Washington, DC — Election denialism, disinformation and the stakes for democracy have been prominent in the news this week, including the infamous moment at the vice presidential debate when JD Vance refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and refused to answer if he would go along with a similar challenge in the aftermath of 2024.
Meanwhile, Vance, Trump and other Republicans continue to go for broke in their relentless anti-immigrant focus – which is getting even darker, even more unhinged and even more dangerous in the homestretch of this cycle. After weeks of outright lying about Haitians, Trump is now talking about gruesome executions of girls “right in front of their parents.”
But, the Republicans’ anti-immigrant obsessions aren’t distinct from their threats to democracy. Instead, they’re“two sides of the same coin,” as Vanessa Cárdenas phrased it in a recent Univision op-ed.
An important piece in The Guardian by Rachel Leingang and Sam Levine, “Republicans’ non-citizen voting myth sets stage to claim stolen election,” points out the connections and important larger context. This includes the GOP focus on the “Big Lie 2.0,” and the myth of non-naturalized voters casting ballots in significant numbers and the white nationalist replacement theory that there is a plot to undermine white America. All of this is a pretext for a potential 2024 post-election challenge.
Meanwhile, a new FBI and DHS threat analysis concludes “that ‘election-related grievances,’ such as a belief in voter fraud, could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence in the weeks before and after the November election,” per coverage in CNN (find excerpts of The Guardian article and new FBI and DHS threat assessment below).
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“Those telling the same old lies about the 2020 election are laying the groundwork for doing the same in 2024. Their unrelenting anti-immigrant focus and lies about a supposed plot to have immigrants cast fraudulent votes are the cornerstones of their election denialism strategy and risks another violent Jan. 6-style attack on our democracy – or multiple attacks on multiple election-related targets to intimidate voters.
Simultaneously, they are creating a pretext for restrictive laws and lawsuits that seek to disenfranchise eligible U.S. citizen voters. Relying on the white nationalist replacement theory, this Big Lie 2.0 about voter fraud in 2024 is being used to justify purges of some eligible U.S. voters, intimidate those trying to help people register, create new bureaucratic and financial barriers to voting and lay the groundwork for contesting the results if the Republicans don’t win. Taken together, it’s a dangerous assault on American democracy that instigates the possibility of more political violence, as DHS threat analysts make clear.”
Find excerpts from The Guardian story by Rachel Leingang and Sam Levine, “Republicans’ non-citizen voting myth sets stage to claim stolen election” below:
“There is no proof that non-citizens are voting, or even registering to vote, in any meaningful numbers. It’s not the first time Republicans have made these claims, but the purges and rhetoric over non-citizen voting this year is, perhaps, at its apex.
The rhetoric makes voting an immigration issue, linking two red-meat issues for Republicans. It also aligns with broad anti-immigrant sentiment the right is advancing, with much of it stemming from a conspiracy that there is an intentional and systematic effort to replace white Americans with minorities through mass migration – the great replacement theory.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the theory holds that the white population is being displaced by non-white immigrants “who will vote in a certain particular way. These attacks on non-citizens and voters are part and parcel of the great replacement conspiracy theory,” she said. “They’re indistinguishable.”
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said it’s clear why Trump and supporters are leaning into the myth of non-citizen voting. “This is about setting the stage to claim an election was stolen,” he said. “This will be one of the primary, but among many, false claims made if Trump loses. And it will be false, but it still could be dangerous because it could incite his supporters to believing a totally secure election was stolen.””
A CNN article by Sean Lyngaas, “Domestic extremists with ‘election-related grievances’ could turn to violence in final weeks of election, FBI and DHS warn,” notes in part:
“The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are concerned that “election-related grievances,” such as a belief in voter fraud, could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence in the weeks before and after the November election, as it did during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to a new intelligence bulletin from the agencies.
Domestic violent extremists [DVEs] “continue to create, exploit, and promote narratives about the election process or legal decisions involving political figures, and we are concerned that these grievances could motivate some DVEs to engage in violence, as we saw during the 2020 election cycle,” the FBI and DHS said in the bulletin sent to state and local officials and private executives”
Additional Resources
- Read the Univision op-ed from Vanessa Cárdenas, “How Trump’s relentless anti-immigrant focus is tied to his threats to democracy” (Spanish version here)
- Read the AV Substack writeup on “The Big Lie 2.0”
