The “big lie” of the 2024 election is being workshopped on Webex.
In tiny boxes, hundreds of people, most of them white, meet weekly in online video conferences to share specious evidence of a problem that doesn’t exist: a leftist plot to “get the illegals to become voters,” as Jeff Vega, a conservative Latino activist in Michigan, put it at a meeting in August.
The participants, who have reportedly included a Wisconsin state lawmaker, a former Trump administration official and a U.S. congressman, bat around ideas for how to combat this supposed threat, from reviewing lists of noncitizens with driver’s licenses to scanning the voter rolls for “ethnic” names. They urge one another to go as far as they can within the bounds of the law.
These meetings are run by the Election Integrity Network, a coalition of conservatives “dedicated to securing the legality of every American vote,” and dozens of statewide partners. Reporters are prohibited, but recordings have leaked to media outlets including NBC News.
There is something ordinary about the videos, grids of activists gathering to check in, grouse, motivate and brainstorm. But the cause that undergirds them is disquieting, and it has activated tens of thousands of self-described patriots to “save the election.”
In contrast to 2020, when Trump and his backers tossed out an array of false election interference allegations — many ludicrous, quickly struck down by courts — Republicans in this election cycle are almost entirely focused on the specter of noncitizen voting, a claim all the more appealing because of the difficulty of proving something isn’t happening. It’s a reboot of Trump’s 2020 election denial, focused on a specific enemy with a more robust strategy, one that has already achieved some success with this clearer — if no less false — message. The claim has spread widely online and in the real world, driving consequences that could shape the election and beyond.
Well-funded conservative groups are systematically deploying the manufactured threat of noncitizen voting to pump up their base, to file restrictive federal and state voting measures and purge tens of thousands of voters from the rolls, and to flood the courts with lawsuits that plant doubt about the security of the upcoming election, opening the door to delays in the certification of results. It has been the hot topic of congressional hearings, million-dollar ad buys, right-wing media, domestic disinformation projects and campaign rallies.
And it’s already caused harm, with voters disenfranchised, progressive canvassers and Latino activists harassed, and the normalization of an anti-immigrant conspiracy theory that has motivated horrific mass violence: the belief that a group of elites is using immigration to orchestrate the extinction of white Americans.
