‘Big lie’ 2.0: How Trump’s false claims about noncitizens voting laid the groundwork to undermine the election

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.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal. It is also incredibly rare: One study of jurisdictions with large populations of noncitizens in 12 states named by Trump as hubs of illegal voting found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected — not proven — illegal noncitizen voting among 23.5 million votes in 2016, or 0.0001%. Many other organizations — including a libertarian think tank — have also debunked the claim. Meanwhile the only nonpartisan research to support it, a 2014 peer-reviewed paper that found up to 14.7% of noncitizens were voting, has been roundly rejected by the scientific community.

But the false belief that this is happening at rates that may tip the election toward Democrats who are out to steal it (again) marries two of the biggest themes in Republican messaging: that America’s borders and elections are insecure.

“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” Trump said during September’s presidential debate. “They can’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in practically, and these people,” he continued, motioning to Vice President Kamala Harris, “are trying to get them to vote.”

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and founder of the pro-Trump America PAC, has repeatedly posted to his over 200 million followers on X, the platform he owns, about a “diabolical” Democratic plan.

“They are importing voters. It is obvious,” reads a typical post.

More than 200 Republican members of Congress have posted to X about noncitizens voting this year, according to Advance Democracy, a public interest research nonprofit. Responses to these posts on social media and pro-Trump forums have included calls for violence against immigrants, researchers said.

Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt repeated his claims about illegal immigration and noncitizen voting in a statement to NBC News. She added, “President Trump will secure the border and secure our elections so that every American vote is protected.”

The lie about noncitizen voting has become a chief narrative of the 2024 election, and for progressive groups, voting rights advocates and disinformation researchers, its purpose is clear: to lay the groundwork for questioning the legitimacy of the 2024 election.

As Michael Waldman, president of the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, said in May at a congressional hearing on noncitizen voting, this time, “The ‘big lie’ is being pre-deployed.”

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.

When Trump, an enthusiastic spreader of the birtherism conspiracy theory — that Barack Obama was not born in the United States — descended his tower’s escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015, his speech villainized immigrants as drug traffickers, violent criminals and invaders. He promised to “Make America Great Again,” and when he was elected, he got to work.

Trump’s administration implemented a policy to separate migrant children from their parents at the border, and he signed executive orders banning foreign nationals from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S., suspending refugee programs and ordering the construction of a border wall. At the same time, Tucker Carlson was mainstreaming the “great replacement” theory on his Fox News prime-time show.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump casts immigrants as thieves, responsible for the scarcity of jobs, homes, hospital beds and disaster relief. He says an immigrant “invasion” has “crushed wages, crashed school systems” and “wrecked” the standard of living, bringing “crime, drugs, misery and death.”

Polls suggest that anti-immigrant messaging is effective, with Americans — including Latino voters — increasingly supporting mass deportation and stricter border control measures. Recent polling also shows a spike in fear over noncitizens voting, with 85% of Trump supporters expressing concern.

The fresh popularity of an old lie is in large part due to a new crop of online influencers.

Noncitizen voting dominates the election rumors tracked by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. YouTubers manufacture evidence for these rumors with videos that are promoted by well-funded conservative groups and recirculated in right-wing media. In many cases, the creators are online strivers finally tapping into a hungry audience — and a new frontier for disseminating political propaganda.

“This is the attention economy,” said Danielle Tomson, research manager at the Center for an Informed Public. “There is a very consolidated and dedicated community of people who are interested in rumors about election fraud, about noncitizen voting, and about border insecurity.”

Nick Shirley dreamed about reaching 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. Since his sophomore year in high school, the Utahn had been imitating his favorite creator, Logan Paul, posting pranks, stunts and treacly content. But nothing really took off, and in 2021, he quit to go on a mission in Santiago, Chile, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At the end of 2023, he reappeared on YouTube, able to speak Spanish and with an entirely different focus.

Shirley’s videos now routinely rack up millions of views with formulaic “man-on-the-street” style interviews featuring people identified as migrants praising Democratic politicians and sharing their intention to vote. “Confirmed: Migrants for Biden 2024,” Shirley captioned one video on X in February. University of Washington researchers labeled the clips “misleading” due to selective cuts and incomplete subtitles, a designation Shirley disputed in an email to NBC News. Similar videos followed, garnering millions of views across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and X, and landing Shirley an invite on Fox News, which branded him an “investigative video journalist.”

Arguably no one has found more success in this new genre than Anthony Rubin, a Miami-based creator behind the website Muckraker. Rubin’s videos mirror those of right-wing activist James O’Keefe — deceptively elicited and edited content that has the aesthetic trappings of journalism, but is not bound by the ethics.

Rubin, 27, an amateur fighter from Long Island, had for years been trying to find his wedge in right-wing media, launching websites and filming himself confronting Black Lives Matter protesters and antifa activists. His January video “exposing” what he framed as an immigrant “invasion” at the Southern border drew his first mainstream attention. Rubin became a frequent guest on Fox News and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show. This summer, Rubin started working for the Oversight Project, a self-described investigative unit within the Heritage Foundation, a once distinguished conservative think tank known these days for Project 2025, its far-right blueprint for a second Trump term.

In the three most popular videos Rubin produced for the Oversight Project, operatives wearing hidden cameras knock on doors in North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. Residents with blurred faces peek out while the operatives ask whether they are registered to vote and if they are citizens. Some of the residents in the heavily edited videos appear to answer in Spanish that they are undocumented and already registered.

The videos spread on social media, notching tens of millions of views and shares, most notably by Musk, who posted the Georgia video with the caption, “Extremely disturbing!” The Oversight Project’s executive director, Mike Howell, called the videos “evidence” that undocumented immigrants were being registered to vote.

In the real world, Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, called one of the videos “a stunt.” (Raffensperger announced the findings of a state audit this week: Twenty out of 8.2 million registered voters in Georgia were found to be noncitizens.) A fact checker for the website Lead Stories went to the same apartments and published a video in which residents explained they had said they were already registered so the door-to-door canvasser would leave them alone. The fact check was posted by Lead Stories to X, where it was reshared a single time.

Rubin declined an interview unless NBC News agreed to a live television broadcast, but stood by his videos in a statement, calling the work “prestigious” and “some of the most important information seen during this 2024 election cycle.” Howell also declined an interview or to elaborate on the partnership between Muckraker and Heritage, citing vague threats from “the cartels” and the federal government, but defended his work with Muckraker in a statement that said, in part, it is “telling the American People the truth.”

Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar on the University of Washington’s election response team, called Rubin’s videos “fact checks in an alternate reality,” and said their purpose may evolve after the election — particularly if Trump loses.

“These are going to be used as evidence of election fraud,” Bayar said.

In the meantime, the damage from these disinformation operations is already apparent.

Republican governors and officials have used the manufactured threat of noncitizen voting to pass restrictive voting laws, purge their rolls and, voting rights advocates say, harass and intimidate voters and progressive get-out-the-vote efforts. In June, Tennessee election officials sent letters to thousands of voters, warning that their names matched with noncitizens and that voting by noncitizens was a felony. Thousands of voters were struck from the rolls across Ohio, Virginia, Alabama and Texas, in the kind of purges that the Department of Justice says misidentify new citizens as illegal voters.

“They’re being thrown into this mix because of erroneous information and bad data, and it’s very hard to undo that,” said Robert Brandon, co-founder of the Fair Elections Center, a national voting rights organization.

Among the 3,200 people removed in Alabama was Jose Sampen.

Sampen emigrated from Peru nearly 20 years ago and made a life in Alabama. A FedEx delivery driver and a dad, he became a U.S. citizen last year and voted for the first time in March. In August, Lee County sent Sampen a letter telling him he had been removed from the voting rolls as a noncitizen.

“I pay my taxes, I have become a citizen, I have the right to vote,” Sampen said in a declaration filed in a federal case challenging the purges. “I did nothing wrong.”

A federal judge last week ordered the reinstatement of Alabama voters who were wrongly removed.

In Texas, Democratic political candidates and Latino civil rights activists were raided as part of a criminal investigation by state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said without evidence on a conservative radio program in August: “There’s a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally. I’m convinced that that’s how they’re going to do it this time — they’re going to use the illegal vote.”

DMV parking lots and grocery stores have become settings for so-called citizen journalists and suspicious conservatives to expose what they see as a conspiracy operating in plain sight. In one video, a Republican candidate for supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County, Florida, approaches a table of women registering people to vote and asks, “You citizens?” In another, a right-wing vlogger argues with volunteers outside an Arizona DMV. “WATCH me CONFRONT organization that DOES NOT ask proof of citizenship to VOTE,” the video caption reads.

One advocacy group that mobilizes Latinos said it had ramped up staff safety trainings.

“We’re facing intimidation day after day for our canvassers in our offices, on social media and online,“ said Héctor Sánchez Barba, president of Mi Familia Vota. “We’re under attack.”

Recent internal reports from the Department of Homeland Security obtained by Property of the People, a nonprofit focused on government transparency, warned of election-related violence. “Perceptions of voter fraud” and fears about “migrants or minorities” were listed as potential triggers. And militias of armed anti-immigrant vigilantes who patrolled the southern border are now focused on watching ballot boxes, according to a report on their leaked internal chats.

The specter of violence is still fresh for many Latinos.

“We don’t forget about El Paso,” said Beatriz Lopez, deputy director of the national progressive group Immigration Hub, citing a 2019 mass shooting that killed 23 and injured 22. The gunman left a screed that explained his actions as being a “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

“It goes back to some people believing that immigrants are taking over the country,” Lopez said.

The surge of lawsuits that Trump and his supporters filed to overturn the 2020 election  — more than 60 almost entirely unsuccessful legal claims — were reactive and slapdash.

“Last time the lawyers weren’t ready,” former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., told Cleta Mitchell while guest hosting Steve Bannon’s podcast.

This time, legal experts say the Trump campaign and his allies are gearing up earlier to challenge the results, flooding courts in swing states with some 90 lawsuits, according to Democracy Docket, a progressive group that tracks election litigation. Increasingly, the filed cases are relying on the noncitizen voting lie.

On Sept. 11, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Nevada Republican Party sued the Nevada secretary of state and the Democratic National Committee, claiming that the state is failing to investigate and purge noncitizens from voting rolls. (In a motion to dismiss, Democrats argued that the Trump campaign had provided no evidence and that the proposed systematic removal of voters violated federal law against such actions 90 days before an election. The case is pending.)

On Sept. 12, the Republican National Committee and North Carolina Republican Party sued to stop students and employees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from using digital university IDs to vote. The groups alleged the state elections board broke the law in approving the digital ID at a moment when “many states, including North Carolina, confront issues relating to non-citizens and other ineligible persons attempting to register to vote.” (A state appeals court granted the Republicans’ request.)

The lawsuits “are designed in large part to advance that narrative and also to lay the groundwork for post-election legal challenges,” said Ben Berwick, an attorney who leads the election law and litigation team at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit that aims to prevent America’s decline toward authoritarianism.

Because many of these lawsuits are based on easily disproved claims and have been filed so close to the election, Berwick said the main intention isn’t to win. More likely, he said these “zombie” lawsuits would return as fuel for conspiracy theories and legal challenges to get certain votes — like mail-in ballots or specific precincts — thrown out.

“If you are raising what are ultimately baseless claims with no evidence to back them up, one way to try to make them seem more legitimate is to put them into lawsuits,” Berwick said. “Even if they ultimately fail, they can give a veneer of legitimacy to the underlying claims.”

Whichever way the election goes, the noncitizen voting myth is likely to endure.

If Trump wins, he says it will be because the margin of victory was “too big to rig,” meaning his re-election won’t disprove a Democratic plot to import illegal voters, but will be accomplished in spite of it. The corps of so-called election integrity groups will likely continue to investigate a type of fraud that doesn’t widely happen, and call for more restrictive voting rules to stop it. And the lie could serve as a pillar for the mass deportations expected in a second Trump term.

Should Harris win, Trump isn’t likely to concede. His new “big lie” could be deployed as evidence in challenges to the results; as a pretext for Trump allies on election boards, in state legislatures and in Congress to delay or refuse certification; and as a rallying cry for conspiracy theorists and extremists.

Either way, a new force of conservative activists who came together after Trump’s failed attempt to overturn an election is awaiting orders. On Election Day and in the weeks that follow, these thousands who found one another in the wake of one big lie are ready to mobilize around the next.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com