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On Tuesday morning, celebrities like Stephen Curry, Olivia Rodrigo, and Kerry Washington used their social media platforms to mark National Voter Registration Day, a nonpartisan effort to get Americans to sign up to vote in November’s election.
But at the same time, a group of MAGA influencers were rolling out a very different message about voting to their followers.
“Millions of illegals have been crossing our southern border, many of them who are coming are drug traffickers and sex traffickers. But what I’m worried about is the illegal voting,” Danielle D'Souza Gill said in an Instagram video she shared to her 255,000 followers, alongside the hashtag #OnlyCitizensVote. D’Souza Gill is the daughter of election conspiracist and right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza and wife to Brandon Gill, a Trump-endorsed election denier who recently won the GOP nomination to run for Congress in Texas’ 26th district.
Her video about immigrants voting is not a one-off. It’s part of a coordinated effort called “National Only Citizens Vote” week that has been rolling out since Monday. The campaign has been coordinated by a network of election denial groups who created the Only Citizens Vote Coalition to centralize their efforts. A WIRED review of recordings of half a dozen meetings to plan out “National Only Citizens Vote” week has revealed that the organizers, guest speakers, and volunteers who are participating are pushing conspiracies about immigrants, planning to post threatening signs at polling places, and blaming the “evil left” for stealing the election even before a vote has been cast.
The coalition was spearheaded by Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump adviser and attorney who was on the infamous call in 2020 when Trump asked Georgia state officials to reverse the election results. Mitchell has personally hosted online Zoom calls for the last several months where hundreds of local volunteers were given marching orders about how to spread the conspiracy about immigrants voting.
For the week, the coalition created a website filled with resources including PowerPoint presentations, handouts, posters, and printable signs in Spanish and English warning: “If you are NOT a citizen of the United States of America, it is ILLEGAL for you to vote.” Across platforms like X, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, volunteers and GOP influencers with huge followings have been encouraged to post memes and videos pushing the conspiracy. The campaign also incorporates offline activities, encouraging supporters to attend flag-waving events on street corners, hand out bumper stickers and yard signs, write to their local representatives, and seek airtime on local TV and radio stations to spread the conspiracy.
Monday was dedicated to “shining a light” on noncitizen voting, Tuesday “celebrated citizenship, and Wednesday focused on “federal action.” Friday is, unironically it seems, dedicated to “protecting noncitizen voters” when the activists will push the message that voting when not a citizen could get you deported.
It’s the culmination of the last six months of work from election denial groups like Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, which has been spreading election conspiracies for the last four years, as well as organizations like the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Transparency Initiative, a group headed up by former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli and backed by far-right billionaire Dick Uihlein. Their work hasn’t been in a vacuum: Former president Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers, conservative activists, and right-wing pundits have been strenuously pushing the lie that a flood of immigrants pose a threat to the integrity of the 2024 elections.
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The connective tissue between the Trump campaign and the grassroots activists spreading the conspiracy is the Election Integrity Network, a group established in the wake of the 2020 election by Mitchell. The Election Integrity Network, which earlier this year was involved in mass voter roll challenges, has established a huge network of regional, state, and county-level groups with tens of thousands of activists who attend regular online information sessions about everything from poll worker recruitment to media training.
In recent weeks, Mitchell and her staff have been laser-focused on the threat of noncitizens voting, according to WIRED’s review of recordings of more than half a dozen meetings. In a series of online webinars, each attended by hundreds of volunteers, Mitchell and her colleagues have spoken at length about the supposed threat posed by immigrants, while providing no evidence to back up their claims.
“The noncitizen voting has become one of the top talking points this election cycle, despite effectively zero evidence of it being a widespread problem. They're just going on vibes,” Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director at Documented, tells WIRED. “It's become a centerpiece of MAGA-oriented messaging in the run-up to the 2024 election, embraced by everybody from Donald Trump, House speaker Mike Johnson, to Elon Musk, in part because it links together two of the right's biggest talking points for this election: immigration and the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen.”
All the available evidence suggests that noncitizen voting accounts for a vanishingly small fraction of a percent of the votes cast in US elections. The GOP push to suggest this is a problem echoes much of the rhetoric around the great replacement conspiracy, which falsely suggests that a “cabal of global elites” is encouraging people of color to immigrate and replace white voters. Experts also believe the narrative is being seeded as a scare tactic designed to lay the groundwork for Trump and his allies to once again question the outcome of the vote.
The push to make immigrant voting an issue began to gather steam in April when, standing alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago, House speaker Mike Johnson said he was working on some voter suppression legislation to make it illegal for noncitizens to vote—which it already is. That legislation became the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act—better known as the SAVE Act—which not only seeks to make it illegal for noncitizens to vote (again, it is already illegal) but to also introduce a requirement for people registering to vote to provide documentary proof that they are citizens.
According to a June survey by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, this measure would disenfranchise one in 10 voters, or around 18 million people, who for various reasons have difficulty accessing the documents like passports and birth certificates necessary to prove they are citizens. The White House dismissed the bill in July as “based on easily disproven falsehoods.”
These claims have made it to the mainstream: Last month, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo posted on X about a friend of a friend who claims to have seen “a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote.” The claims were quickly debunked, with Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Sergeant William Lockridge telling The Fort Worth Star-Telegram that “none of it is true” and that the claims were “kind of racist.”
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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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While the activists behind Only Citizens Vote week claim the initiative is meant to be about protecting US democracy, the reality is that pushing these conspiracies disenfranchises voters, or worse.
Last month, officers from Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit conducted early morning raids on the homes of Latino civil rights activists, including multiple members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), as part of “ongoing election integrity investigations.” While the press release announcing the raids did not mention noncitizens specifically, Paxton has been among the loudest voices pushing the conspiracy about immigrants voting.
The noncitizen voting conspiracy “is certainly part of the reason that Latino nonprofit organizations, civic leaders, and LULAC members were targeted,” Juan Proaño, the CEO of LULAC, told WIRED about his organization’s members being attacked. “This is setting a precedent in the courts to normalize these tactics, so they can be copied in other Republican states.”
“There’s a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally,” Paxton said on The Joe Pags Show last month. “I’m convinced that that’s how they’re going to do it this time, they’re going to use the illegal vote. Why were they brought in, why did he bring in 14 million people? He brought them here to vote.”
“It's hard to think of anything more intimidating than having someone who's involved in civic activism and voter turnout have their home raided, and it appears that those raids have been motivated by these noncitizen-voting conspiracy theories,” Fischer says.
Beyond all the bluster and divisive rhetoric, another possible reason that the GOP is so focused on this non-issue, experts believe, is that they are simply laying the groundwork to question the outcome of November’s vote.
“Why is it happening now?’ Michael Waldman, CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, said last month during a House committee hearing on the SAVE Act. “It’s being pushed preemptively, I believe, to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election this year. The Big Lie is being pre-deployed.”
