Newsletter: How Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Is Fueling the Election Denial Movement

American Oversight is investigating how the anti-democracy movement has promulgated the nonexistent threat of widespread illegal voting to sow doubt in our elections.

Inquiriespress@americanoversight.org

Among the many tactics being deployed by the anti-democracy movement as it seeks to foment chaos and doubt about the 2024 election has been a wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric centered on the nonexistent threat of widespread illegal voting.

Election denial activists and politicians have advanced false claims that voter rolls are being inflated with non-U.S. citizens and have pressured officials to advance harmful anti-voting measures, directing national attention to the xenophobic attacks.
Non-citizens in select jurisdictions have been granted the right to vote in local elections. There is no evidence of widespread illegal voting in federal elections.

The far-right fixation on “non-citizen voting” is the latest example of the weaponization of anti-immigrant sentiment for political gain, as the anti-democracy movement uses racist conspiracy theories and positions immigrants as a danger to election integrity.

A prominent individual behind the spread of these unfounded fears is Cleta Mitchell, founder of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition and the Election Integrity Network (EIN), which has drafted and promoted model state legislation that would require verification of voters’ citizenship status and make it easier to purge voter rolls.
Documents obtained by American Oversight also show how EIN members have claimed that non-citizens have been added to the voter rolls through enrollment in public benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and have suggested that there should be greater surveillance of immigrant use of these services.

This fearmongering has real and immediate consequences for immigrant communities, who have been wrongly cast as an existential threat to U.S. democracy.

The lie has been used before by former President Donald Trump and his allies; Trump’s false claims that he lost the 2016 popular vote because of illegal voting laid the groundwork for this latest round of white nationalist and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories.
This use of anti-immigrant rhetoric to fuel distrust in our elections can sow the same kind of confusion and lies that underpinned the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

On the Records

Texas Gov. Abbott Likely Inflated ‘Noncitizen’ Voting Figures

In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that roughly 1 million voters had been purged from the state’s rolls, claiming that 6,500 “noncitizens” had been removed and that nearly 2,000 had a voting history.

Reporting from the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and Votebeat shows that only a fraction of those removed from the voter rolls were identified as non-citizens. Most of those included in Abbott’s 6,500 figure were people who had not received or responded to letters informing them there were questions regarding their citizenship.

American Oversight obtained records that back up this reporting, showing that 379 non-citizens were removed from Texas’s voter rolls between 2021 and 2023, and that 5,440 were removed because they did not respond to the letters.

Along with other watchdog and voting rights groups, we had previously sent a letter to Texas’ secretary of state, flagging that some of these people could have been mistakenly removed.

Extremism in the U.S. Military

A new report from the Associated Press documents the alarming problem of far-right extremists with a military background. From 2017 to 2023, more than 480 people with a military background have been accused of extremist crimes.

Records we obtained that are cited in the AP report show that in 2020 and 2021, the Department of Defense developed a system to identify extremist and white supremist incidents in the military. Researchers wrote that the system was an important step toward identifying extremist activity.
But according to the AP, the Pentagon is not using the method. The report was never shared with the Pentagon’s Countering Extremist Activity Working Group that was created following the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Newsletter: How Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Is Fueling the Election Denial Movement

On the Records

Texas Gov. Abbott Likely Inflated ‘Noncitizen’ Voting Figures

Extremism in the U.S. Military

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