Beyond Trump, there are few election deniers more zealous than Cleta Mitchell, a once-liberal Democratic Oklahoma legislator who has constructed a vast conservative apparatus promoting the noncitizen voting lie.
Mitchell converted to the right in the ’90s, and represented tea party politicians in campaign finance cases in the aughts. She co-founded the Public Interest Legal Foundation in 2012 to root out purported voter fraud. It used to be a lonely business.
“We could fit into a phone booth, those of us who cared about election integrity,” Mitchell has said.
But Trump’s insistence that elections were insecure turned Mitchell’s project into a Republican talking point. Mitchell volunteered as a legal adviser to Trump in Georgia during his effort to overturn the 2020 election results. As Mitchell tells it, the public outcry over her contributions on a leaked, now-infamous call in which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to help him “find” 11,780 votes forced her to resign from her Washington, D.C., law firm.
So Mitchell dug in, launching the Election Integrity Network in 2021 as a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a hub for Trump loyalists aimed at pushing the country further to the right. She recruited election deniers into a national army of election workers, poll watchers and hobby-activists focused on challenging voter rolls and filing public records requests. In 2022, tax filings show the Election Integrity Network brought in more than $750,000, largely from the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Earlier this year, Mitchell created the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, which she described to Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk as “a national neighborhood watch to try to find these pockets of noncitizens that are getting added to the rolls.”
Mitchell declined an interview with NBC News, calling a list of questions evidence of “a vintage ‘Are you still beating your wife?’ story.”
Mitchell’s group, which partners with some 80 other organizations, helped draft model state legislation banning all noncitizen voting, which was adopted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative network. The Only Citizens Vote Coalition spent September organizing in support of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — or the SAVE Act — a federal bill that would have required documentary proof of citizenship, which researchers have found would disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. Mitchell testified at a House Judiciary hearing, an appearance the Election Integrity Network turned into an advertisement.
Despite the momentum, and Trump’s urging, the SAVE Act — tucked into a stopgap funding bill — was defeated, with 14 Republicans voting against it. The bill’s failure was a blow, but far from fatal for Only Citizens Vote and the cottage industry of national MAGA groups that rally under the “election integrity” banner.
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 nearly interchangeable. They include Americans for Citizen Voting, an organization that’s rallied Republican lawmakers in eight states to support ballot measures banning noncitizen voting; the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which solicits and publishes propaganda furthering the noncitizen voting myth; the Election Transparency Initiative, which is chaired by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and once-acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security; and the Honest Elections Project, founded by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo to provide research and polling.
This year, these conservative activists are on the same page, as opposed to 2020, when Trump’s “big lie,” that the election had been stolen from him, came by a thousand cuts. Misinformation flooded social and right-wing media, but the narratives were disjointed and confusing, including viral false claims of fraudulent mailed ballots and rigged voting machines.
Likewise, the blame was spread too broadly. Fingers pointed to low-wage poll workers, state election officials, voting machine manufacturers and, ultimately, members of Congress and the then-vice president, barricaded in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The obsession with mail-in voting turned out to be counterproductive, and this year most Republicans have abandoned that talking point. Now, the focus is sharper.
True the Vote, a Texas tea party offshoot behind some of the most absurd election fraud conspiracy theories, put it this way in a March fundraising email: “In 2020, mass mail ballots and dropboxes were introduced to provide the level of engineered chaos necessary to control outcomes. In 2024, the chaos will come by way of mass illegal voter registrations.”
Trump’s isn’t the first campaign to stoke unfounded fear of immigrants. Every few decades, this sentiment flares up and is fanned by politicians eager to capitalize on worries over immigration’s impact on national security, the economy and culture.
Before Trump there was Pat Buchanan. In three failed presidential campaigns, Buchanan clocked notable victories by tapping into the era’s far-right, visiting Confederate monuments and asking in 1990 with regard to immigration, “Does this first world nation wish to become a third world country?” Belief in the threat of white extinction orchestrated by leftists and Jews through immigration, a racist conspiracy theory known as “great replacement,” was a hallmark of white nationalists, who publicly supported Buchanan.
In the mid-’90s, Americans’ support for immigration started to rise. But with the 2000s came the tea party, which moved the Republican Party further right while Democrats grew more supportive of immigration.
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