Conspiracies “swell” in the run-up to elections

Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election with false allegations that the election was stolen from him. Now, one of his advocates in that effort is laying the groundwork for a similar push in 2024.

Attorney Cleta Mitchell heads the Election Integrity Network, which leads efforts to take “Mr. Trump’s lies about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action,” he said The New York Times. (Mitchell advised Trump in 2020 when he pressured Georgia officials to make up for his vote deficit in that state.) The group lobbied for new state election laws and “hunted” for voter fraud, working closely with with Republican National. Committee while doing so. This activity helped “debunked theories go from state to state,” the Times said.

Mitchell and her allies use electoral processes to paint a picture of “rampant voter fraud without providing concrete evidence to support their claims,” said interceptions. Lawsuits are designed not to win, “but to confuse the public,” said legal ethics professor Scott Cummings. But Mitchell says he’s trying to stop Democrats’ efforts to fraudulently undermine the election. “I literally make people lie,” she told a conservative radio host.

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Trump’s 2020 campaign efforts have been largely improvised. This time, the former president’s allies “launched a much more coordinated attack on the system,” Eric Lutz said at Vanity Fair. They “sought more control over the gears of the system”—mostly through efforts to make them controls the election board in Georgia and adopt new voting rules in that swing state. Those efforts are also underway in the House of Representatives, where Democrats fear that Speaker Mike Johnson “could violate the rules of the electoral vote count in January.”

Mitchell and his allies say Democrats are counting on illegal non-citizen immigrant votes to win, said The Huffington Post. Democrats are helping migrants access “the very porous voter registration system and get their votes together,” Mitchell said during congressional testimony last month. There is very little evidence to support her claims. Migrant voting “is extremely rare,” said Allison Anderman at Brennan Center for Justice. Instead, attempts to purge voter rolls of non-citizens “have primarily resulted in the removal—or attempted removal—of American citizens.”

Election conspiracy theories “are already thriving online,” he said wired. The fake stories — about ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania or the Pentagon authorizing “lethal force” against election protesters — are part of the “flood of voting misinformation narratives” spreading across X, Instagram and Facebook, from usually distributed by the “right”. election denial networks, the Trump campaign and Russian propaganda groups”. That worries observers. American society is “much less equipped to be proactive about election lies,” said Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight Project.

There could be a backlash. A recent poll shows that American voters are suspicious of candidates “who say former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election,” said NBC News. Election denial was “the least popular position tested in the survey.” Self-described “MAGA Republicans” and other conservatives respond positively to these candidates. But voters in “swing groups” — including “suburban women, independents, moderates and seniors” — are turned off by such claims, NBC said. Elections may hinge on voters rejecting electoral conspiracies.