The “deceive, disrupt, deny” strategy behind voter eligibility lies

Why election-subversion planners are aggressively targeting eligible voters

Over the past two weeks, you’ve heard Amanda Carpenter on the plot to subvert the 2024 election. (If you haven’t read those pieces, go do so now. Here, here, and here.) 

In short, there’s a three-part plan to deceive the electorate, disrupt the election, and ultimately deny any election results the authoritarian movement does not like.

We want to dig in on the most prominent example of those tactics right now: the lie about non-citizens participating in our elections.

Tragically, these lies are having real impacts on targeted communities and the eligible voters removed from the voter rolls just a few weeks before the November election. 

The lies about our voter rolls are meant to deceive the electorate

Claims that ineligible voters are participating in our elections are a lie. And the people making those claims know it. 

Groups like the Heritage Foundation and former President Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity have been highly motivated to find examples but have found next to no evidence of any sort of voter fraud. 

Virginia, which is currently purging eligible voters from the rolls under the guise of removing noncitizens, has not prosecuted any cases of noncitizen voting in at least 20 years. Georgia’s Secretary of State just wrapped an investigation which found that no noncitizens have voted in Georgia since 2016, when new ID requirements were adopted. Prior to that only nine non-citizens (out of 8.2 million registered voters) illegally cast a ballot in Georgia. 

As the Georgia numbers show, ineligible voters do occasionally make it onto the rolls. Not because of some nefarious plot, but because of routine paperwork-processing errors by the DMV. But it is illegal for those individuals to vote and — with extremely rare exceptions — they don’t. And states have processes in place to keep their rolls as accurate as possible. That means updating the rolls when folks move or die, identifying and removing ineligible voters, all while ensuring that eligible voters aren’t disenfranchised. 

This is all normal, ministerial government work carried out year-round by local election officials across the country. 

On top of all the administrative guardrails in place, ineligible voters are not trying to vote in our elections because, again, it’s illegal and has been for decades. Multiple laws prohibit noncitizens from voting in federal elections, including the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996. Plainly, there is no incentive for individual non-citizens to vote — if they’re caught they’d face potential imprisonment and the prospect of being deported or denied citizenship or immigration benefits. Why would they risk that?  

Disrupting the electoral process is the point

Despite knowing that there's nothing to these conspiracies, officials across the country are taking disruptive, often illegal, action to disrupt the democratic process. 

There are, unfortunately, a plethora of examples to choose from: 

• Voter roll “purges” in Alabama and Virginia that removed eligible citizens from the rolls, 

• Baseless lawsuits in Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania challenging votes from the armed services and U.S. citizens abroad, 

• Lawsuits in Nevada, Arizona, and many other states pushing for unreliable methods of list maintenance that would risk disenfranchising voters, and 

• Lawsuits seeking nonexistent or flawed information from the federal government under the guise of verifying citizenship status of registered voters. 

To dig deeper on the voter-roll “purges,” as one example, both Virginia and Alabama recently rolled out illegal last minute list-maintenance efforts based on faulty, outdated data. Programs which have, predictably, threatened the voting rights of thousands of eligible voters. 

In Alabama, at least 717 U.S. citizens were illegally removed before a Trump-appointed judge put a stop to the program. In Tennessee, which sent thousands of letters to voters demanding proof of citizenship before calling off the purge, one eligible voter told NPR he felt he’d done something wrong and was intimidated. Purged voters in Virginia, nearly 100 of whom have been registered in the Commonwealth for over a decade, have expressed frustration and confusion about why they are being disenfranchised now. 

All of the various legal challenges to voter eligibility are based on extremely unreliable data and methodologies. And they aren’t lawful. Which is why all of the cases that have been decided so far — Alabama, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia — have failed in court. Just this week, a federal judge in Virginia ordered the Commonwealth to reinstate voters — many of whom we have confirmed are eligible U.S. citizens — who were illegally removed from the voter rolls because they did not receive or failed to respond to a single mailer from the election officials.

But the harm of these efforts doesn’t stop with the individuals who have been illegally removed from the voter rolls. Voting and immigrants rights advocates report that these lies are also causing alarm in immigrant communities and chilling participation by eligible voters in this year’s election. 

And of course — as Anna and our colleague Kenneth Parreno recently explained — these efforts foster distrust, increasing the threat of violence and sense of fear at polling places and beyond. They are thinly disguised attempts to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens (who make up a record percentage of the electorate in 2024) to keep them from the polls or from getting help, like language assistance, when voting. 

While the disruptive impact of these ploys on election administration alone is essential to understand and reject, the individual impacts are just as undemocratic and damaging. All of these ploys put American’s fundamental right to vote at risk. And long term, they undermine faith in our democracy both now and for future elections.

Endgame: Deny the results based on lies

Disenfranchising thousands of eligible voters is bad, but it gets worse. The ultimate goal of these voter-eligibility lies is to lay the groundwork for contesting and denying the election results. 

We’re likely to see these lies reappear in two forms after the election.

First, election deniers may sue in the post-election period to challenge results or throw out certain ballots based on false claims that the results are tainted by illegal votes. That is likely the primary motivation behind some of the most frivolous ongoing lawsuits, which have no hope of delivering pre-election changes but could, like zombies, rise again after election day as part of a challenge to election results.

Second, we may see election officials threaten to withhold certification of election results based on these false claims of noncitizen voting. Since 2020, we’ve seen an increasing number of local officials threatening to withhold certification of their election results. And they usually cite the election conspiracy du jour: distrust of voting machines (Otero County, New Mexico, 2021), the failure to conduct a hand count of ballots (Cochise County, Arizona, 2022), or insecure ballot dropboxes (Boulder County, Colorado, 2024), to name just a few examples. Given the drumbeat of lies about immigrants and voting we’ve heard already this time around, we should expect to see some of these claims again as a reason not to certify the election. 

To be clear, neither of these gambits — throwing out ballots or withholding certification — is likely to succeed. Courts are not going to disturb election results without evidence (1) of ineligible voters actually casting ballots (2) in sufficient numbers to change the election outcome — neither of which has ever been shown before. And state officials will be able to go to court to require local officials to certify, as they are required to do by law.

But that’s not exactly an all-clear signal. 

Even if it fails, the fact that a major political faction has invested so much in a strategy to discredit and undermine our electoral process is dangerous and has done real damage. 

We’re watching those harms play out right now, as thousands of eligible voters’ right to participate in our democracy is being questioned and is in limbo.