Thread by @weareoversight

This week, we’re doing a deep dive on the Big Lie that the election was “stolen” from Trump because of voter fraud. First, we’re breaking down its roots: the decades-long campaign to hype the threat of voter fraud so as to impose restrictive voting laws.
americanoversight.org/from-voter-fra…

I: Building the “Voter Fraud” Narrative: In the last decade and a half, a robust anti-fraud movement has grown out of a conservative backlash, giving rise to what Roll Call in 2012 called a “voter fraud brain trust.”

This included people like former Justice Department officials Hans von Spakovsky, who is now with the Heritage Foundation, and J. Christian Adams, who is head of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group that pushes for aggressive voter-roll purges.

It also includes the group True the Vote, founded in 2009 by tea party activist Catherine Engelbrecht, which has for years helped stoke fears about fraud, working with partisan lawyers and strategists.

Another prominent purveyor of the voter-fraud myth was Kris Kobach, who in his 2010 run for Kansas secretary of state campaigned on “stopping election fraud.” While in office, Kobach championed a state law requiring proof of citizenship to vote.

Around this same time, a push for stricter voting rules, such as ID requirements, was also taking hold in multiple states, despite the continuing lack of evidence of the need.

II: Donald Trump’s 2016 Claims: Conservative activists had worked for years to convince Americans they should be concerned about voter fraud. Then Trump started casting doubt on future electoral losses even before he was elected president in 2016.

In the weeks before the 2016 election, as Trump’s prospects were looking dim, he claimed without evidence that the election was “absolutely being rigged” for Hillary Clinton and that “large scale voter fraud” was taking place.

Mike Pence echoed Trump’s warnings about impending widespread fraud, as did prominent campaign surrogates such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and then-Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who later became Trump’s first attorney general.

Kobach, who had joined the Trump campaign as an immigration adviser, claimed before the election, “If it's close, the votes of aliens could turn the election.”
kansascity.com/article1179571…

When Trump won the 2016 election, he did so while losing the popular vote. Yet he refused to acknowledge his popular-vote loss, instead falsely claiming, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Kobach stood by Trump’s lies about millions of illegal votes. Von Spakovsky, writing in the Wall Street Journal, claimed that while there was “no way of knowing for sure,” there was “a real chance that significant numbers of noncitizens and others are indeed voting illegally.”

Prominent Republicans, including then-House Speaker Paul Ryan and then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus, declined to publicly contradict Trump’s lies.
nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opi…

III: Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (PACEI): Once in office, Trump quickly put the resources of the U.S. government to work amplifying his false claims.

In May 2017, Trump announced the creation of an “election integrity commission” that would be led by Pence and Kobach.
wsj.com/articles/trump…

The commission was later expanded to include a who’s-who of proponents of the voter-fraud myth, including von Spakovsky, Adams, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.

In November 2017, we represented one member of the commission, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, in a lawsuit alleging that he and other members had been excluded from the commission’s work and denied access to documents.

The next month, a judge ordered the commission to release documents to Dunlap and to include him fully in its proceedings; less than two weeks later, Trump disbanded the commission.

The documents showed why the administration was unwilling to conduct the commission’s work in broad daylight: While commission staff had outlined a report in which they intended to expose various categories of widespread fraud, they had found no such fraud to include.

IV: State Fraud Investigations and Stoking Fears About Mail-in Voting: The Covid-19 pandemic’s arrival in the spring of 2020 provided extra fuel for the alarmist rhetoric of voter-fraud activists.

As election officials attempted to expand early voting or voting by mail, the leadup to the 2020 election saw state leaders using their own powers to boost the nonexistent threat of widespread fraud.

Leaders in Georgia, Kentucky, and Nevada created “fraud task forces,” purportedly to safeguard fair elections. Our investigation in Georgia found that the state’s “absentee ballot fraud task force” had met only once — six months before the election.
americanoversight.org/georgia-offici…

In Texas, we uncovered documents showing that Attorney General Ken Paxton had poured taxpayer resources into an “election integrity unit” that resolved just 16 prosecutions, all relatively minor offenses that didn’t lead to jail time.
houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas…

Throughout the Trump administration, voting-restriction activists touted the myth of widespread voter fraud to state and local leaders. In August 2020, von Spakovsky led a meeting for Republican state election officials to “strategize” about “election integrity” measures.

We found that in 2019, Adams’ Public Interest Legal Foundation sent officials in Palm Beach County, Fla., a list of 100 people whom it claimed were deceased and had votes cast in their names.

Investigative reporters at @reveal went through the names on PILF’s list and found no evidence of fraud.
revealnews.org/article/john-j…

These activists also continued to exert influence at the federal level.

An email we uncovered from September 2020 revealed that the Heritage Foundation had convened an “Election Law Working Group” composed of voting-restriction activists and multiple U.S. Election Assistance Commission officials.
americanoversight.org/new-emails-sho…

At the same time, Trump had also enlisted his Justice Department in promoting doubts about absentee voting. In late September, after voting had begun in many jurisdictions, DOJ released a statement about “potential issues with mail-in ballots” in one Pennsylvania county.

It later came out that Attorney General William Barr had briefed Trump on the investigation; Trump subsequently touted the investigation in a television interview. Within days, a state investigation had found that the issue was a mistake by an election worker, not fraud.

And so, after over a decade of activism aimed at using the myth of widespread voter fraud to limit voting access, after Trump’s repeated lies, and after activists tied expanding voter access to fraud, the groundwork for the “Big Lie” was in place.

Check our Twitter again tomorrow for Part 2 of our deep dive into the Big Lie. We’ll break down the attempts to stop election certification after the November 2020 election. In the meantime, read our investigation here:
americanoversight.org/from-voter-fra…