With just weeks to go until the midterms, election denial groups have found a new target: nursing homes.
The groups, led by the right-wing Election Integrity Network, have claimed without evidence that left-wing organizations are perpetrating voter fraud inside nursing homes, care homes, and assisted-living facilities. The network is now recruiting their followers to contact and question those facilities.
“These left-wing groups go into the nursing homes, and they go into the group homes, and they basically steal the votes of these most vulnerable,” Cleta Mitchell, the Election Integrity Network’s founder, said in a recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room show.
As evidence, Mitchell referenced a case in Wisconsin from 2020 in which a sheriff alleged that eight residents in a care home had their votes filled out for them. The Wisconsin Election Commission rejected the claims. Mitchell told Bannon the case could have cost president Donald Trump the 2020 election, though that wouldn’t be possible: Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by over 20,000 votes.
Mitchell’s group has been urging followers to download a toolkit from the Election Integrity Network website and email and call nursing homes in their area. The group has also created multiple images for followers to share on social media which reinforce the idea of widespread voter fraud at nursing homes.
In one campaign, the network shared a series of posts that mapped residential care facilities in competitive congressional districts in states including Arizona, California, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The posts identified “vulnerable residents” who “may become targets for political predators seeking 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 trust in the midterms. And just like the claims of noncitizen voting and widespread mail-in voter fraud, they have been supercharged by the Trump administration.
In July, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a memo that removed previous guidance on how staff at nursing homes could help residents to vote, such as assisting with mail-in voting or transporting residents to polling locations. The new memo replaced that guidance with threats of prosecution if staff “engage in inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents’ rights.”