her 282 million Instagram followers to “vote the people who most represent YOU into power.” This, unsurprisingly, was mocked by the election-denial groups, as the pop star was once again accused of being part of a psyop.

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    David Gilbert

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