‘Big lie’ 2.0: How Trump is weaponizing disinformation about noncitizens voting to fuel rigged election claims
Former President Donald Trump and his Republican supporters are mobilizing around a new “big lie”: the false claim that a flood of noncitizens votes could swing the 2024 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.”
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