The story had all the elements of a blockbuster crime saga: burner phones, semiautomatic weapons, silencers and bags of prepaid cash cards. “NOW WE HAVE PROOF!” blared the headline on the right-wing websiteGateway Pundit. “Massive 2020 Voter Fraud Uncovered in Michigan.”
The story referenced “thousands of fraudulent ballots” caught by Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch. Grateful readers deluged her office with hundreds of calls, hailing her as a hero.
But Meisch knew it wasn’t true.
According to police reports, the Michigan attorney general’s officeand an interview with Meisch, an employee of a voter registration drive company had submitted to the Muskegon city clerk thousands of voter registration applications weeks before the 2020 election, some with faked signatures and faulty addresses.
Meisch’s staff spent hundreds of hours weeding out the bad applications. The guns the police found were legally registered to a landlord who had nothing to do with the registration drive. The prepaid phones and cash cards were given to temporary employees to contact new voter prospects.
“There were no fraudulent ballots,” Meisch said in an interview, “not a single one that anyone in my office was aware of.”
But for Gateway Pundit, which is run out of its founder’s homeand whose small staff produces stories that help set the agenda for Donald Trump’s most ardent followers, the August story provided weeks of headlines that radiated across right-wing media and were repeatedly amplified by pro-Trump influencers. That’s despite the fact that it was published nearly three years after the election — and after Meisch’s staff had thwarted any fraud.
The outlet’s emphasis on long-debunked fraud claims helps explain why election denial has proved so durable, despite the many efforts to halt the spread of disinformation and impose consequences on those who persist in it.