Trump’s allies ramp up campaign targeting voter rolls
Efforts could impact swing state outcomes
A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.
Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.
In one Michigan town, more than 100 voters were removed after an activist lobbied officials, citing an obscure state law from the 1950s. In the Detroit suburb of Waterford, a clerk removed 1,000 people from the rolls in response to a similar request. The ousted voters included an activeduty Air Force officer who was wrongly removed and later reinstated.
The purge in Waterford went unnoticed by state election officials until The New York Times discovered it. The Michigan secretary of state’s office has since told the clerk to reinstate the voters, saying the removals did not follow the process laid out in state and federal law, and issued a warning to the state’s 1,600 clerks.
The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grassroots groups that formed after Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.
Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.
The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.
The bigger risk, they note, is disenfranchising voters.
“If you’re challenging 1,000 voters at once, you are not bringing the sophistication required when you are handling someone’s constitutional right,” said Michael Siegrist, clerk of Canton Township, Mich., and a board member of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks.
In an email response to questions, Mitchell dismissed those concerns.
“The only persons ‘disenfranchised’ by following the law are the illegal voters, whose illegal registrations suppress and dilute the votes of those who are lawfully registered,” she said. “Our primary goal is to see that the laws of the states are followed and enforced by those sworn to administer the elections according to the applicable law.”
It is difficult to know precisely how many voters have been dropped from the rolls as a result of the campaign — and even harder to determine how many were dropped in error. A Times review of challenges in swing states, which included public records, interviews, and audio recordings, suggested the activists were rarely as effective at removing voters as they were in Waterford.
In Michigan, activists call their project Soles to the Rolls — an apparent play on Souls to the Polls, a get-out-the-vote effort popular in Black churches.
The undertaking pulls from every corner of the election-denial movement. Its parent group is an offshoot of Mitchell’s national network. A top deputy to Mike Lindell, a leading promoter of election-related conspiracy theories, helped conceive of the data program the activists use to hunt for suspicious voters, according to recordings reviewed by the Times. The state’s Republican Party, which is mired in a leadership dispute, has also endorsed the data program, and the Trump campaign cited its numbers in a misinformationriddled report released in January.