Far-Right Electoral Groups Now Target Elderly Care Homes
Inspired by new directives from the Trump administration, right-wing electoral groups are targeting elderly care homes and baselessly claiming that left-wing groups are stealing residents' votes.
Led by the right-wing "Electoral Integrity Network," these groups have alleged without evidence that left-leaning organizations are committing voter fraud in nursing homes, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities. The network is currently recruiting followers to call and question these possibilities.
"These leftist groups are going into nursing homes, and they're going into group homes, and they're basically stealing the votes of these most vulnerable people," Kelta Mitchell, founder of the Election Integrity Network, said in a recent appearance on Steve Bannon's War Room show.
As evidence, Mitchell pointed to a case in Wisconsin from 2020 in which a sheriff's office claimed eight nursing home residents had their ballots filled out for them. The Wisconsin Elections Commission denied the claims. Mitchell told Bannon that this could cost President Donald Trump the 2020 election, though it's unlikely: Trump lost Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes in 2020.
Mitchell's group asked followers to download a toolkit from the Election Integrity Network website and email and call nursing homes in their area. The group also created numerous images for followers to share on social media that reinforced the idea of widespread voter fraud in nursing homes.
In one campaign, the network shared a series of posts mapping residential care facilities in competitive congressional districts in the states of Arizona, California, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Rapsts identified "vulnerable residents" who "may become targets of political predators looking for easy access to ballots."
Mitchell and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to requests for comment.
The effort is part of a much broader push by election deniers to undermine confidence in the midterms. And just like allegations of non-citizen voting and widespread mail-in voter fraud, the Trump administration has emphasized them.
In July, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a memo that removed previous guidance on how nursing home staff can help residents vote, such as assisting with mail-in voting or transporting residents to polling places. The new memo replaced the directive with threats of legal action if staff "engage in inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents' rights."
The memo also claims that the agency "has become aware of several allegations of cases where residents' rights have been unlawfully violated." However, the examples cited in this memo have not resulted in any proven cases of voter fraud. CMS did not respond to a request for comment.
In August, senators led by Elizabeth Warren and Alex Padilla slammed the changes, writing in a letter to CMS that instead of protecting the nation's 2 million nursing home residents, the new rules would disenfranchise them.
"CMS issued a memo that appears to be an attempt to intimidate nursing home staff from assisting residents in the voting process," the senators wrote in the letter to CMS Director Mehmet Oz (who himself has been vocal about fraud in the 2020 election).
But now, with the midterm elections less than a month away, groups like the Election Integrity Network — which has close ties to the White House — are pushing the narrative that nursing homes are hotbeds of vote fraud.
Another election denial group, the New York-based Civicia Project, has launched a similar campaign called "Adopt Care Facilities." The group told WIRED that it could not share the number of people participating in the campaign, but reiterated claims made by CMS about voter fraud in Wisconsin, among other allegations.
"We don't assume wrongdoing by a facility because its residents need help voting," Kim Hermans, co-founder and president of the Civica Project, told WIRED. There are other common cases of bogus absentee applications and similar problems. Separately, in our own review of New York records, we found over-85s who registered and voted for the first time shortly before the election. "This is not illegal per se, but it does raise a fundamental question about how the facility is handling this process."